Every year, new web tools come onto the market. These are supposed to help make our lives as marketers easier with better time management, multi-layered views of web properties, or a better consolidated and aggregate dashboard. Many of them are free or have a "lite" version of the webware available. Here are a few good ones that come to mind:
YouSendIt - Ever get thwarted by IT's security or file size settings in Microsoft Outlook? YouSendIt provides temporary file transfers between users. It's not just a work-around for Outlook. Most email providers limit the send/receive file size to 10 mb. Their lite version is not too shabby for the occassional user. You can send files up to 100 mb with a 1 gb/month bandwidth restriction. Your recipients have up to 7 days to download the file before the system automatically deletes it. YouSendIt provides a handy link for users to download.
Icerocket - Using an RSS reader to track updates for twitter feeds or blogs is fine if you want to keep track of what people are saying about you. But what about all the other sites that are saying something about your company, its products, or brands? Icerocket is an aggregate search engine that looks for your keywords across a variety of online media: Blogs, the WWW, Twitter, MySpace, News, Images, etc., and does this all at once.
Mailinator - This is a service that lets you create a temporary email account. It's good for signing up for consumer newsletters that don't secure their account creation pages. Why is this relevant for marketers? If you're testing web contact forms, you might not want to have your work email address captured into your company's CRM; but you still want verification (e.g., like the autoresponder) that your web forms actually work.
ShareThis - Definitely not a new tool on the scene, but this is an easy sharing link for all types of web content. Check out their blog and why it makes sense for online marketers to use this tool. Did I mention? It's really easy to use, for users, content providers, and web publishers.
LovelyCharts.com - An online diagramming application. Ever wonder how flow diagrams (e.g., wireframes, flow charts, organizational charts, network diagrams, process flows) are created for PPT presentations? This tool can help map our your data bits into something graphical and more meaningful than drawing out the boxes by hand in PPT.
