Basics 15 Online Tools that Every Marketer should know
- Shiv
We are connected like never before. Sharing has become a day today activity. We share data/E mails/Photo/Music Files/Emotions & Emoticon If you ask me brands fails on a long run due to fact that they do not live up to the moment, they forget the Phase of Product Up-gradation in Life Cycle. The Best Example that I can quote for Product Up-gradation is Web 2.0 Technology, which has made our Lives so easy. Web 2.0 can be defined as a second phase of internet revolution, which facilitates higher level of Communication and Information Sharing. Web 2.0 allows its users to do more than retrieving data, most of the internet giants are relying more on it because it is a big money game and with this one-concept companies are being more creative to use the maximum of it and coming up different business models. Now in this e-Book, you will find 15+ Essential Online Tools that can bring great ease and glory to your Online Experience. I have finalized on these 15 tools after evaluating 200+ tools and every of these tools have their own functionality. I have a disclaimer; this e-Book is meant only for the People who spend more than 5 Hours online/day Happy Journey
- Shiv
Slideshare.net Have you ever wasted long hours in searching for Power Point Presentations through search engines? If yes, you need not waste your time any more. SlideShare saves your time and gets you the relevant documents which you are looking for. SlideShare is a community for sharing presentations. Individuals & organizations upload presentations to share their ideas and connect with others. Anyone can find presentations on topics that interest them. They can download, or embed presentations into their own blogs & websites. The usage and the interface are very simple that you donâ€&#x;t require a User manual to learn the features of this web Page. Website Address: www.slideshare.net Other Suggested sites with same functionalities: www.authorstream.com, www.slide.com
Zoho.com Zoho is an online office suite which offers Tools like Word, Excel and Power Point. The free package has totally 13 Tools which we use in our day today life. Zoho.com provides a comprehensive suite of applications for businesses. Suppose you are working on some data plan in Zoho Excel (Sheet) and later you wanted to save it somewhere, Zoho has an option for it. The document that you create can be saved internally. Once you Log in you can select the tool on which you wanted to work and save it. Ultimately it‟s like Online Data Briefcase. Zoho Offers all Office application in one shot from E-mail (Zoho Mail) to Messenger (Zoho Chat). You can also switch over applications as per your convenience. There is an option called Zoho DB where in you can upload your Spread sheet and make “Live Online Reports” You also have an option called Zoho Marketplace where you can search for Applications and you can make it a part of your Zoho Kit. They also have custom made applications for Apple iPhone.
Other than these applications they have more sensitive Business applications like Zoho CRM, Zoho Invoices, Zoho Project management Software, Zoho Video Conferencing and Zoho creator. Most of these Business Applications are charged. This is an absolute solution for Small Sized organizations. This Zoho Kit will surely take you through Surprises, Just try it out it‟s an amazing product. Finally after exploring this online product completely, I was so curious to find the brain behind this great product and I was surprised it‟s a Chennai based company called “Zohocorp”
Globally the product is a big hit on a business front. Magazines like TIMES, The Economist had given great reviews about this product. The Entire Idea of bringing all office applications together is a great idea and finally we have some good product based companies in our soil. Other Suggested sites with same functionalities: Google Docs
Visualcv.com Visualcv is nothing but Web 2.0 meets your resume, it allows you create an online interactive resume. The VisualCV reinvents the resume. Ultimately, it will reinvent the way the Internet is used for recruiting, to the benefit of professionals and employers alike. With the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies, the time has come to give professionals the tools they need to stand out and present their qualifications in a visually compelling way.
Visualcv has Separate columns where you can enter your „Qualifications and Credentialsâ€&#x; and this makes the work of a Recruiter so easy that he is no more going to read pages and Pages of your resume. All that you had done in your professional career at one shot, this makes Visualcv more interesting. Hence, recruits also have access to VisualCV; the normal functionality of a Job Portal is also Taken care in Visualcv.com
Scribd.com Scribd is a document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format. (iPaper is a rich document format similar to a PDF file) Scribd allows you for a free download of all documents/files related to your search. You also get the chance to download eBooks (Some of the costliest books in the market are freely available with scribd.). Documents related to all topics starting from Tourism Guide to “How to use an iPhone� are available with Scribd. Scribd delivers the document in a very rich interactive format, with Scribd you can also have the documents being embedded in your Blogs/Webpages. This also allows the user to share the documents/eBooks with the entire community.
Other Suggested sites with same functionalities: www.docstoc.com (I strongly recommend this)
Dimdim.com DIMDIM is a free, open-source conferencing and screen-sharing app. It's a simple tool for sharing
presentations, collaborating on projects, or having meetings between people in multiple locations. DIMDIMâ€&#x;s Web Conferencing will give you a real time experience and a fantastic web interface. DimDim makes everything possible online which you normally do in a physical meeting at your conference hall. For a free subscriber DimDim accommodates 20 users and the person who initiates the web meeting can share Documents, can share his screen and can take the attendees through a website and he can also share the white board contents with the attendees. The Product also allows the attendees to have private chat session during the course of the meeting and the presenter can also tweak the meeting duration if needed. The best thing about DimDim is starting from the Installation of the tool, every single thing is easy and self explanatory. You really need not break your head to learn the features. I have been using many Web 2.0 products for a long time, but none of the product gave me an excellent interface like DIMDIM. The developer had made a point to make the tool so simple that once you are in to the product you are going to have a wonderful user experience which many donâ€&#x;t provide.
Animoto.com As their Caption says it takes you to the end of Slide Shows, Animoto helps you to create stunning 60 Second Videos with your personal Photos. The Created Videoâ€&#x;s can be embedded in your Blogs and WebPages. The functionality is so simple, you just need to Upload Images and select the style of video outlook that you want. Animoto delivers you a high Quality Video with a Background Music of your choice.
Pixlr.com Pixlr is an advanced online digital photo editor. It performs advanced effects previously only available to professionals using expensive software. Now you need not download any of the photo editor Tools, You can just edit your Photos online. If you are finding it difficult to use Photo Shop, I strongly recommend you to Try Pixlr since it is simpler than Photoshop with multiple features.
Other Suggested site with same functionality: www.fotoflexer.com
Digsby.com Digsby is a social networking IM, that is how I would define it. It does the collaborative effort to bring all your social networking Accounts in a single chat window along with your Email Accounts. You have the provision to have multiple email accounts opened and you are notified whenever you receive an Email or a Chat message.
Digsby Accommodates your Face book, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Few more Networking Services. All that you need to do is download the Chat Tool Bar and tweak the settings as per you requirement.
Zoomin.com Sometimes Technology takes you back to olden golden days, we call it as retro effect. ZoomIn does the same of delivering the hard copy of your digital photographs to a desired location (As per your request) I hardly see people going to Photo Labs as we all have our memories in digital formats online, but your Mom and dad might want to see the physical photo to cherish their memories. ZoomIn helps you in getting this task accomplished. Just get all your Photoâ€&#x;s of a recent trip and upload it in ZoomIn and choose the style and size of the photo and fill in the details regarding the shipping address. I did this a month before, they took 5 days to deliver the photo copies through Post (along with an album) to my home town. For 20 Photoâ€&#x;s they charged me Rs. 160 and it took me just 10 Minutes for placing the order.
Xobni.com Xobni makes your „Microsoft Outlook Experienceâ€&#x; a wonderful one. Earlier I had the problem of search option with the Outlook, now that with Xobni I could easily track the mails and conversation sent/received a year before in seconds.
Once you download this tool, it gets embedded with your MS Outlook. Now if you want to refer a project document which you had sent long back to your client, you just need to type the name of the recipient or the title of the mail or any related text to track the email. Xobni also gives the entire history of email conversation that you had with the concerned person along with the documents exchanged.
Cometdocs.com Cometdocs is a free online document conversion interface that offers a large set of document conversions online and Cometdocs currently offers over 50 online conversions. A registered user can have his documents converted to desired format in the next five minutes, a copy of the output document will be sent to your email account. Feasibility to have all kind of document conversion makes Cometdocs a special One. Comet Docs also allows you to compare two different files or two similar files with minor changes.
Pageflakes.com “All in one� is the logic behind Page flakes, a virtual desktop that bring all your Online Accounts in a single webpage. Page Flakes has more than 50 useful short tools that can give you a good online experience. The User webpage is designed in such a way that you need not open a new tab in the browser. You have all necessary web application on a single page form file sharing to file Storage.
Storage Drive is shared with www.box.net, which itself is an Amazing Online File Storage Drive with an Excellent Interface.
Box.net allows you to own a Virtual Storage drive. Dozens of third party applications including Google, Microsoft, Autodesk, Zoho, WordPress, and Picnik have been seamlessly integrated into Box.net. Every single application will give a glorious online ride. Your total online social life gets in to a single Page that is Page Flakes. From Twitter - To do List, everything is possible with Page Flakes. Other Suggested sites with same functionalities: www.netvibes.com, www.schmedley.com
Survs.com Are you a Researcher? Are you a Research Scholar? Are you Blogger? As a Startup, are you interested in Getting Opinions about your Product? Survs will serve the purpose. Twitter can get you Qualitative Opinions; But Surv will get you Quantitative Opinions. You can Conduct Online Surveys and get Feedback from the respondents. Surv will be an absolute solution for startups that cannot spend more on Online Market research. You can create the surveys online and send it across to the respondents through Email. Survs also provide the Survey results in Data format (Output of Quantitative data) You can also conduct Online Opinion Polls through www.Polldaddy.com
About the author: Shiv The author is a Social Media Evangelist/Marketing Blogger, whose avid interest in the field of marketing and technology has helped him to keep pace with the latest trends. He works as a „Marketing Analyst‟ at Hyderabad, with a leading research firm headquartered in San Francisco and aspires to contribute more to the field of „Creative Marketing‟ Email: hairaman@gmail.com Phone: +91-9704165275 Blog Space: www.iamshiv.com Twitter: www.twitter.com/hairaman LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/iamshiv