Love the Cloud – 3 Marketing Research Tools
May 22, 2012 Leave a comment
- Google Alert - ongoing monitoring of your client on the web
- Skydrive – to create and share documents in teams
- Citelighter – online creator of citations and bibliography
Google Alert is a very simple but extremely effective way to monitor your client’s presence on the web. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s pretty darn good. Simply input your client name (use the “Boolean” quotations to make sure you get the exact name) and Google will email you daily a list of links found with that term.
Skydrive solves two problems; document sharing and storage. I particularly like Skydrive because as a Microsoft product the integration into formatting with PowerPoint and Word are seamless. Setup your account, create a document and then share it with your team members. The team can make additions/changes and can retrieve the document when and where you like!
Citelighter is a plug in application that sits right beneath your browser menu bar. Create a project, then as you browse you just highlight the quotation you want and presto, magic, you have saved it as a citation. Change the citation format (MLA, APA, etc) on the fly and print a bibliography with a click.
There’s hardly a day in a marketer’s life that goes by without some sort of research. The cloud plus technology has really stepped in to provide us with tools that make research easier and also make working in teams seamless. All that adds up to better marketing strategy!
What tools do you use and recommend?
