Innovation is alive and well in the development of cool free and low-cost web-based tools and apps. It’s great to find a tool that automates some little process or provides a new capability you’ve been looking for, and fun to find a tool you didn’t even know you needed.

How can you quickly find out how far a link has spread on Twitter? Surf the web securely and anonymously when using pubic WiFi? Manage all of your social media accounts from a single login on your iPhone? Back up your Gmail account? Make more productive use of your time on social networking sites?

There’s an app for that—or cool web tool. Find tools to do all of the above and much more in this collection of helpful business, online and social media tools, apps and reviews.

Cool Social Media Tools

PingTags

A slick service that enables you to easily add a QR code to your business card which links to your LinkedIn profile and contact information. Anyone scanning the code can conveniently contact you without entering any additional information. And when you log in to PingTags, you can view analytics like how many people scanned your card and which links they clicked.

Buffer

Buffer is a tool for automatically posting content to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. As the site puts it, “Fill up your Buffer at one time in the day and Buffer automagically posts them for you through the day.” It’s available at three price/service levels: free, Pro ($10 per month), and then a big jump to Premium ($99 per month). Nothing replaces real social media engagement of course, but used carefully and in conjunction with real-time monitoring, automation tools like this do have their place.

Storefront Social

One of the easiest ways to import an online store into Facebook, even incorporating translation and foreign currency support for buyers in other countries. Plans have a monthly fee (with the most popular priced at $30-$50 per month) but you can try it out for a week free.

Four51

Four51 offers two sets of tools for local business and consumer brands. FanTools uses “knowledge gained from across the FanTools network of small businesses to deliver plans” that enable local retailers, restaurants and other types of businesses to use exclusive coupon offers mixed with other content across their social networks to drive engagement and purchases. It’s priced for small business at $50 per month with a 90-day free trial offer to try it out. CommerceTools uses cloud-based technology to help companies streamline the distribution of products, supplies, services and content to individuals or groups by simplifying and automating order and fulfillment processes.

ALOT
***** 5 STARS

ALOT is a catalog of free “apps for your PC” in a range of categories including entertainment (comic books, TMZ, The Onion, IMDB search), food, games, travel, music, news (The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, Stock Market Watch), reference, social networking (e.g., apps for Facebook, Twitter and Evite) and more.

ShortStack

ShortStack is a tool that helps businesses customize their Facebook Pages with “contests, sweepstakes, videos, custom forms and more.” Yes, it is “Timeline ready.” The tool is free for pages with up to 2,000 likes, with pricing starting at $30 per month above that level.

Mywebees

Mywebees lets you display your website on your Facebook page. It’s not a copy of your site, but your actual site—displayed in a Facebook iFrame. It’s a very cool, easy way for small businesses to increase the interest and value of their Facebook presence. No word yet though on how this may be affected by Timeline.

Cool Twitter Tools

TweetReach

How many people saw that link you tweeted? Tweeted or retweeting it themselves? Which Twitterers exposed it to the largest audience? Find out in a snap with TweetReach. In just a few seconds, I discovered that a recent post I wrote on social media storytelling for PR reached 56,689 people via 25 tweets—over 10,000 people just through Jim Dougherty.

TweetStats

This free tool graphically shows peak Twitter activity for any Twitter handle. It takes a few minutes to load completely, but once fully loaded shows activity on your network by day of the week and time. I wasn’t surprised to learn that most of the activity on my network happens early in the morning, but it was interesting to note unexpected spikes in activity at midmorning on Monday and Tuesday and around lunch time on Wednesday and Thursday.

tweepi

An automated free tool to help “flush” Twitterers you are following who aren’t following back, follow those who are following you, clean up inactive users (requires paid “premium” subscription), force spammers to unfollow you, and find interesting new tweeps to follow.

Other Cool Web Tools

Clipboard

A free tool for clipping, saving and sharing just selected parts of web pages such an image or a selection of text. Clipped content can be kept private, shared only with friends or shared publicly.

AnchorFree

Concerned about your web browsing security and privacy when you’re away from home and using public WiFi? AnchorFree’s Hotspot Shield is a free (or optionally ad-free low-cost) VPN encryption service that provides secure, private web browsing anywhere. It works on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. On mobile devices Hotspot Shield enables data compression, increasing the amount of data a user has under their mobile data plan and thus saving users money on mobile data. Hotspot Shield also protects users from over 3 million malware threats, phishing sites, and spam.

AirSpeed

A simple app that syncs contact information, emails and appointments between Google and Salesforce, eliminating time-consuming copying and pasting. After a 14-day free trial, the service is priced at $10 per month (or less per user for larger teams) with a 50% discount for non-profits and schools.

Teamplifier

A free online project management and collaboration tool, similar to Basecamp, that lets users switch between projects with one click, delegate tasks, track task changes, subscribe to tasks and receive notifications, and manage people on projects with groups.

Prezi

The new way to present—way beyond PowerPoint. Prezi is an online presentation tool that lets you pan and zoom around your presentation “canvas,” present online or offline, easily collaborate with teammates anywhere to develop a presentation, and add a timeline using “frames and a path to create a cinematic journey.” Pricing ranges from free (though your “Prezis” will be public and include Prezi branding) to $159 per year for the Pro version (your own logo, lots of storage space and more).

Cool iPhone Apps

MySocialMania (app)

A free app for Apple iOS devices that enables users to manage multiple social media accounts at once. A users can post to his/her Facebook wall, send a Tweet, share photos to Flickr and TwitPic, upload a video to YouTube, post a blog entry and manage other social accounts all from a single login and tool.

AtZip

A free iPhone app for discovering what events are happening in your area, who you know that’s going to each, browse ideas from nightclubs to museums to movies (along with ratings), connect with others who are attending the same events and share thoughts and photos.

5 Awesome Spreadsheet Apps for the iPhone by Search Engine Journal

Frequent best-of honoree Ann Smarty reviews five spreadsheet apps for the iPhone that “allow you to look at anything from profits and annual earnings, to employee checks and monthly expenses” anytime from anywhere. She notes that there are many others available, but calls these “arguably the best around.” All are priced at $10 or less.

250 best iPad apps: social media apps by The Telegraph

Brief reviews of top social apps for the iPhone including Flipboard—which “takes the activity from your social networks—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and plenty of others are supported —and presents it in an attractive magazine-style layout…This app is must-have on all iPads”—Gowalla and Spout.

Social Search and Social Media Monitoring Tools

Topsy

Billing itself as a real-time social search engine, Topsy is reasonably good at finding topical and brand references across the social web. While it’s no threat to professional monitoring tools like Radian6, it’s a decent, free, quick-check tool for smaller companies and one-off searches.

Synthesio

Synthesio is a powerful, professional social media monitoring system that combines technology with human assistance for global brand reputation monitoring, topic monitoring, influencer rating and social community mapping. It is multi-lingual, customizable and filters out much of the “junk” picked up by other monitoring tools. This power and flexibility comes at a cost, however, as pricing is based on the number of search returns and starts at $1,500 per month.

PeopleBrowsr

A social media analytics and engagement tool that incorporates search, analytics and engagement capabilities. Within “engagement,” for example, you can evaluate the “degrees of separation” between a company and its audience, schedule tweets, and assign tweets to different team members for response / follow up. Pricing starts at $150 per month, but you can try it out first with a 14-day free trial.

Chatmeter

Chatmeter bills itself as “the first and only Local Brand Management service—the only platform that informs with daily alerts to monitor and respond to customer feedback from across the web combined with a dashboard to see the real impact on how customer experience is affecting online visibility for each location.” Priced at $40 per location per month (volume discounts for chains),  Chatmeter purports to save chains thousands of dollars in lost revenue by improving marketing effectiveness and providing the tools to easily respond to customers immediately for each of location.

Inefegy Social Radar

Inefegy’s Social Radar is known as a social media monitoring platform that is powerful, fast, has an outstanding user interface, and “now tracks some 40 million Web sites, including blogs, forums, image sites, news sites like CNN and the BBC, Twitter and more.” You can “request” a free trial, and the pricing is flat rate (you can run unlimited searches for one monthly fee), but specific pricing information is difficult to come by.

Cool Tools for Creating Infographics

10 Awesome Free Tools To Make Infographics by MakeUseOf
***** 5 STARS

An outstanding article by Angela Alcorn which provides guidance on how to create an infographic, followed by helpful, illustrated reviews of 10 free tools to assist in infographic creation, such as Stat Planet, Hohli, Creately (which also supports collaboration and easy flow chart creation) and Inkscape.

The 5 Best Free Tools For Making Slick Infographics by Fast Company

Noting that “It’s not enough to simply write about data any longer; the world wants visuals. While there are many professional information designers making a name for themselves, such as Nicholas Felton of Feltron.com, the majority of these digital artists are up to their eyeballs in high-paying work. Where does this leave you?,” Amber Mac reviews five free tools for creating infographics—four of which were covered in Angela’s article above, plus a new tool, Visual.ly.

Reviews of Cool Social Media Tools

Introducing PeerIndex: A New Companion to Klout for Social Media Influence Measurement by WindMill Networking

Neal Schaffer reviews PeerIndex, a competitor to Klout for social media influence measurement. Klout had an opportunity to become the standard before it stumbled badly in October 2011 when it radically changed its algorithm, calling its validity into serious question, then arrogantly refused to apologize and reverse course. A newer and (possibly) more accurate influence metric site is Kred, which is also worth checking out.

Is HootSuite Pro a Smart Investment? by Social Media Examiner

Nichole Kelly answers the question many of us HootSuite fans have been asking: is it worth it to upgrade to the Pro version? And after detailing the differences between the free and paid versions, her conclusion is…probably not, for most users. But it’s worthwhile (and HootSuite could make it more worthwhile, with a little work) for agencies and larger companies.

How to Back Up Gmail by Time Techland

Worried that Gmail could crash and lose all of your email history? Doug Aamoth details five different methods to protect yourself from just such a possibility, ranging from easy and free (e.g., Gmail Backup) to harder but free (forward to an email client such as Microsoft Outlook) to other slightly more involved but still free alternatives.

Search Social Media More Efficiently with Greplin

Josh Peters reports that Greplin is a powerful tool for topic-searching across your “personal social graph,” to find instances of people you’re connected to talking about topics you’re interested in. “Greplin social media search can access more than just your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. With a basic account (free) you can also include your DropBox, Gmail and Google docs accounts to the search to include content you’ve created. With a premium account ($5 / mo) you can include Evernote, Yammer, Basecamp, Highrise, Google Apps, and Salesforce accounts with more to come.”

4 Great (free) Tools to Measure Social Sentiment and 4 Important Stats by Social Media Today

After highlighting four important statistics (among them: “53% of people on Twitter recommend companies and/or products in their Tweets, with 48% of them delivering on their intention to buy the product”), Nick Bennett reviews four free tools for measuring social sentiment, including Twendz and Twittersheep.

Content Tools: This Week in Social Media by Social Media Examiner

Cindy King reviews a handful of fairly new tools, including Storify, a content curation tool that “gathers content from various social media platforms to create your own story. You can then create a widget of this story to embed it in your website” and 23press, a low-cost tool that simplifies the process of moving a blog from one host to another.

Free analytics tools you should be using by iMedia Connection

Josh Dreller advises marketers to “Check out some of the following free tools that can help you collect, analyze, and take action on data. In fact, a combination of all these systems would certainly push your data-driven organization to another level. With these free analytics platforms, any company could truly compete with the advanced data tools and tactics of even its largest competitors”) the reviews eight free tools including Quantcast for demographics, 4Q for free survey analytics and TubeMogul for video analytics.

5 Productivity Tools for the Busy Social Media Manager by Social Media Today
***** 5 STARS

Leo Widrich shares five of his favorite tools to optimize his time on social media, including Refynr, which lets you “Create a social savvy filter of keywords you want to have included…(then) creates a ‘refyned’ news stream for you with only the most relevant tweets”), Triberr (an invite-only community of bloggers), and Tungle for setting up meetings.

48 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools by DreamGrow

Priit Kallas reviews four dozen free social media tools in two groups: one including the tools he uses most often (e.g., HootSuite and Social Mention and one arranged alphabetically from Addictomatic for searching “the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s a tool to keep up with the hottest topics” to WhoUnfollowedMe which enables the true Twitter paranoid to “check your unfollowers on your schedule, every 15 minutes.”

17 Alternatives to Klout by ReadWriteWeb

Acknowledging the Klout trainwreck and noting that no influencer rating measure will ever be perfect, David Strom nevertheless runs through 17 alternatives for Twitter influence measurement, Facebook metrics, Google metrics, tools with a multi-site focus (e.g., PeerIndex, which is “probably the closest competitor to Klout” according to David), and sentiment analysis tools such as Kred (which has since emerged as one of the top alternatives to Klout).

7 Apps That Rocked My Work by iMedia Connection

Jason Harty reviews his favorite seven work-related apps, including Editor by Pixlr for easy online photo editing (“If MS Paint ain’t cutting it and Photoshop is over your head, give Editor by Pixlr a look”), Evernote for online and on-the-go note-taking, and Jing for quickly capturing any portion of your computer screen.

Nine companies B2B marketers should know about by Velocity Partners

Doug Kessler provides brief reviews of nine marketing products/tools for B2B professionals, such as EPiServer (web content management for the .Net platform), Reevoo (a social commerce platform for brands and retailers) and Marketo (marketing automation software).

SEO is a blend of art and science. The “art” side relies on knowledge, intuition and creativity. The “science” side can be made more effective and more efficient by using tools like the ones highlighted here—enabling SEO practitioners to focus more on the art part.

Need to analyze the optimization status of an existing website? Identify promising keywords? Analyze competitors’ backlinking strategies? Evaluate the impact of social media activities on search results? Create XML sitemaps for multiple search engines?

You’ll find tools to aid with all of those tasks and more in this collection of useful and cool SEO tools.

SEO Analysis and Reporting Tools

2 Free Tools to Find and Analyze SERP Dominators (for Competitor Research) by Search Engine Journal

Frequent best-of honoree Ann Smarty reviews WhoICompete and Andrew Griffiths’ search marketing tool, two tools that, in her words, “let you generate the list of domains that get ranked high for several related search queries (we call them ‘SERP dominators’)”–in other words, the companies that are successfully utilizing web presence optimization (WPO) around these search phrases.

8 Cool Free SEO Website Tools by Abnormal Marketing

Fiona McEachran looks at eight helpful free SEO toos, ranging from the widely used (e.g., HubSpot, Alexa, and Backlink Watch, which is one of my favorites) to the lesser-known but interesting like iWebTool—a suite of tools including a Backlink Checker, Google PageRank Prediction and Keyword Density Checker—and Best SEO Tools, another intriguing suite.

5 Free Web SEO Analysis Tools by Blogging News Technology

The English is a bit rough but the information useful in this post reviewing free web analysis tools, including WebSEOAnalytics, SEOWorkers and SEOrush.

What’s In Your SEO Toolbox? by SEO Book
***** 5 STARS

Writing that “From a cost and time standpoint I’ve found it really helpful to pick a core set of tools and stick with them rather than bouncing around to get an extra feature or two,” Eric Covino reviews his favorites in this outstanding post. He helpfully divides his list of tools, most of which are market leaders, into five categories: keyword research, on-page criteria, rank checkers, competitive link research tools, and link monitoring tools.

Tools every SEO specialist and marketer should use by iMedia Connection

Jason Hennessey offers mini-reviews of half-a-dozen useful SEO tools, including Majestic SEO, Raven Tools and SEMRush. This is a solid list for newbies, but experienced SEO professionals and digital marketers will likely already be using these (or their own favorite alternatives).

Challenges in Automated Traffic Reporting by The Daily SEO Blog

Benjamin Estes examines five tools for monitoring and reporting on organic traffic data, from the most basic (Google Analytics) through some more exotic options like Geckoboard and GinzaMetrics. He summarizes the capabilities, pros and cons of each tool, but doesn’t declare a “winner” as each client’s requirements are, after all, somewhat different.

The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Chrome SEO Extensions by Search Engine Journal

In this concise and easy to digest post, Benjamin Beck serves up quick, bullet-point reviews of “good” SEO extensions for Chrome (among them: the SEO MOZ Bar, Buffer App and Check My Links) as well as “bad” and “ugly” extensions that either aren’t particularly useful or well-designed.

Single-Tool Reviews

Review: Bruce Clay’s Latest SEOToolSet by Coconut Headphones

Ted Ives extols the virtues of Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSet, which includes tools for working through the SEO process in six main areas: keyword strategy, linking strategy, architecture best practices, content optimization, traffic analysis and monetization (determining click value). Ted’s conclusion: “Bruce’s product is very broad and comprehensive and covers more bases…(than) other tools…and is well worth trying out.”

A Complete Review of Wordtracker’s Link Builder by SEO Book

Eric Covino (again) provides a thoughtful comprehensive review, this time of Wordtracker’s Link Builder tool. He steps through the process of setting up a campaign, researching competitor link profiles, link analysis, finding contacts, reporting, and using the Firefox extension. Eric closes the post with a helpful summary of the features he likes as well as areas he feels could be improved upon.

Why Optify Got Down To SEO Basics by MediaPost SearchBlog

Laurie Sullivan reports on the Basic edition of Optify, a tool designed to help marketers and business owners not only “understand SEO, but also how social media influences search engine query results.” The tool offers some nice features, such as keyword suggestions and a one-click tracking plugin for WordPress, but it’s not clear if it covers all of the bases of WPO as well as an something like gShift Labs.

Google (and Yahoo!) Sitemap Generator for Windows – GSiteCrawler

This free Windows-based tool generates XML sitemaps for Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Keyword Research Tools

12 Popular Keyword Organization Tips & Tools by SEO Book

Aaron Wall reviews “a dozen different tips and tools to help you organize your keywords,” including Ad Group Filter, SpyFu Keyword Groupie, Rank Checker, Xenu Link Sleuth and Screaming Frog.

6 Free Steps to Practical SEM Keyword Development by Target Marketing Magazine

Michel Leconte explains how to develop target keyword lists for SEO and SEM using common, popular tools like Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Instant and Alexa, and concludes, “How do you know when you have not spent enough time doing keyword identification? Chances are that if you don’t need to develop any new content and/or re-organize your website to fuel and align with the strategy at the end of this process, you’re missing something.”

What’s the best web content management system (CMS) for your small business? Should you look at something beyond a CMS—a web marketing system (WMS), that provides additional functions like customer relationship management (CRM) and email? There’s no shortage of options, and the decision is an important one: you’ll be “married” to the platform you choose for as long as your current site is up.

Content management systems are valuable tools for small businesses that 1) don’t want to make a big investment in IT infrastructure, 2) don’t have web development (HTML, CSS etc.) expertise on staff, and 3) want to be able to maintain their own web content (adding new pages, text and images) over time, without needing to learn web coding skills.

“Free” CMS options such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal have an obvious appeal (price) to small businesses, but none are cost-free. All require some level of technical expertise, and Joomla and Drupal particularly have steep learning curves. Low-cost, fee-based tools are generally more user-friendly, provide more features, and most importantly come bundled with support. For businesses looking beyond “free” tools, here are six CMS and WMS options that can help you get more sales and marketing productivity out of your website, while being easy on your web content contributors.

Keep in mind that all of these tools impose some design limitations; if you need a truly custom look and feel like these sites, your only option is to hire a professional web design and development firm. But if you can live within a template (and most of these tools do offer a respectable array of options), you can save thousands of dollars on design and coding costs.

CMS Only

These platforms offer website building and content management tools with hosting, but no “extras.” If you are just looking to get a site up on the web and already have systems in place for CRM and marketing automation, these tools are worthy of consideration.

Squarespace

Pricing: $150-$600 per year ($12-$50 per month)

Squarespace is a generally well-regarded tool with reasonable design functionality for building natively search-optimized websites and blogs. It offers a solid set of features including site search, multiple permission levels for different types of contributors, a form-builder, and  built-in analytics. The learning curve is far less daunting than most free CMS alternatives, and a strength of the tool is its mobile support. For anyone looking for an inexpensive, easy-to-use, basic website building and management tool, Squarespace is definitely worth consideration.

UPDATE: After closer examination, SquareSpace is not worthy of consideration, due to weaknesses in search engine optimization, specifically:

• • Custom meta title tags for high-level pages are limited to 50 characters (even the most conservative SEOs recommend 65 characters for the title tag).
• • Meta title tags inside a section (e.g., “blog”) will always begin with the section name. You can customize the section name, but you can’t override the fact the all-important first few characters of every page title in that section will contain it.
• • You can’t create custom meta description tags (!) which are essential in “selling the click.”
• • The people behind SquareSpace seem to lack understanding of how SEO works. True, manipulative tactics don’t work, but solid, white hat SEO is essential to getting a website ranked highly. Their information is both inaccurate and offensive to legitimate SEO professionals.

LightCMS

$240-$1200/year ($20-$100 per month)

Like the other tools listed here, LightCMS is low-cost, easy to use, search-optimized and provides tools like a forms builder. What sets it apart is better design flexibility than most of the alternatives, calendar tools and built-in ecommerce functionality. For developers and agencies, LightCMS also offers one of the most attractive partner programs. Considering all of its features, LightCMS is another shortlist-worthy tool for basic website creation, particularly for smaller B2C companies who want an easy-to-manage online store.

Solution Toolbox

$300 per year ($25 per month)

Another website building option that includes extras like ecommerce functionality with credit card processing, and nightly backups. The site is a bit cheesy, but the functionality of the tool is solid. Solution Toolbox provides their own comparison of their system to Squarespace and LightCMS, but take it with a grain of salt; it’s biased in their favor of course and some of the specifics are out of date (for example, Squarespace now includes a forms-builder). Still, for smaller consumer marketers who want to run an online store in addition to their basic website, this is worth a look.

Web Marketing Platforms

These suites combine CMS functionality with additional web marketing applications to provide more than just a website, but a complete online marketing software system.

Business Catalyst

$480 per year ($40 per month)

Business Catalyst combines the features of the products above—a CMS, forms builder, and ecommerce tools—with email marketing functionality and a basic CRM system. It provides respectable design flexibility and support for mobile devices. Though the product had issues in its original incarnation, Adobe has fixed many of these issues since acquiring it in late 2009 and continues to invest in product development. The catch? Business Catalyst isn’t sold directly to users, only through web developers and agencies (though there are ways around this).

Genoo

$2,400/year ($200 per month)

Genoo is a solid, easy to use tool, very strong on email marketing / marketing automation. It offers some of the best built-in SEO tools of any of these packages. Genoo doesn’t provide native CRM functionality, but does have a pre-built integration to Salesforce.com. This is ideal for midsized companies with at least moderately sophisticated internal marketing resources who are already using a separate CRM system and are ready to graduate from hosted email marketing services. Genoo’s offering includes training on how to use its lead-nurturing capabilities.

ePROneur

$1,800/year ($150 per month)

This is a complete web marketing package for smaller, non-ecommerce businesses. It provides a robust CMS for a website and blog along with native CRM, email marketing, and forms-building tools, as well as comprehensive strategy guidance for making all of the pieces work together. The ePROneur package uniquely combines hosting, software, services and strategy to help companies with limited resources effectively generate leads and revenue online. The web marketing resources section of the company’s website also offers a wealth of free strategic and tactical web marketing information.

Any of the alternatives above can help small to midsize companies cost-effectively build and manage their web presence with no IT infrastructure and limited technical expertise. The key from there is to choose a platform whose strengths match up with your business type and needs. And also to investigate multiple options to determine which tool, and company, you are most comfortable working with.

FTC Disclosure: Webbiquity has no affiliate relationships with any of the vendors in this review.

The SeoQuake team, the group behind the SEMRush tools for SEO and keyword research, recently released a new tool to help SEM consultants and agencies find local clients. SEMRush Geo displays Google AdWords advertisers on a Google Maps background, enabling users to identify the businesses within any geographic area who are running AdWords campaigns.

Clicking on any businesses opens a small pop-out with additional information (which is also displayed in the left sidebar). Clicking the SEMRush icon within the pop-out or sidebar opens a new window displaying the keywords bid on by that company, and for each keyword the average cost per click, destination URL, percentage of AdWords traffic driven, percentage of AdWords costs and more. The free link displays only partial data; a Pro subscription to SEMRush (at $50 per month) is required to view all of the AdWords data, plus organic keywords, history and export capabilities.

For companies using AdWords, it may seem almost a bit creepy that there is this level of detail about their SEM activities available publicly. But it’s a good reminder for all of us that what we online is, usually,  there for the world to see if one knows where to look. For SEM agencies and consultants, the SEMRush Geo tool is a prospecting goldmine. Used properly, the tool can help agencies generate new business and advertisers improve the effectiveness of their AdWords campaigns. For consultants and agencies that provide SEM services, this is definitely worth checking out.

FTC Disclosure: SEMRush provided access to their tools to assist in conducting this evaluation but did not provide any direct compensation for writing this post.

Looking for an easy way to create a cool graphical email signature with trackable interactive buttons? Supplement your email list with your contacts’ social network info? Find out if the username or vanity URL you want is still available across dozens of social sites? Display a feed of brand-related comments from a variety of social networks on your website? Create video emails? Convert PowerPoint presentations to Flash, or into YouTube videos? Search for a brand name or keyword across all of the most popular social networks at once? Monitor social media discussions of your company or product in real time? Create animations? Promote events through social media? Gather competitive intelligence?

Economic conditions may have been tough in 2010, but there was no shortage of online innovation. Discover how to accomplish all of the tasks above and more using some of the coolest free and modestly priced social media and web tools released in the past year or so.

Cool Social Media Tools

eSig

A slick tool with free and fee-based options for creating graphical email signatures, adding interactive buttons and even tracking click-throughs from the different elements of your email signature.

Flowtown

A handy way to supplement your email contact list with information about those prospects from the most popular social networks.

namechk

Check dozens of popular social networking and social bookmarking websites to see if the username or vanity url you want to use is still available.

JustUnfollow

Don’t want to follow Twitterers who aren’t following you? This tool makes unfollowing non-followers easy.

Klout

A free tool for finding the relative influence of any Twitter user. For those accustomed to getting stratospheric scores on standardized tests, Klout can seem a bit harsh. If you need more of an ego boost, try TwitterGrader.

paper.li

Create your own online newspaper from Twitter and Facebook updates based on any topic or group of contributors. Your custom paper is updated daily and easy to share.

DialogFeed

***** 5 Stars

Display a feed of brand-related comments from a variety of social networks on your website. Highlight the best comments, selectively hide comments (e.g. that are irrelevant or profane), and enable site visitors to share comments back to their social networks without leaving your website.

twebevent

A free service for setting up, promoting and hosting Twitter chats.

Social and Alternative Search Engines

48ers

A realtime social search engine that pulls current and recent results for any term from Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg and Delicious. Searches can also be filtered by platform.

Qwiki

A different kind of search engine, Qwiki (currently in alpha) delivers a combination of audio, images and text in response to searches on an expanding variety of topics. In the site’s words, “Think of asking your favorite teacher about Leonardo Da Vinci, or your most well-traveled friend about Buenos Aires: this is the experience Qwiki will eventually deliver, on demand, wherever you are in the world… on whatever device you’re using.”

MyLife

A powerful people search tool. Find long-lost acquaintances, extended family members, or a future love interest. Discover what information is available about a potential future boss or employee. Interesting, though the “Who’s searching for you” feature appears to be more a spammy sales tool than a functional offer.

Blekko’s Tools Give Search Marketers Google Alternative by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Granted, the web is littered with “Google killer” alternative search engines, but Blekko, created by Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson, is really cool. It enables users to perform slashtag searches, so for example, rather than just searching for “social media marketing” and getting a zillion results of all types, you can search for “social media marketing /blogs” to see only results from blogs. Or use /forums too see only results from discussion forums, /date to sort results by recency, or even create your own slashtags.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

Lithium

A feature-rich, realtime social media monitoring and engagement tool. In addition to customizable search and sentiment monitoring, the Buzz Tracking feature provides realtime “metrics around how much buzz is out there, how much of it is yours, how much of it is your competitors’, and what’s buzzing industry-wide.” Lithium also includes response assignment and reporting tools. A free trial is available.

BackType

A slick, easy to use social media monitoring and alerts tool. Create an account or try it out by setting up a free alert in just seconds.

Actionly

A social media monitoring tool that tracks your brand and keyword searches across Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Google Buzz, Blogs, and News, and reports results hourly. Actionly also includes Twitter account management and analytics tools.

Sysomos

A realtime social media monitoring tool featuring sentiment analysis, key influencer tracking, and the ability to sort/view results by geography and demographics. Sysomos has an impressive blue chip customer list and the company’s recent acquisition by Marketwire gives it solid brand and investment backing.

Wildfire Social Media Monitor

Measure your social media marketing performance with tracking tools for the major social media networks, keep tabs on competitors and compare your results to theirs, and get alerts about trends and social media activity. Wildfire is designed to enable organizations to easily create branded interactive campaigns (e.g. sweepstakes, contests and surveys) and publish them to multiple social networks and their own website. Pricing ranges from $30 to $150 per month.

Other Cool Web Tools

Proclaim Messenger

Proclaim Messenger enables you to easily combine pre-recorded or live video with PowerPoint presentations to produce video email campaigns (with full analytics), one-off video sales emails, or hold live one-to-one or small group video chats. Pricing ranges from $30 to $100 per month depending on features.

Runaware

Runaware’s TestDrive® suite of services provides software developers with marketing tools and a hosted interactive online demo environment that allows customers to evaluate real software in their web browser, complete with tutorials and detailed usage reporting. Runaware’s Cloud Platform offerings enable clients to experiment and evaluate SaaS and PaaS using their own application without requiring any modifications.

Wondershare

An inexpensive tool for converting PowerPoint to Flash web files, ideal for creating online presentations, Flash banners, photo albums, e-cards and more. You can import other Flash files and audio as well as record narration. The output can be saved as a Flash file for the web, converted to a self-running executable, used to create an auto-run CD or sent as an email attachment.

Qirina

Billing itself as a “keyword analysis and comparison engine,” Qirina is a simple but useful SEO evaluation tool that helps users understand a site’s position in the keyspace, assess the quality of the site’s on-site SEO, and identify competitors in search.

Reviews of More Cool Web Tools

Another Cool Tool To Optimize Your Site Loading Speed by Daily Blog Tips

Now that Google is taking site loading time into consideration as a ranking factor, webmasters are feeling the need for speed as never before. Here’s a quick review of WebPageTest, a handy tool for checking any site’s pre- and post-cache load times.

6 slick news aggregators you should try by iMedia Connection

Josh Rose reviews six “news aggregators (including Popurls, Netvibes and Alltop) that…are moving beyond the simple RSS reader. These are customizable tools that can be shaped into exactly the right resource for the most important information you need to know.”

PowerPoints That Turn Into YouTube Videos Create Instant Marketing Tool by MediaPost Search Blog

Laurie Sullivan provides an update on Brainshark, “a tool that turns PowerPoint decks into YouTube videos. The platform turns a presentation into a video slideshow (with voiceover/audio) formatted to upload onto YouTube with one click.”

6 Free Sites for Creating Your Own Animations by Mashable

Sarah Kessler reviews a half-dozen free and (mostly) easy to use tools for creating online animations, including GoAnimate, Devolver, Xtranormal and Voki.

6 Newfangled Social Media Tools Worth Discovering by Convince & Convert

Jay Baer shares his thoughts on a small collection of tools worth checking out, including Curate.Us, which is sort of a social media-friendly version of ClipMarks; Formulists, a slick tool for automatically creating lists of your Twitter followers based on criteria you select such as having a similar follower count or having retweeted you in the past month; and Wibiya, which lets you create a custom footer bar for your blog or website that enable users to easily translate a page, share it via their social networks, link to your YouTube channel or perform other actions.

12 Social Media Tools for B2B Pre-Event Marketing by Social Media B2B

***** 5 Stars

Adam Holden-Bache presents a dozen tools that can “help event organizers extend an event’s visibility, attendance and pre-event conversations,” from LinkedIn Events and Facebook Events to build attendance, to location-based services for event check-in, to Slideshare for leveraging presentation content after the event.

11 Twitter & Social Media Tools To Try In 2011 by COMMS Corner

***** 5 Stars

The brilliant Adam Vincenzini reviews a collection of highly useful social media tools including Twoolr for Twitter statistics, MentionMap for analyzing “what a particular person is talking about on Twitter and who they are talking to,” TouchGraph for visualizing where your site is being mentioned, and Citrify, a simple yet effective web-based photo editing tool.

The Best Things In Life Are Free: 10 Tools For Digital Professionals That Don’t Cost A Dime by MediaPost Online Media Daily

A quick review of 10 free tools for online marketers, for tasks like keyword research, competitive intelligence gathering, social media monitoring, test marketing and presentations.

Most Popular Free Windows Downloads of 2010 by Lifehacker

***** 5 Stars

The most popular free Windows tools of 2010, including Soluto for speeding up slow PCs, Snow Transformation for those who want their Windows screen to look like a Mac, Freemake video converter and editor, and MultiBootOS– a true geek tool that lets you load multiple operating systems onto a USB drive and select between them at boot-up.

4 Social Media Predictions for 2011 by oneforty blog

Social media monitoring tools are predicted to get both more sophisticated and less expensive in 2011, and several interesting vendors are cited here including Argyle Social, viralheat, Beevolve and eCairn.

Related Post

20+ Cool Social Media and Web Tools

Looking for a way to monitor social media activities and results on a tight budget? Want to show the world how social you are with a cool widget on your website or blog? How about a real-time search tool to see what’s being said about your company or any topic of interest right now?  Interested in an easy way to stay current on key Google Analytics traffic stats from your desktop? Need a way to edit video and photos without the expense and overhead of a pricey editing application?

You’ll find all of this and more in this collection of tools and reviews of some of the coolest free or low-cost social media monitoring and web tools so far this year.

Cool Web Tools

Social Mention
***** 5 stars
A powerful real-time social search engine that not only displays results for a specified term or phrase, but lets you filter results by source (e.g., blogs, microblogging sites, social bookmarking, images, video), and shows associated metrics like sentiment, top keywords, top users (who’s talking about this topic most actively) and sources. You can narrow search results to a specific timeframe and sort by date or source. Social Mention also lets you set up alerts (simiar to Google Alerts) and offers a widget that can be installed on a website or blog to display the real-time buzz about your specified topic.

uberVU

A social media monitoring tool that combines powerful features (e.g., historical and real-time data, sentiment analysis, platform filtering) and ease of use with a more attractive monthly price than many well-known competitors.

Social Website Analyzer

A quick and handy way to get a snapshot of the “social media rank” of any website. Metrics include traffic stats from Alexa, Compete and Quantcast; backlinks and results by search engine; backlinks and mentions on the major social news sites and more.

Outbrain

A cool, free blog widget that automatically displays links, along with thumbnail images, to related posts on your blog at the bottom of each blog post you publish. Visitors can rate posts and you also get click statistics. It takes a bit longer to install than they claim but isn’t terribly difficult.

monitter

A dead-simple to use Twitter monitoring dashboard; keep tabs on tweets for three phrases, hash tags or Twitter handles. Monitoring can be filtered by location as well.

Collecta

A real-time search engine that displays results from blog posts, articles, blog comments, microblogging sites (e.g., Twitter) and social content sharing sites.

Stupeflix

An online video editor than enables you to mix videos footage, images and soundtracks and add effects to create standard or high-definition online videos. Your first video is free. After that, their standard pricing model is designed for high-volume production but plans are available for less frequent use as well.

Polaris

***** 5 Stars
Want a quick snapshot of how your website—or any number of websites you track through Google Analytics—is performing? Now there’s no need to log in to GA just for a simple check. Polaris is a slick, free Adobe Air-based desktop tool that displays eight GA charts at a glance, including the dashboard, traffic sources, top content, keywords and goal values.

Amplicate

Do you really love a particular topic, company, website or public figure? Or really hate one? Care what others think? This is the site for you. Amplicate is a user-driven site that shows you at a glance how many people love or hate any of thousands of different entities across dozens of categories. For example, (at last check) in the social networks category, three times as many (67 to 22) people loved ecademy as hated it, while more than twice as many (18,163 to 8,632) hated Facebook as loved it (not that Zuckerberg is terribly worried). Joe Biden gets 86% love, but Barack Obama only 48%. Okay, so it may not be scientific, but it is fascinating.

BackUpMyTweets

Twitter saves “only” your last 3,200 tweets. For those who feel they really need to hang on to more than that, BackUpMyTweets offers a free service to save all their snippets of 140-character brilliance. The site also offers tools for backing up web mail accounts, blogs and online photos.

Reviews of More Cool Tools

5 PowerPoint Search Engines To Seek Out Publicly Available Presentations by Carpe Diem

According to some estimates, there may be as many as 50 million PowerPoint presentations publicly available on the web. But searching for them can be a pain. Sure you can use a general search engine with PPT as a filetype query, but you can save yourself work and typing by utilizing one of these PowerPoint-specific search engines to do the digging.

The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today by Social Media Today

Jay Baer provides concise reviews of his favorite social media tools for Twitter management, comments, search, photo sharing, analytics, video creation, social media monitoring and more.

Trackur Launches Free Version Of Its Social Media Monitoring Tool by TechCrunch

Robin Wauters reviews Trackur, an online reputation management and social media monitoring tool created by Andy Beal and team. Trackur is sort of Google Alerts on steroids and competes with products like Radian6 and Attentio. This is a slick tool, and my one experience with their support team was impressively brief and helpful.

10 Must-Have Web Apps Every Internet User Would Love To Know by Smashing Apps

Mini-reviews of 10 helpful tools such as WobZIP, an online utility for unzipping files on admin-proteced computers; Mitto, an online password manager; and Web Page to PDF, which is kind of self-explanatory.

10 Free Web-based Alternatives to Photoshop by LifeClever

Chanpory Rith reviews 10 free online tools that offer many of the features of PhotoShop with the high cost or complexity, including Picnik (possibly the best free online photo editor), PhotoShop Express, Snipshot and flauntR.

5 Free B2B Marketing Tools by Modern B2B Marketing

Maria Pergolino of Marketo reviews five popular tools including CoTweet, a Twitter tool that enable users to track keyword or brand mentions and even assign responses to particular individuals (for example, by product line). These are familiar but essential tools for the b2b marketer’s toolbox.

List of Search Engines – Top Search Engines in 2010 by Secret Search Engine Labs

Google may be the 800-pound gorilla of search engines but as this post reminds us, it’s not alone in the jungle. Here you’ll find a alphabetical list of 30+ alternative search engines from Ask and Rich Skrenta’s Blekko to social search engine Stumpedia and “computational knowledge engine” Wolfram Alpha.

Interesting websites to check out by iMedia Connection (video)

Shelly Palmer discusses four tools worth checking out including BugMeNot (for creating website logins that won’t get you spammed) and Phonezoo, a site where you can find and create custom cell phone ringtones.

10 Simple Google Search Tricks by The New York Times

Simon Mackie of GigaOM explains 10 cool little tricks for Google searches including site search, using Google as a calculator, performing currency conversions and finding specific types of documents online.

12 alternatives to Basecamp by Popwuping

Clark MacLeod reviews a dozen alternatives to popular online project management / group collaboration tool Basecamp, such as Huddle, Kindling and Mindquarry.

Part 1 of the best cool web tools for 2009 presented tools for sharing presentations online, consolidating social networking accounts, generating word-of-mouth referrals and using social media for research. This post includes tools for social search, social media monitoring, Twitter management, competitive research, real-time chat, job hunting, video sharing, time management and more.

Social Media Tools

HowSociable?

An extremely cool tool. What Website Grader does for website SEO analysis, HowSociable? does for a brand’s presence in social media: it evaluates a variety of sites to produce a combined “social media presence” score. Even better, it allows you to drill into the social media mentions of a brand behind the metrics.

Filtrbox

A real-time social media monitoring platform for PR, marketing, and brand pros. Get real-time alerts, trending and analysis for news, blogs, twitter and more.

KnowEm

Protecting your brand online is critical. This tool lets you instantly search more than 350 social media sites for your brand as a user name, so you can reserve it and keep it out of the hands of competitors, name squatters or potential detractors.

TwiPing

An inexpensive utility that helps efficiently create Twitter lists, find relevant people to follow, identify inactive Twitter followers and more.

CloudProfile: Social Media Optimization for Small Business by Mashable

Mashable reviews CloudProfile, a social profile / SEO / social media monitoring tool for small businesses. Sounds interesting, but is it worth $50 per month?

The Internet more positive about PPC than SEO by Searchcowboys

A review of whatdoestheinternetthink, a social sentiment tool. Enter any term and this tool will show you percentages of positive, negative and “don’t care” social media sentiment regarding the topic or brand.

Own Your Domain Name & Aggregate All of Your Social Accounts with Chi.mp by How-To Geek

A review of Chi.mp, a free service that enables you to register a personal/unique domain name, domain name, then blog, create photo albums, and aggregate all of your social accounts in one place.

Real-Time Chat Tools

Meebo Me

A widget that lets you install real-time chat capabilities on any web page.

Olark Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners by TechCrunch

TechCrunch review of Olark, a live chat widget alternative to Meebo.

Enhanced Search Tools

5 Ways to Add a Search Sidebar to Google SERPs by Search Engine Journal

Ann Smarty reviews WebMynd, Unified Search and three other tools that extend the search capabilities of Google in various ways to produce more relevant and/or comprehensive results.

Search Engine LeapFish Merges Real-Time Data And Social Content by MediaPost Online Media Daily

Review of LeapFish, a meta-search engine that combines traditional and real-time results from social media and news sites.

Wowd

A real-time search tool for discovering current opinion and news coverage of hot topics.

Scoopler

Another real-time search tool.

Google Squared – A Simple Tutorial by SEM Nook

A quick tutorial on how to use Google Squared to get customized, focused search results.

SimilarWeb

A downloadable tool that helps instantly find sites similar to the one you are currently browsing.

MyLife

A powerful people search tool for finding online information about individuals.

Hunch

A human-powered recommendation engine that provides guidance on a wide range of topics and questions, from which computer you should buy to which vegetables are the most  nutritious.

Other Cool Web Tools

Clip2Net

A tool that allows you to capture and upload video, images, text, files, even an area of your desktop to the web.

Hey!Spread

An online video distribution and analytics service to promote video content, somewhat along the lines of TubeMogul.

9 new marketing tools you need by iMedia Connection

Doug Schumacher reviews nine cool apps and plugins for marketers, including Skitch (for web page markup), OmniGraffle (diagramming), ColorZilla (online color management for design) and Hootsuite (Twitter management dashboard).

Find Competitor’s Top Performing Keywords & Use Them To Your Advantage by PPC Hero

Tips on how to use Compete.com to find your competitors’ top keywords, site traffic patterns, unique visitors and other information.

Xtranormal

A tool that lets you create funky animated movies from a text file.

Favicon

A tool for creating website favicons, similar to the DeGraeve favicon tool or the Dynamic Drive FavIcon generator.

Krunchd

A URL shortener that enables you to combine multiple URLs into one shortened link for collaboration or sharing.

Indeed

Job hunting? Indeed instantly searches job sites, newspapers, associations and company career pages for jobs based on title/keywords and location.

100+ Resources for Getting Things Done by Readaloo

A fabulous list of time management apps for calendars, task lists, collaboration, organization, taking notes, bookmarking, mind-mapping and more.

Looking for a more powerful way to share presentations online? Consolidate your online profiles and social networking presence? Create a cool Twiiter background even if you’re not the artistic type? Generate word-of-word referrals? Use social media more effectively for research?

You’ll find tools for all of those tasks and others in this collection of more of the best cool online tools.

SlideSix

SlideSix is a multimedia presentation sharing site, designed to be SlideShare on steroids. You can upload presentations, record audio narration, and attach videos, all on the site. SlideSix lets you upload PowerPoint, PDF or OpenOffice presentations, mix in videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and share your presentations with groups.

PeoplePond

PeoplePond is a secure social profile site that can be connected to your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts. It’s an important place to have a profile listed for anyone concerned with online reputation management. The creators of PeoplePond more recently also launched CompanyPond, a company profile site that improves online visibility and SEO for corporate sites.

DandyID

Another service that allows individuals to collect all of their social media profiles in one place, verify their identity, and track activity on those profiles. And, tired of filling out the same information over and over for each new social networking or profile site? DandyID “provides you with a globally recognizable profile that you only need to fill out once. The profile then follows you around the web and automatically appears on DandyID-enabled sites.”

My Tweet Space

For anyone who wants a cool, custom Twitter background but is design-challenged, My Tweet Space provides a wide selection of free and low-cost professionally designed backgrounds to enhance one’s Twitter presence.

Tell A Friend

TAF offers free and fee-based tools to help companies capitalize on word-of-mouth (or word-of-web) marketing. Their suite of apps ranges from simple branded buttons to social commerce tools, advertising and social rewards programs.

Mixxr

This is a cool alternative search engine that lets you search Google, Yahoo, Bing and Twitter simultaneously. Great for viewing the differences between “traditional” and real-time search results.

Bing Tips & Tricks by Digitial Inspiration

There have lots of posts written about Google search tricks, but in this piece, Amit Agarwal shows how to perform tasks like tracking companies, finding MP3 files and even setting up an RSS feed of search results (something that can’t be done with Google or Yahoo!) with Bing.

100 Tips and Tools to Research the Social Web by Select Courses

An outstanding list of tips and tools for using social media to conduct both primary and secondary research, monitor trends, create alerts, analyze information and organize your data.

Sprout Builder

In their own words, Sprout Builder is “a visual authoring studio that allows creative professionals to quickly and easily create branded, rich-media content and widgets.” It enables designers build anything from simple Flash banners to a sophisticated widgets with multiple media types, feeds and sharing options by dragging different media types onto a canvas and controlling effects. Pricing ranges widely from $19 per month for the individual option to $299 per month for the professional version, but there’s a 30-day trial for the curious to try this out.

Flock

Flock is a “social web browser” that integrates email, photos, video and social media sites into a single interface, while simplifying sharing and publishing. It runs on Windows, Mac or Linux and supports multiple webmail types (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail), social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace), blogging platforms (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad), media sites (Flickr, YouTube) and more. It includes features like a People Sidebar for staying in touch with your social connections, an integrated RSS feed reader, blog editor and web clipboard. And it’s free.

Huddle

Huddle is an online project management, collaboration and file sharing tool along the lines of Basecamp, DeskAway and Projjex. It supports unlimited users, online chat, project alerts, a whiteboard feature, document management (approvals, workflow, audit trails), and collaborative document editing. Pricing ranges from a free, ad-supported version to $200/month for the enterprise package, with the most popular service level at $38 per month.

CRM Diagnostic

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have become ubiquitous, yet many—perhaps even most—implementations fail to take full advantage of the software’s capabilities in one or more areas. Most companies could be getting more benefit from their existing systems, but identifying the problem areas, and what needs to be done to improve use of the software, can involve a long and expensive consulting engagement. This free analysis tool from on-demand CRM consulting firm Demand Chain Systems short-circuits that process, helping to identify the most promising areas for improvement in just 40 minutes.

Jing

Jing lets you capture on-screen action or animate still images, add narration, and upload the final video or YouTube or other video-sharing sites or share by email. Available for Windows and Mac, Jing lets you add call-outs to screen captures or images, share your video or output it for further editing in other tools. There’s a free version for casual home users, or a Pro version that adds features like additional output options and webcam capture (Mac OS X Leopard only) available for just $14.95 per year.

Skimmer

Skimmer is a free Adobe AIR desktop application designed to organize your social media activities and make interaction easier by aggregating your friends’ feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Blogger on one screen. It provides instant access to any video linked in a feed post, a slideshow view for Flickr photos or YouTube videos, and the ability to customize your profile and the appearance of your content.

TubeMogul

TubeMogul is a free online video tracking and analytics service that provides a single point for uploading to the top video sharing sites, and powerful analytics on who, what, and how videos are being viewed. TubeMogul tracks viewing statistics far beyond “views,” including per-second audience dropoff, audience geography and more. According to their site, “TubeMogul’s analytic technology aggregates video-viewing data from multiple sources to give publishers an improved understanding of when, where and how often their videos are watched, track and compare what’s hot and what’s not, measure the impact of marketing campaigns, gather competitive intelligence, and share the data with colleagues or friends.” There are also fee-based versions that provide more advanced analytics and video promotion features.

Check whether the Twitter conversations about you are positive or negative with twendz by Advocable

Palin Ningthoujam reviews twendz, a free social media tracking and sentiment measurement tool that shows you who is talking about your product or brand (or any other topic) on social media sites, what’s being said, a keyword cloud of the terms most commonly used in the conversations, and the overall tone (negative, positive or neutral) of the conversations. While not as sophisticated as professional monitoring tools, twendz does provide a quick, easy and free snapshot of the content and sentiment around any topic of social media discussion.

Originally published on WebMarketCentral between August 2008 and September 2009.

DeskAway

Somewhat similar to tools like Basecamp and Projjex, DeskAway is an online collaboration tool that supports ad hoc work teams by enabling them to manage and track projects, share large files, send secure messages and report on activities. Pricing ranges from free (up to five users and three active projects at a time) to $99 per month for unlimited projects and users.

Gickr

Gickr is a slick free tool for creating animated GIFs from any collection of photos. It can be used to create banner ads, slide shows or Flash-like animations.

Lexical FreeNet

This is a “connected thesaurus” that belongs in every writer’s toolbox. For any word or pair of words, it shows related words, connections between the words, rhyming words and more. For famous names, it can help find information such as occupation, birth and death years, nationality, and “trigger links” (e.g. “Clinton” and “Whitewater”).

OnlyWire

OnlyWire lets you automatically submit content to all of your favorite social networking sites with a single button, and makes it easy for your blog readers to bookmark and share your content. If you don’t want to see their ads, a fee-based version is available for a reasonable $25 per year.

16 Essential PC Applications for Bloggers by Problogger

Frequent Best-of contributor Darren Rowse reviews essential blogging tools including SnagIt for capturing screen images, Digsby for consolidating social networking chat with a single tool, Camtasia Studio for screen recording, PeaZip for file archiving and unzipping, and a dozen others.

64 B2B Marketing Tools and Resources by Modern B2B Marketing

In one of the most underrated posts of last year, Jon Miller provides links to more than 60 tools and information resources including blog posts, white papers, analyst reports, webcasts, podcasts, ebooks and articles on topics ranging from lead scoring and nurturing to marketing ROI and social media tools. Examples include David Raab’s Guide to Demand Generation Systems, Marketo’s Landing Page Test Calculator and this podcast from Laura Ramos on using Web 2.0 tactics to boost b2b marketing results.

9 Google Bookmarklets for SEOs by Search Engine Journal

The indispensable Ann Smarty reviews nine helpful bookmarlets (small tools activated from a button in your browser), such as Search selected text on Google and tools for Google Trends, Google Insights, and Google Blog Search.

Clicky

While there are lots of website analytics programs out there, Clicky combines powerful functionality with affordable pricing in a way few others can match. Unlike Google Analytics (the application it’s most likely to be compared to), Clicky provides real-time stats, Twitter analytics, separate mobile visitor tracking, visitor details, WordPress integration and more. While their free and blogger plans offer limited funcitonality, their Pro ($60 per year as of this writing), Super Pro ($120/year) and Enterprise ($300/year) plans offer impressive capabilities at very reasonable cost. It’s hard to compete with free, but with all of these features and great value, Clicky has found a way to do it.

Facesaerch

Facesaerch (yes, that’s the correct spelling) is just what its name implies: a search engine specifically for faces. Search for your favorite celebrity, a neighbor, your boss, your next prospective employee—anyone whose picture may be somewhere on the internet—to discover what photos of them have been posted and where.

Animoto

Animoto lets you grab images from your hard drive or the web, choose a soundtrack from your audio collection or theirs, and then automatically creates a cool music video from your selections. While this tool would benefit from more attractive pricing (you can only make 30-second videos for free) and better controls, it’s worth checking out and playing with.

Feedoor

Similar to feedkiller, previously reviewed here, Feedoor.com lets you merge RSS feeds or even individual blog posts into a single feed. You can select how many stories from each source to include, and the tool provides advanced filtering options to include or exclude posts based on keywords, author and date. It also lets you create Javascript widgets for your blog or site that display headlines from your custom feed, and does it all with a simple, straightforward interface.

Crucial Firefox Plugins For SEM Professionals; Put Google To Work To Meet CPA Goals by Search Engine Land

Josh Dreller reviews seventeen helpful Firefox plugins, such as FireFTP (a fully functional and free FTP client that runs within Firefox), FireShot (a free screenshot capture tool with annotation capabilities), SearchStatus (a “Swiss army knife” for SEO pros) and Google Global (lets you search as though you were sitting anywhere in the world).

6 All-in-One Tools for Quick SEO Diagnostics by Search Engine Journal

Prolific SEO blogger Ann Smarty reviews a half-dozen SEO diagnostics tools including Quarkbase (a new addition to my arsenal), HubSpot’s Website Grader (one I use all the time), and Cubestat.

17 Online Free Web Based Applications That You Probably Would Love To Use! by SmashingApps

AN Jay reviews a variety of helpful and cool online tools here, from free web conferencing service Dimdim and URL shortener BudURL to Skydeck (an online tool for keeping track of your cell phone calls and text messages) and PDFescape, a free online PDF reader / editor / form filler and form designer tool.

LookupPage

This is an essential site for personal online reputation management. LookupPage lets you create an optimized personal profile that, in most cases, will show up very highly on the major search engines, helping you to “own” valuable first-search-page real estate for your name. The site offers free listing, as well as couple of affordable fee-based options that provide additional benefits such as an ad-free page and top listing guaranteed.

Retaggr

Another valuable site for reputation management, Retaggr not only enables you to create an online profile linked to your accounts on other social media sites, but also lets you easily create an online business card, social media email signature, and blog widget to help visitors easily add you to their friend lists.

Exalead

An alternative search engine, Exalead may not be a “Google killer” but does provide some interesting features. The top menu and right sidebar box make it simple to narrow your search to the entire web, just your PC, or Wikipedia, as well as by related terms, site type, media type and other criteria.

Name Combo

Either a slick tool to help generate domain name ideas, check availability and register with just a few clicks, or at least a mildly interesting way to waste some time—you decide.

WiseStamp

This is a slick tool that enables you to easily create a graphical HTML social media email signature for use with most common webmail services (Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL, Hotmail etc.). WiseStamp lets you control the look of the email signature as well as adding RSS feeds and social networking links like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Face to Face video chat by ePoster

Concise review of ooVoo, a free video chat tool that’s been previously written about here. ooVoo is an easy-to-use tool for conducting video chat with anyone who has a webcam.

14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition by FutureNow

The brilliant Bryan Eisenberg details more than a dozen tools to help compare or benchmark your site/blog against competitors, including Feed Compare (compare the size of your RSS subscriber base to others), Xinu Returns (shows how your site compares to others on search engines and social bookmarking sites) and Website Grader (provides an overall score for the SEO quality of your site plus competitive comparisons and recommendations for improvement).

The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites by PC Magazine

Finally, Kyle Monson reviews a slew of useful and/or entertaining online tools such as Animoto (automatically creates videos from uploaded music and photos), Jott (a cool and handy speech-to-text conversion tool) and, for researchers, NationMaster, a site which lets you compare countries on a wide variety of statistics ranging from the serious (economic measures, terrorism) to the trivial (softdrink consumption).

Surf Canyon

Surf Canyon is a broswer plugin for Firefox and IE that refines results as you search, helping to make them more relevant so you can find exactly what you’re looking for more quickly. Pandia’s review of how Surf Canyon personalizes search results states that “SurfCanyon accelerates the search process by re-ranking the search results based on your behaviour…Even though there’s no actual magic involved, this nifty little app does a great job of digging though the search results for the hits you need, even though Google buried them on page 12.”

Projjex

In the same realm as Basecamp from 37signals, Projjex is an online project collaboration tool that lets you define groups, upload and share files, schedule meetings, assign tasks and send automated reminders. Projjex extends this functionality with cool, practical features like file tagging to simplify search, time tracking and iPhone integration. Serious users will eventually want to upgrade to the fee-based service, but the free offering is robust enough to be helpful tool for small businesses while providing larger organizations with a realistic trial before buying.

Follow me on Twitter badges / logos / buttons by limeshot marketing

Lots of bloggers are adding Twitter follow-me buttons and badges to their blogs, but thanks to limeshot, you no longer have to limit yourself to standard light-blue-and-white graphic. Here are 36 variations for a follow-me badge that reflects your color scheme and personality.

feedkiller

feedkiller is an rss mixing tool that lets you combine a variety of content into your website or favorite rss aggregator with a single rss feed. It’s free and very simple to set up. MakeUseOf.com notes in its review of feedkiller that “other tools can be used for that purpose (such as) RSS Mixer, Feedoor and FeedBlendr. However what makes FeedKiller standout is the ability to select the number of stories to include from each feed.” What would make it stand out even more is a simple PHP script for including the resulting feed on a website.

SearchCloud

SearchCloud is a powerful search tool to use for multi-term, detailed searches. Any search engine will let you use multiple search words of course, but SearchCloud takes that a step further by letting you select a size for each search word or phrase, indicating its relative importance. And on the off-chance that SearchCloud isn’t intuitive enough for you, they even provide a one-minute video on how to use it

ScribeFire

ScribeFire offers a Firfox browser plugin that lets bloggers drag and drop formatted text from the web into their blogs, post entries, take notes, categorize and tag their blog posts, upload images and share posts on social bookmarking and networking websites. The company also offers tools for both displaying and buying online ads. TechJaws has called ScribeFire a blogger’s best friend, and LifeHacker has made it a download of the day, pointing out that “In addition to Blogger and WordPress, ScribeFire works with Jeeran, LiveJournal, TypePad and Windows Live Spaces.”

Monitter

Inspired by TweetDeck, Monitter is a real-time Twitter monitor that lets you keep track of live posts for any three keywords you enter, plus filter the display by geographic location or language (English, Spanish, and German). Frederic Lardinois wrote in his ReadWriteWeb review of Monitter that “Monitter is a cool and well designed way to monitor keywords on Twitter.”

dnScoop

Overall, this is more for amusement than practical business use (though the inbound link checker is very thorough and accurate). dnScoop is a domain check and website valuation tool that estimates the value of an established website or a domain name using several different criteria including the number of inbound links; the popularity, age and Pagerank of the domain; website traffic; and other factors.

Propeller

At first glance, Propeller look like just another Digg clone or YASN: a social bookmarking site where you can post links, vote on them, comment, and share them with friends or a group. However, the site is owned by AOL, so there’s a chance it will be able to keep spammers and objectionable material out while avoiding the problems like the Digg Mafia or the StumbleUpon witch hunt. At last check, the links here were still do-follow, so they have SEO value as well.

Top 5 Free Web Applications by Search For Blogging

Mert Erkal, Chief Editor of Bloghology Magazine, shares his favoriate free web applications, including ADrive, an online service for storing, transferring and sharing very large files; Audacity, a powerful open-source audio-editing program; and LogMeIn, a free remote-access service similar to GoToMyPC.
Convert Archives Into Different Compression Formats (RAR to ZIP and etc) by Raymond.cc

Although ZIP is the most commonly used format for file compression on Windows PCs, several other compression formats actually do a better job of producing more compact files. If you ever receive archives in these formats (such as RAR, 7z or KGB) and can’t open them, or you’d like to be able to use alternative formats, this handy utility converts archives between numerous compression formats.

Testing the Quintura Site Search Widget by Pandia Search Engine News

Quintura is an alternative search engine developed in Russia, based on semantic technology. What sets it apart from the crowd of other alternative search engines is the way it presents search results in Web 2.0-style clouds of related search terms that help you narrow or expand your search simply by clicking your mouse. The folks at Pandia explain here how you can now use the same technology to spider and search your own site or blog—for free.

social bookmarking services and community websites submitter by Social Poster

Here’s a list of 79 social submission bookmarklets you can simply drag to your Firefox toolbar to install. The list includes direct links to register for each service, login and submit a new item, as well as each site’s Pagerank and Alexa rank. This is social posting for the lazy (or extremely busy).

Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks by Lifehacker

This isn’t actually a new tool but rather a collection of neat tricks for using Google to accomplish a range of tasks, from simple things like tracking flight status and calculating currency conversion to more advanced activities like finding free music, filtering image search results and evading your company’s site blocking software (ahem, not so sure that last one is a good idea, but it’s an interesting trick). These have been compiled by Gina Trapani, best-selling author of Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better and Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day.

SpaceTime

A search tool that provides “unlimited space,” enabling you to search Google, YouTube, RSS, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, Flickr and Images all in one 3D space. SpaceTime’s™ 3D Web Search lets you choose a search engine from the drop down menu, type in your search term and view all your search results at once in a slick 3D interface. It’s not quite something you can’t live without, but it is a fascinating and cool new way to search the web, find videos and shop online.

Online Alarm Clock

This is about as simple and elegant as web tools get. Hey, why waste twelve bucks on an alarm clock when you can make your $900 PC perform the same function?

Gmail Hacks, Tips & Tricks by Best of the Web

As with the Lifehacker post above, this isn’t a tool but rather an exceptionally useful collection of tips and tricks, in this case for Gmail users. Learn how to master Gmail’s keyboard shortcuts, streamline the process of adding attachments, quickly switch between multiple Google accounts, read your Google Reader RSS feeds from within Gmail, use Gmail as an external hard drive, back up your email account and more.

4Q – The Best Online Survey For A Website, Yours Free! by Occam’s Razor

Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik offers a free on-exit web survey tool featuring three simple questions to help site owners determine why certain pages get visited much more frequently than others, why certain pages have higher exit or bounce rates, and other critical information, using real data rather than idle speculation.

Pageflakes Acquisition Confirmed by TechCrunch

Erick Schonfeld reported a few months ago that custom web startup page provider Pageflakes had been acquired by LiveUniverse. Pageflakes is a cool tool for making the web your own, similar to Netvibes or TopNetPix, and has been covered in this blog before, most recently in January of this year when several new features were added to the tool. Under its new ownership, the tool so far keeps getting better.

DomainTools

A collection of a dozen cool webmaster tools including Mark Alert (provides an alert anytime a domain uses your trademark), detailed uptime reports on web hosting providers, DNS Tools (whois, traceroute, and ping), Domain Monitor (a free tool to monitor all your domains) and more.