IN THIS ISSUE:

 

Evernote is a Clever Note
How Does Your Website Compare?
Tool Review

Newsletter Archive

the B2B Marcom Mind
March 2009

I hope the times have been good to you and that we'll soon return to an environment of security, if not prosperity! Meanwhile for me, we're down in the southern Nevada desert both trying to get warm and find a change in scenery. Both are spirit-lifting in these harder times. My two dogs think they're in heaven lying in the sun on the patio. For my husband and me, work goes on as usual, just a different view out the window.

This month's issue is all about productivity tools. These are "a few of my favorite things." Evernote is a handy app that is fabulous for capturing and organizing your research notes, while Hubspot's Website Grader can show you the strengths and weaknesses of your website's SEO (or your client's website). Lastly, this app is on 24/7 for me and it's called Twhirl. It's a widget-type app about the size of your instant message window that streams your Twitter tweets as they come in.

As always, I enjoy hearing from you. I'm just an e-mail away, so drop a line and say hello. I'd love to know the productivity tools you can't live without.

See you next month,

Terri Rylander
LinkedIn B2B Marcom Group Manager
Freelance B2B Marcom Writer

"Make it simple. Make it memorable. Make it inviting to look at. Make it fun to read."
~Leo Burnett

Evernote is a Clever Note

I can't remember who first told me about Evernote, but now I won't be without it. If you've ever been researching online and found pages and parts of pages you wanted to save for later, this is your app. Terrific for research, or just saving and organizing electronic bits for later. I use it to save clips when I'm researching for a white paper or article.

With Evernote, you can save things you find that are either on your computer, on the Web, or on your mobile phone. Taken directly from Evernote's website, here's how they describe the ways you can use it:

• Create — Create new notes using desktop, web, and mobile versions of Evernote.
• Snap — Take a snapshot using your camera phone or webcam. We'll even recognize the text in the image.
• Clip — Clip entire web pages, screenshots, and just about anything else you can copy.
• Drag-n-drop — Drag and drop content into the desktop clients for Mac and Windows.
• Email — Email notes directly into your account using your personalized email address.
• Scan — Scan receipts, recipes, tags, brochures, and anything else into Evernote
• Record — Record audio wherever you are and listen to it whenever you want

As you can see, it stores about anything digital that you might want. Then, to organize it all, you can create notebooks to keep projects together, and tags to keep topics together. Check it out and let me know what you think.

How Does Your Website Compare?

Wondering how your website or your client's website stacks up? Check out HubSpot's Website Grader.

This clever website tracks several pertinent areas that influence your SEO (search engine optimization) success. These areas include:

• On Page SEO - looks at your metadata title, description, and keywords, your heading, the number of images, and a readability index.
• Off Page SEO - looks at your domain age and expiration date, Google pagerank, the number of pages indexed by Google and when that was last done, your traffic ranking by Alexa, the number of inbound links to your site, and whether you are listed in some popular directories.
• Blogosphere - checks to see if you have a blog and how that blog is ranked according to Technorati.
• Social Mediasphere - looks at your activity with del.icio.us and Digg.com.
• Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads - checks to see if you have an RSS feed and a conversion form.
• Competitive Intelligence - lastly, all of this information is summarized and compared to your competitors (if you provided them).

Giving it a try is as easy as entering your URL and e-mail address. In less than 30 seconds, you'll have your results. And, if you liked that, they also have a Facebook grader, Twitter grader, and Press Release grader to check out.

Tool Review

Ok, have you discovered Twitter yet? Maybe you have, but you don't want to hold open a browser window and keep hitting the refresh button. Maybe you haven't because you don't know how. Either way, a great widget-type application called Twhirl makes it so much easier.

Twhirl, when open, sits in its own window, a little smaller than an instant message window. Tweets automatically appear almost as they happen (you can customize the refresh cycle). With Twhirl, you can have multiple Twitter accounts and each will display in a separate window. Twhirl tracks your character counts, lets you upload pictures in your tweets, see your replies and direct messages, track and find your followers, and mark tweets as favorites. For me, the best part of Twhirl is that when minimized to the taskbar, your tweets will show up as 5-second balloons, allowing you to keep current on tweets without interrupting what you're doing on the screen. It's a quick download and light footprint (uses Adobe Air), so give it a try. Tweet me on @BIMarcom or @Terri_Rylander.