BizTech101.com -- "the best social media and web tools for business"

Tool:
Google Trends: Trend-discovery and Trend-Tracking Tool

URL:
google.com/trends

Key benefit:
Being able to discover new trends and opportunities and stay ahead of the game.

Tip:
Discover how popular certain products, product categories, people or events are. You can also use the tool to compare interest for up to five products or concepts. The underlying assumption here is that the trends can [...]

Tool:
Google Forms: Web-based surveys and other data collection

URL:
docs.google.com

Key benefit:
Enables you to collect data from customers or others using Web forms… works great for online surveys. The best part is it’s easy to use, no web development or database skills required!

Tip:
Try using Google Forms for quick surveys where you want to poll your customers, employees [...]

Tool:
Google Wave

URL:
wave.google.com

Key benefit:
Great new tool from Google. I will try to describe it in two words only: HOSTED CONVERSATION. According to Google, Google Wave is “an online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and [...]

Tool:
Keyword Popularity Estimator by Google

URL:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal?defaultView=2

Key benefit:
Just like Yahoo! tool described earlier on this blog, this keyword tool helps you identify the most popular keywords. This is extremely useful when designing your website, naming your website pages, doing SEO (search engine optimization) or when buying keyword ads. Even more importantly, the tool can help you estimate the online demand for your [...]

Tool:
Twitter

URL:
http://www.twitter.com

Key benefit:
“Microblogging” tool that helps you stay connected with your clients and other organizations or individuals that you want to “follow”

Tip:
Use Twitter to brand yourself / your business and position yourself as the leader in your field.  Present only very useful content: great news, insights, tips, URLs or other relevant information. Then start following others, [...]

Tool:
iGoogle

URL:
http://www.igoogle.com

Key benefit:
Great tool to help you stay on top of all new trends and industry news

Tip:
Start your day with iGoogle:  review all important industry news before you leave home. Receive updates from carefully selected  websites and blogs.

Price:
Free

Cyri:
What does Cyri think? Check back shortly. Score: TBD

Ivan:
Customize your iGoogle page to receive RSS feeds from [...]

Tool:
Google Documents

URL:
http://docs.google.com

Key benefit:
Great tool to help you upload, edit and share your documents online

Tip:
Use this tool to upload your important documents and take them along “with you” wherever you go.  No need for memory stick any longer. You can access your documents anytime, anywhere… (no wonder this is called “cloud computing” : the documents go [...]

Tool:
Google Site Optimizer

URL:
http://google.com/websiteoptimizer/

Key benefit:
Try A/B Split testing or multivariate testing to optimize your website

Tip:
Start out with the easier A/B Experiment and once you feel comfortable with that, move on to the Multivariate Experiment.  If you don’t feel comfortable copying and pasting the HTML code into your test and control pages, ask an IT support person [...]

Tool:
AWStats log file analysis

URL:
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

Key benefit:
Get accurate results for your website analytics

Tip:
Page tag web analytics programs (e.g. Google Analytics) are handy and provide a rich graphical interface but they don’t always capture the complete picture as accurately as a true log file analyzer. Try using both… AWStats and Google Analytics then compare the difference.  For [...]

Tool:
Usereffect.com’s Split Test Calculator

URL:
http://usereffect.com/split-test-calculator

Key benefit:
Quickly see whether your results from a split testing are significant and warrant action.

Tip:
You should always be experimenting when conducting any kind of online or email marketing campaign, changes to website design, etc.  Use this tool to see if the results you are getting from your experiments (i.e. changing a variable [...]