Remember the innocent elephant jokes of our youth? You know the ones – What do elephants do for laughs? (Tell bad people jokes) or What do you call an elephant with a machine gun? (Sir).

A natural lead-in into this week’s caption contest, where we encourage child-like humor and abandon, but usually reward the opposite. Our new cartoon – Trunk Space – can be found at the top of this entry (email subscribers can click on “Read Full Post”). The winning caption receives a $30 iTunes gift certificate and their name in big beautiful orange font, like this week’s winner, JR Gunderson, whose caption appears below:

While JR may need an overview of the subjunctive, his caption was the most captivating.

This may be your last chance to win a weekly caption contest in 2008, so submit your entries now (yes, you can submit more than one).

P.S. Don’t forget to submit an entry to Check My Bait. Now that the holiday season is upon us, we expect to be assaulted with some of the best worst advertising out there. While there’s no iTunes prize for Check My Bait, we believe mocking bad ads is a gift in and of itself.

… Here comes Weekly Claus.  Nothing gets us in the holiday spirit quite like a weekly.

We will be unveiling a new weekly tomorrow, as well as announcing the winner of our last caption contest, Love is in the air.  Deadline for all caption entries is 12pm EST.

The winning caption receives a $30 iTunes gift certificate – the gift that truly keeps giving, and if you have relatives like us, the only gift worth receiving.

But you can’t win if you don’t try.  Submit your caption for Love in the Air now!

These days, it might seem like a luxury to get everyone in your company in the same room.

With a service called Yammer, getting all your departments, offices, telecommuters, and contractors on the same page just got a lot easier.

Yammer is part social network, part microblogging service, part Twitter – repackaged and re-imagined for the business class. At its core, Yammer is designed to help employees share status updates; naturally, the “what are you working on?” feature, the equivalent of a Facebook status or Twitter tweet, is a key ingredient. From your Yammer homepage, you can see what all the employees in your network are working on and follow conversations and updates on individual topics in your personal feed. You can ask co-workers questions, share links and files, or track the progress of a project. Yammer archives all your company activity and topic tagging makes conversations easily searchable – a handy tool if a new employee needs to get up to speed on an active project.

Creating a Yammer account is free and easy; the service identifies workers by their email address and routes them to a private corporate network (i.e. only @feedgrowth.com addresses can join my Yammer network). Administrative tools like member and content management, as well as custom appearances (colors and logos) are available for $1/month per admin member, with bulk pricing available for larger networks.

Unless you possess an uncanny ability to read a crowd, you could probably use a little real-time feedback while making a presentation or sales pitch.

Poll Everywhere is an application that lets users participate in a poll with their mobile phone (via text message) or a web browser. You can view responses in real-time through the Poll Everywhere site or embed them in your personal website and/or PowerPoint presentation. Just to make that last point crystal clear – you can show the results of an open poll in a live setting, like a conference or company meeting, and Poll Everywhere will update your presentation as the the results come in.

You can get unlimited free polls with 30 or fewer responses or pay a monthly subscription based on the maximum number of responses you are willing to accept. Participants are, of course, responsible for text-related charges; however, web-enabled smart phone users can vote through their web browser. Polls can be multiple choice questions, with predetermined answers, free-form text, or a pledge poll.

The pledge poll is great for fund raising efforts – Poll Everywhere will actually call pledgers back on your behalf, process their payment, then turn around and cut you a check.

You can customize the look of your poll, including colors and fonts, to help align your poll with your brand or company image. And, Poll Everywhere provides you with downloadable reporting features and the ability to track answers by user across multiple polls.

Want to set your self apart at your next conference or sales presentation? Here’s how.

The beauty of online advertising is your product is always a click away. However, if you rely on more traditional ad mediums, like print, television, or billboards, you are at the mercy of short attention spans. A customer may run across your ad while flipping through a magazine, interest piqued, but ultimately, just move on.

That’s where SnapTell might help. Users take a picture of a product or ad with their camera phone, send the image to SnapTell, and within seconds, receive information on the product – and if you’re a participating advertiser – coupons, branded media (like wallpapers or ringtones), promotional contest and prizes, and more. Unlike most mobile marketing, SnapTell is 100% user opt-in, which means users only receive your materials if they want them and more importantly, when they are motivated to use them.

SnapTell utilizes scalable image recognition technology to identify your product from the image. And despite the pitfalls of most camera phones – poor quality, low resolution, weird angles or lighting – the system is quite reliable. SnapTell maintains a large database of product and brand images, which it is able to search upon query. It can even extract text from the user’s image – a useful feature if your product is not registered in the SnapTell database already.

Advertisers can set up a SnapTell campaign though the online interface. Simply “drag and drop” product images into the database, set up the corresponding content delivery, and let Snaptell do the rest. You can even get campaign stats to see how effective your mobile marketing efforts are.

We see a natural connection between marketing and design. After all, marketers are frequently asked to make design-based decisions, from the look and feel of an ad campaign to a product’s packaging.

So where do you turn for inspiration, especially if your left brain is in control of the operation?

Try the COLOURlovers site. COLOURlovers is a color and design community, where palettes, patterns, and color recommendations are offered up daily. COLOURlovers is similar to Adobe’s kuler (which we discussed in Purple Reign) but with social components. Users can post and rank colors and palettes, answer design dilemmas (e.g. what colors compliment a website of chocolate brown and green?), start a discussion, join a user group, or blog about what’s hot and what’s not in the color scene.

COLOURlovers boasts approximately 150,000 members (referred to as Lovers), 1,500,000 million colors & 615,000 palettes. There’s no shortage of eye candy on this site, and the networking tools let you reach out to the creative community for help on any project imaginable.

COLOURlovers is a free, but you will need to create an account if you want to use all of the site’s features.

Road warriors, listen up. When it comes to making sales calls, you only get one shot to make a good impression. This means being punctual and having your schtick together – flight times, rental car and hotel confirmations, directions, and more. We all know what it’s like when things go awry.

Let a service like TripIt help you with the details. TripIt streamlines all your travel plans into a single web-based itinerary. Simply forward your electronic travel confirmations to plans@tripit.com – TripIt supports confirmations from over 250 major travel services, including airlines (domestic & international), hotel chains, train lines, travel agencies (AMEX, BCD, & Carlson Wagonlit), and travel sites like Expedia, Orbitz, and Travelocity. TripIt builds your itinerary as you go and even throws in helpful tidbits like local weather, driving directions, and travel guides. You can also send Tripit your business appointments, and for those who like to wine and dine their clients, restaurant reservations and event tickets.

Check out this sample TripIt itinerary:

What’s great about this service is you can access your travel plans from any computer or mobile device. The TripIt mobile interface is compatible with Apple iPhone, Palm Treo, Blackberry, and any cell phone with a web browser. You can even email basic commands like “get hotel” and the “TripIt To Me” service will send you details back.

By now, you are aware that there are several tools to help you gather and easily digest content across your favorite sites and blogs. But if the news source is secondary to the topic you are interested in, a self-populated RSS reader may not be the best solution.

Try Addict-o-matic instead. Addict-o-matic aggregates feeds from the biggest sites but only displays content relevant to the terms you supply. For example, if you only want to see news articles and blog posts pertaining to the Lizzer bookmarklet tool (heralded as a “godsend” by Mashable), Addict-o-matic does all the leg work for you. Results come back within seconds and are neatly displayed in mini RSS feed boxes.

Addict-o-matic pulls content from Google, Yahoo, Technorati, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, Tweetscan, Delicious, and many more. However, if that’s too much of a good thing, Addict-o-matic lets you customize your results page.  In our example, we’re not concerned with Lizzer results on YouTube. Simply click on the x in right hand corner of the YouTube box, and that feed is deleted from the page. Or, drag and drop boxes to change their ordering on the page.  What’s really cool is with every modification you make, your url changes, so if you bookmark your Addict-o-matic page, those changes will remain the same.

Addict-o-matic is a great little tool for keeping tabs on people, products, brands, and just about anything else you can think of. You need only check back on your bookmarked page to see real-time results.

JR Gunderson and MailChimp Co-Founder Ben Chestnut adhering to the gray vest dress code…

We wanted to thank all those that came out for our MeetUp last night and pass on some key takeaways to those that were not able to attend.   Special thanks to Ben Chestnut from MailChimp for leading the discussion and providing us with some great RSS insights and resources!

Ben showcased a great new A/B testing feature in their RSS to email tool.  What can often be a very manual and painstaking process of splicing mailing lists and setting up new campaigns to perform an A/B test can now be automated with their new A/B testing feature.  Simply set what you want to test (subject lines, the day the email is sent, the time of day the email is sent, the “From” name, etc.) and let MailChimp perform the test and apply the results to the rest of your campaigns.  Check out this video below that walks you through the A/B testing process.

Ever wonder how your email campaign stats match up with the industry average? Through analyzing over 200 million emails, MailChimp allows you to view industry averages for stats such as open rate, click rate, and bounces, and makes it possible to tie these averages into your custom analytics report.  Make sure to check out the MailChimp Resource Center to explore all of their tips and tools.

We look forward to holding more MeetUps and are certainly open to any suggestions for topics that our readers may have.

Thanks to a handful of apps, like Google Alerts (see our note entitled Danger, Will Robinson), you can keep tabs on any person, product, or conversation on the web. Still, you have to take the good with the bad with these services – the bad being unfiltered results that may have no bearing on the subject you are monitoring.

You might want to consider a service called Yotify. Like Google Alerts, Yotify tracks keywords across multiply sites; unlike Google Alerts, Yotify lets you refine your search criteria by location, price, or service. Yotify calls these searches “scouts”. For example, you can track apartments or job listings on Craigslist, put out an APB on a product you want to snag in a set price range, or just monitor your name or brand across a specific site (FoxNews.com, Reuters, USAToday, and more).

Yotify scouts are free and simple to set-up. Choose your topic – Shopping, Travel, Classifieds, News & Blogs, etc, – choose your media outlet (you can always default on all sites), enter your keywords, then specify how long you want the scout to last and how often you want to be notified of results. Yotify is a free service, though you do have to create an account to gain access to all site functionality.

There is only so much marketing can do to “sell” a product or service. Often, it comes down to the speed and acuity of your sales force to close the deal.

That’s where a service like EchoSign comes in handy. EchoSign is a web-based, signature workflow solution, which is really a fancy way of saying you can execute contracts digitally (and fast). EchoSign is part e-fax, part document repository, letting you send, sign, track, and store sales documents in a single system.

To get started, upload an electronic copy of your document to EchoSign. EchoSign supports Microsoft .doc & .xls, as well as text and PDF files. Then, enter the email address of the recipient(s) and click send. When your document arrives, they can e-sign instantly or print, sign, and fax back. EchoSign supplies a free fax number and special coversheet with your document. This coversheet contains a barcode, which EcoSign uses to route and store the document when it comes back to their system. When all parties have signed, EchoSign automatically sends a PDF copy to you, the signee, and your designated contact list (e.g. you may want to send a copy to the legal department or your assistant). The beauty of the system is you can always see the status of any document or quickly pull up a contract that has been executed and archived.

EchoSign offers free accounts for the occasional user and $29.95/month for unlimited sending and signing. However, the true value here is removing the obstacles that stand between you and that signature. The longer a contract lingers, the less chance you have of making the sale.

While it might be nice to be the first to get your name as a username (johnsmith@gmail.com), don’t forget that you should be worried about doing the same for your brand. Question is, how can you know where your brand is still available (and importantly, where it has already been snagged as a username by someone else).

Consider using UserNameCheck.com. The name says it all- this service checks the availability of your username on the most popular and socially relevant web sites. Currently at 68 sites (and counting), UserNameCheck.com includes heavy hitters like:

• Digg
• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• Blogger
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
• Twitter
• Disqus
• Flickr
• YouTube

UserNameCheck works by pinging the individual sites and requesting the username you enter in the search field. If “no user name” exists, the site reports back as so. Vice versa if your name is already taken. Results are displayed within seconds, providing a quick and easy solution for securing your online identity.

The idea here is to protect your brand, because you’ve worked hard to establish it. And, it doesn’t get any easier than this.