If you’re selling, you realize that you spend much of your time creating and reviewing presentations. So why are we all still wrestling with creating things on the desktop and then moving them to the web?

Now you can create and sell online, with 280Slides - a web-based presentation solution from 280North. It combines the look and functionality of Apple’s Keynote with the accessibility and price tag of Google Docs (free!). Now, anyone can create and share professional-grade presentations directly in their web browser- even PowerPoint amateurs and Keynote-phobes.

280Slides features a user-friendly toolbar, that lets you add text, shapes, images, and movies to your document. That’s right, movies. Users have the ability to add images and video directly from the web. And it’s ridiculously easy to do. Click on the pictures icon in the toolbar and a small, media browser pops up. From here, you can search the Google image directory and top Flickr hits or type the url in directly. Peruse movie results from YouTube and Vimeo, or upload your own media to the library.

Once your document is finished and saved, you can share it with the world. Email it to a friend or embed in a website. Go public and publish on SlideShare (another online presentation resource) or take it all offline and download your presentation in a PowerPoint format.

As with so many web-based applications, we wonder how we ever got things done before their existence. Trying to manage and juggle multiple projects without a tool like Liquid Planner or 37 Signal’s Basecamp at our disposal would be a nightmare. But, face it, we are all greedy and want more- more functionality, better interfaces, and the ability to prioritize.

So who does all this? Well, actually, WhoDoes does. WhoDoes2.0 is the latest version of of the collaborative project management system from GotThingsDone.com. Like its peers, WhoDoes lets you organize and manage the myriad of activities, dates, and people connected to a project. But WhoDoes has a few more tricks up its sleeve:

• My Workspace is the ultimate to-do list, providing a daily overview of your tasks and deliverables, with a distributional activities calendar that gives you long-term project visibility.

• The Fast Planning feature will help you keep your project on track. This simple drag-and-drop assignment system lets you assign due dates and priority levels to each individual task.

• No more runaway budgets! WhoDoes lets you put billable time restraints on the whole project or specific tasks, so you know exactly where your budget stands as team members enter time against it.

With reasonable monthly fees and a free 30-day trial, WhoDoes offers plan levels and packages for everyone. If you are looking for a project solution, try it on for size.

The saddest place on the web? The beautifully styled but totally empty forum. It’s the stark reminder that so often, if you build it, they won’t come.

Now you have an option - try kick-starting your site discussion forum with a paid posting service like ForumsFirst. Their stable of professional writers produce blog commentary and discussion threads on-demand and tailor-made to your website or blog. ForumsFirst offers a variety of reasonable content packages. For those who want to dip their toes in water, a trial blog package only costs $5. You get 12 comments, a minimum of 40 words each, from two registered users. Ready to dive in? The Jumbo package will set you back $225 for 750 comments, from 10-12 registered users, over the course of 15 weeks.

ForumsFirst also offers bookmarking services. For $20, they will add your website or blog to del.ic.ious and other top bookmarking sites. Search engines like Google and Yahoo rely on social bookmarking sites for their vast catalog of user-approved urls. In other words, the more links your site has on del.ic.ious, the better your site will rank in organic search.

If your visitors currently hear crickets when they visit your forum, here’s how to get the party started.

As we discussed in Talk amongst yourselves, there are a number of web-based tools to help you create a dialog with your customers or readers. However, some companies (and bloggers) would rather these conversations take place on home turf. And who can blame them?

Thanks to Yedda’s suite of blogger widgets, you can turn your website or blog into an open forum. Like Yahoo Answers, Yedda leverages the wisdom of crowds in a simple Q&A platform. The twist here is that Yedda understands the most important questions and answers come from your own audience.

The Profile Widget streams all your personal Yedda Q&A’s on your site, letting you share your knowledge directly with your readers, while the FAQ Widget posts pre-selected frequently asked questions and answers from the Yedda community. With the Ask A Question Widget, your readers can ask and answer questions on any topic. Yedda publishes the questions on Yedda.com and rewards you with a link back to your site.

So whether you are looking to add dynamic content to your site or looking for a free tool to help increase your site traffic, Yedda can be a good answer.

We all know the sad truth. No matter how much planning you go through, most project plans are at best inaccurate. The missing link? No one really knows how long it takes to do anything.

However, they usually can give a more accurate range. That’s the secret behind Liquid Planner. It’s a new, web-based project management tool. The big difference is that it lets you incorporate ranges and confidence levels, leading to a project plan that provides a best case and a worst case scenario. In fact, the system includes a feature that calculates the probability that individual tasks and the overall project will be completed by various dates. In this way, you can manage up and down at the same time and stop plugging in a fudge factor (that no doubt leads to a lot of anxiety).

In other words, as a project manager, you have a much better sense of when all of the pieces will come together.

For small teams (3 or fewer), it’s free. Larger groups will pay $35/month/user. While it’s not cheap, it may help save your skin.

Even though we all know about webinars, it seems that we’re forever in the position of asking people to react to creative or marketing output. And, one thing everyone agrees on - sending email attachments is definitely not the best way.

Now there’s a very fast and free option called Backboard. It’s the story that we all know - sign up and then either point to or upload an image to review. Then send a note to people so you can get their feedback - essentially comments that sit at the bottom of the page. Feel the need to see an example up close and personal, here’s a Backboard we created for the digital scientists site. Feel free to add your thoughts.

This is a great, fast, free way to get more feedback on your marketing creative. Before you serve up something to your superiors for review, why not use this tool to gather a bit more perspective?

Despite the success of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its forceful commentary about the importance of creating a conversation with your customer, not everyone got the message. We all still run into companies who cause us heartburn. It might help to open up the conversation beyond the heavily scripted call center.

One way to do that is with Get Satisfaction. This system was developed to help with problem solving, promote sharing, and build up customer relationships. This service is a lot like a customer support board, but it’s a lot more free form. Users visit and pose questions or concerns about a company’s products or services. Then either the company or just anybody can answer. If it sounds familiar, it’s sort of a customer-focused version of Yahoo! Answers (that we discussed in Talk Amongst Yourselves). If you’re looking for a way to engage with customers outside of traditional challenges, here’s an easy way to do so.

Aren’t you wondering what your customers are asking about?

Try inviting a small number of customers to review your marketing tactics using Stixy. It’s a free, web-based bulletin board that that makes sharing photos and notes a snap. Stixy houses a number of widgets in a single, browser-based desktop and is extremely easy to use. Click on “new stixyboard” to get started, then choose the widget (notes, photos, documents, or todo’s) you want to use in the project space. There are no layout restrictions, you can drag and drop just about anything. You can simply upload an image of one of your products, whether it’s a sandwich or a motorcycle. Then, just invite a few customers to review.

The classic problem in marketing research is figuring out what questions to ask. This vehicle lets you give your customers an unstructured way to think about or react to an existing or new product. Don’t worry, your customers won’t bite.

When it comes to choosing a brand identity (logo), you may find that your choices are limited by the imagination of the agency or graphic designer you have hired. On the web, however, it’s the land of plenty.

Try 99designs, a service that provides a quick and cost-effective way to sample many, many creative options and directions, before you commit to one. Say you need a new logo. You can use this site to launch a contest with your design requirements, set a prize amount, and sit back and watch the submissions pour in. Once you choose your winner and payment is complete, you own all the rights to the design. In other words, if you like the winning concept, but don’t want to commit to the design, it is yours to develop further.

99designs charges $39 to host the contest and sets reasonable guidelines for prize amounts (e.g. $100 for a logo, $200 for a webpage with html code). Contest holders are required to leave feedback on designs, a practice that helps participants gauge their skills and encourages them to submit more frequently.

Whether your looking for options or an inspiration, 99designs connects you to a community of designers and offers an affordable option for your a-la-carte creative needs.

The struggle to collaborate continues. You want to create a place to share, but you don’t want to sacrifice control. How do you open up the potential for sharing, without letting the inmates run the asylum?

Now you have another option with Google Sites. This offering is the newest element of functionality from the online office toolset called Google Apps (that we mentioned in Close the loop). This application makes it easy to create a shared website, so you can provide people with up-to-date access to information. You can invite team members to add file attachments, incorporate information from other Google applications (documents, calendar, videos, images) and also create new content. What’s really different here is that this tool puts basic site development into the hands of just about anyone. if you can manage MS Word or MS Powerpoint, then you can use this tool to create sites and then publish them either to your intranet or to the web.

You should be happy to hear that usage options range from free to $50 / year, depending on your level in Google Apps. If you’re looking to create a small site for your team that you want to let everyone use and edit - here’s an interesting option.

We wrote about the power of collaborating on the creation of a document using wikis in The dyslexic New Zealander. But these days, text and images can only get you so far.

Try the video enabled collaboration tool Kaltura to take wiki-like collaboration to the next level. While you can follow the details in this tour, all you need to do is really set up the specific page (where your shared video will reside), invite your fellow collaborators, and then upload photos, videos, and audio files. Once you have files that have been uploaded (by you or anyone in your group), you can then go to work creating and editing your final video. You can drag and drop videos and images along a time-line, in much the same way that professional video editing is done. Just as with a text-based wiki, your fellow collaborators can edit with you.

At your next big PR event, why not ask your team, interns, or just about anybody to collaborate on a summary that incorporates video and audio highlights from a group perspective? Sometimes fast and authentic is much more powerful than slick and professional.

Marketing is rarely a large department in any company - if it exists at all. Given that, how can you find a kindred spirit or maybe find someone who has been around the block a few times?

Check out Meetup as a way to build your personal marketing (or any other kind of) network. Meetup is simply a way to meet real people. Live. In person. You know the way it had to be before the web was around. It’s a simple and easy to use way to find people who live in your neighborhood who might be interested in the same things you are. All you need to do is sign up and join a Meetup group (as they call it). This group will actually have meetings where real, live, breathing people will get together and talk about stuff.

Also, many of these groups will sponsor featured speakers on an endless variety of topics. If you’re looking for a way to help your marketers develop by cross-pollinating with others, here’s the easiest and cheapest way to make that happen.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know that there are low cost service providers offshore. However, while the price may be right, can you really rely on someone you’ve never met, thousands of miles away?

Odesk may be able to put your mind at ease. The online service connects you with web developers and designers across the globe. Here’s how it works. Create a profile, and then create a project description. Then you can either bid out your project or peruse the database for workers based on their abilities, work history, or prior client feedback (similar to the reviews on eBay). The system mediates the entire process, letting you engage and interact with qualified applicants / partners before you pull the trigger.

You can outsource the nuts and bolts of an entire project or complement your existing workforce with specialized talent on a project basis. What are you waiting for? Try it this year.

So often a marketing mistake results from what you could describe as a version control problem. An old version of a marketing item (e.g., a press release) is mistaken for the real version … and trouble ensues. Cringe.

To avoid this kind of problem, consider using the open source (free) content management tool called Alfresco. This system looks like a shared hard drive (what many people use today to share documents). However, you can create rules that are attached to documents. Things like who needs to approve a document for it to move forward. From there, it also automatically manages and tracks versions, so there’s really no risk that people get their hands on the wrong version. By adding workflow to your documents, systems like these can help you create marketing process that keeps things moving smoothly - on-time, and on budget.

While everyone likes to talk strategy, the reality is that getting work done is what occupies most of our time. This may be the key to improving your company’s efficiency.

When you’re going to head to head with entrenched competitors, it can seem impossible to unseat the top dog.

One way to change the game is to get all of the little guys together … using something that’s provided for free.

Consider how Google is working to change the game in mobile operating systems by introducing Android. Android is an open source mobile platform that can run a host of basic and third-party applications. Android is not Google’s version of the iPhone; it’s the software, itself, that runs on your mobile device. Qualcomm, Intel, Motorola, Sprint and many other big names in mobile technology have partnered with Google to develop Android applications.

In almost any industry, there are opportunities to help bring together smaller players to create a community … and also change the nature of competition. This same approach has created fierce competition for Microsoft (Firefox browsers, Linux Operating System).

When you’re thinking about how to change the rules of the game, consider how an open source mindset could shake things up … in a good way.

One of the first steps in modern web design involves getting customers or users to react to a wireframe diagram. Don’t make the mistake of jumping right into fancy graphics and animation when what you really need to align on is the basic layout and flow.

Now you can create and even collaborate on wireframe diagrams for your web site using the diagramming tool called Gliffy. Sign up for a free account, choose the wireframe option, and then you have access to drag and drop tools to develop your own wireframe diagram. Once you’ve created a diagram, adding a dropdown here or a text box there, you can then invite others to view it, or even invite others to come work on the diagram with you.

Now you can use free online tools to design the optimal user experience … maybe even sharing the task with some of your best customers.

Making things happen can be tough enough when you’re with your team and can have ad hoc conversations to keep everything moving forward. Then, you have to go on the road and everything falls apart.

Now you have a way to collaborate even when you’re on the road, thanks to Google Docs going mobile. As even the Apple website explains, now you can view your [Google] documents from anywhere on your iPhone. First, you’ll need to get your team to use Google Docs as the vehicle for sharing information. Or, see where we mentioned in Close the loop how you can use it for an inexpensive CRM system. Then, all you need to do is visit your docs using your iPhone and you’ll be able to see what’s been posted. From there, you can then track any changes over time.

These are the early days when it comes to moving office documents (and their creation and tracking) online. However, this trend is accelerating and we’ll no doubt wonder some day what we used to do when everything was trapped on our hard drive.

There are so few secrets on the web. Your competitor’s positioning, key benefits, product descriptions, and sometimes even their secret recipe may be readily available . . . right on their website. However, so few companies spend any time looking at what their competitors display in public.

Try using Diigo to bring together your team and track what’s important and what changes on your competitors’ sites. As they put it, Diigo is about social annotation - it lets you and your team highlight, annotate, share & interact on any webpage. Simply set up a profile, invite your colleagues to join, and then you can simply visit your competitors’ sites (or any site) and make highlights or add sticky notes wherever you like. It’s remarkably easy to set up, as you can see from this little example from one of our favorite sites.

When was the last time you visited your main competitor’s web site?