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.

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.