Paid Search isn’t rocket science, but it can become complex and frankly, unruly, if you advertise on multiple search engines.   Coordinating campaigns and ad spend across Google, Yahoo, and MSN, as well as analyzing the numerous spreadsheets each generate, is a full-time job.

If you don’t have the time, budget, or patience to run a professional paid search campaign, check out Clickable.  Clickable is a web-based search service that consolidates all your ad networks into one easy-to-use interface.  Simply sign up for the service and plug in your account info for Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN adCenter (you don’t need to have all three, but Clickable is designed to handle the three-headed monster).

Your Clickable Dashboard is your command center.  It gives you visibility over all your investments, with key metrics and customizable graphs.  Color-coded alert boxes tell you when an account is in trouble and offer useful recommendations based on your business goals.   You can launch a wizard that follows through with these recommendations or edit them to your liking.  You can also act on your campaigns through the management panel.  This is the real meat of the platform, letting you create new campaigns or alter existing ones for all your networks in a single location.   Of course, no search service would be complete without an analysis and reporting center, and Clickable is no exception.   You can track performance on all campaigns and analyze trends over time, with the ability to add customization and control over the variables.

Clickable charges you based on your ad spend (your paid search budget).  If it’s under $2,500, you pay $129 a month . Otherwise, if your ad spend is over $2,500, Clickable will charge 5% of your monthly ad spend.  With a free 15-day trial, you can always test-drive the service before committing.

Advertisers have been waiting in the wings for popular micro-blogging platform Twitter to figure out a monetization strategy.

Enter adCause, the latest contender.   It connects businesses looking to tap into the growing Twitter network with publishers (or as the name suggests, with philanthropic publishers) who are willing to offer up ad space in their tweet stream for a small fee.

Here’s how it works.  Twitter users sign up for the adCause publishing network and give advertisers their best sales pitch – a description about them and their followers, the number of followers they have, ad frequency (e.g. your ad will appear once for every ten tweets I send out), ad duration, and the cost of this campaign.   As an advertiser, you can search through the network and find Twitterers that best suit your needs or target a specific user by their Twitter ID (you’d be surprised how many have name-brand recognition).  This is also a handy feature if you want to run a background check on a Twitter user before investing.

And if you’re the type that likes to haggle, you’ll dig adCause’s built-in best offer feature (similar to Ebay).  Once an agreement is reached, simply enter your ad text (like Adwords, tweets need to be short and sweet) and pay with PayPal.  Publishers have editorial control, so they do retain the right to 86 your ad if it’s inappropriate for their followers.

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.

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.

If you’ve ever been roped into coordinating an event or a business meeting, then you know that even the smallest change can lead to a logistical nightmare. Locations change, times get pushed back, and unless you plan on calling everyone on your list (or have a small minion at your disposal), you need a way to kill 1000 birds with one stone.

Let Tatango do the gruntwork for you. Tatango is a text and voicemail service that lets you send mass messages to members of a designated group (i.e. it’s the text message / voicemail equivalent of an email blast). Tatango is an easy service to use and free for both the message sender and recipients. Check out this short demo:

To send a Tatango mass message, you will need to register with the service and provide your cell phone number and an email address (for account purposes). Once your account is confirmed, you can start creating groups, adding members by hand or sending them invites through the Tatango platform. There’s no limit on the number of groups or the number of people within the group, so you can create highly targeted lists of individuals. When you’re ready to create a message, prompt Tatango to “record message” and the service will actually call you and guide you through the process. Group members receive a text message alert that tells them you have sent them a voice message. It’s up to them when they listen, so unlike the annoying pre-recorded phone spammer, recipients simply text “CALL” back to the service and voila!, your message awaits.

Recipients can reply to your message and responses are sent directly to your phone or to your Tatango account.