Twitter (see Stay close to Mother Hen) is a micro-blogging site that’s easy to use from just about anywhere - by phone or computer. It has been embraced by a segment of the tech savvy population. What you may not know is that it’s also a potential source of information about your brand, depending on your target.

TweetBeep is a simple tool that will let you monitor the conversation among the digerati. Are they talking about you or your competitor? Is there something important happening in your marketplace that you need to know about? All you need to do is sign up, choose your targeted key words, and then you’ll be notified if they’re among the “tweets” of the day.

It’s a simple, free investment that could keep you ahead of the crowd.

There’s really no reason that you can’t stay up to date with who’s talking about your brand. You can be on your way in about 15 seconds.

Just create a series of brand related alerts using Google Alerts. Enter your terms (try your most important brands), select what you would like to search, and then choose the frequency of reporting. If you’re looking to stay on top of what bloggers are saying, just choose blogs or the comprehensive alert. For example, I have created an alert for this blog. I receive a notification about fifteen minutes after a new post has been released.

With an alert set for your brand (or just about anything), you can be certain that you’re getting the latest word from the blogosphere. It’s a great way to avoid surprises (and no doubt look smarter than everyone who’s not quite so alert).

Thanks to Ethnio, you can pose the question(s) to people who are already coming to your site. With this free service, all you need to do is add a little snippet of code to your site. Then, when a visitor comes along, it will create a popup screener (yes, one of those things that slides along and tries to get you to participate in a survey or marketing research). Wait - these screeners are not entirely loathsome and it turns out that many people actually participate. Depending on the incentive, wouldn’t you know?

This service lets you create screening questions and then serve them up to separate the desired from the undesirable participant. Then it’s up to you to figure out what you’re going to do, now that this free service has given you so many potential respondents. Don’t you think you have something that you would like to ask your site visitors … beyond hot or not?

While 2001’s Hal is still the best lip reader, Facebook’s Lexicon gives you a new vehicle for tracking trends. It works in very much the same way as Google’s trend reading tool, but instead of looking at searches, it counts the number of occurrences of every term across profiles, groups and event Walls every day. All you have to do is put in two terms separated by comma and you’ll get an instant read on who’s winning the buzz war.

Wondering how your brand is resonating with Facebook users? Here’s a good way to find out (oh, and it’s free, of course).

Every website generates a mountain of data. Every visit, every click can be recorded, then sifted, analyzed, and parsed. Oh, you can find out what your visitors are doing.

Just not why they’re doing it. To do that, you have to ask them. That’s the need served by 4Q. It’s a free, 4 question survey tool. When visitors arrive at your site, they are presented with an invitation to participate in a survey after their session. If they accept, a second, minimized window, which contains the survey itself, is launched and waits in the background for the visitor to complete the site visit (see the overview video).

Sign up, create your survey, generate the survey code, place it on your site, and then you’re ready to go. Go on. Don’t you want to know more about why your site visitors do what they do?

When you need to get a lot of people to provide input (sales forecasts, marketing plans, customer feedback), your options are pretty limited. You have to send files around or invite people to add something to an online, shared spreadsheet, like Google Docs (as we introduced in Close the loop).

Things just got easier. Google docs (a free online spreadsheet), has just added the ability to create forms. These forms let you turn their online spreadsheets into an easy way to reach out to others for the information you need. Here’s how it works. First, open up a regular Google doc spreadsheet. Choose to share the document and then indicate that you want to create a form. Fill out the different sections using tools similar to those you’ll find when creating an online survey. Then, you can automatically send an email to anyone from whom you would like to gather information. Your recipient will receive a simple request and be directed to a web page.

As people fill out the form and provide data, you can track the data as it comes in … on your spreadsheet. Where else? Why are you still sending around spreadsheets for people to complete?

No one could have predicted that even when you arrive to the most senior positions in a company, that all of that fancy office space wouldn’t matter. You’re still going to be locked into a 21 inch screen.

Make this the year that you improve your own ability to manage across multiple projects by adding another computer monitor to your Mac or PC. Now that nearly everything can and does exist in digital form, it just doesn’t make sense to limit yourself to a small monitor. In a 2004 study, one hundred eight university and non university personnel participated in a comparison of single monitor, multi-monitor configurations. Respondents edited slide shows, spreadsheets and text documents in a simulation of office work, using each of the display arrays.Multi-screens scored significantly higher on every measure. Ask an investment banker who might use a Bloomberg terminal. Yep - multiple monitors really do make more possible.

Why don’t you twist some arms in your IT department or just pick up a nice monitor from CostCo this weekend? If you’re running marketing and spread too thin, maybe the place to invest in improvement is right on your desktop.

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.

Is your company’s talent management system a set of filing cabinets? Time to do better.

Consider SuccessFactors - a way to use performance metrics to drive your marketing and sales department . . . and your business. There just never seems to be enough time to give people clear goals, create development plans, and then tie everything to company goals. This system will help you manage the people side of the business. Companies like MasterCard, Yahoo!, and too many more to mention use this on demand system to manage all that messy HR stuff. Streamline employee profiles, goal management, performance reviews, and compensation in this single web-based solution.

Bottom-line, you need easy access to employee information and metrics if you want to develop and motivate a high-performance marketing and sales team. This is where the web really shines. Why are you still keeping everyone’s development plan in a paper file?

GoSee4me can be “the eyes of the king” by letting you bid out photography assignments anywhere in the country. Sign up for an account, indicate what you’re looking for (maybe pictures of your competitor’s new product?), start the auction, then choose from the bids of photographers. You don’t have to fly around the country to see what your competitors are doing.

Just get someone who lives there to walk across the street and snap a photo.

It seems as if everything in life is turning into one structured hierarchy after another. Everything has to fit into an iPod-like organization scheme. Or does it?

When you need to think creatively, try using bubbl.us to venture into unstructured thinking. It’s so easy to use that it doesn’t really need much explanation. Create a bubble, add a bubble, then move things around with reckless abandon. Great ideas don’t usually spring forth from a lot of structure. Mind maps, the output of this tool, are well known tools for visualizing and classifying ideas.

Once you’ve created your maps, you can share them, put them on a website, email them, or just save them as an image. Oh, and don’t forget. It’s free.

Need to think through how you’re going to tackle that tough competitor? Or maybe develop that next new product. Try creating a mind map.

We’re all familiar with the challenge of guessing how many jelly beans there are in the jar. In the Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (Doubleday: 2004), you learn that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few. While one guess at the number of beans is no doubt wrong, the average of many guesses is invariably very close to correct. So, how can you harness the wisdom of crowds to questions that are important to growing your business - everything from the price of oil to the direction of the housing market?

Try Inkling Markets, a site whose goal is to combine the opinions of a diverse group of people to predict the probability of an event occurring or the value of something. Say you would like to predict book sales (as O’Reilly currently does with this system). You create a market and ask the specific question. Then, other participants express what they think will happen by buying and selling shares in stocks representing possible answers. The stock price either represents the probability of an event occurring or an actual value. Participants whose predictions are more accurate accumulate more wealth and gain in influence.

The bottom line here is that this is a great way to open a window on the future when it comes to thinking about what affects your business. Given that this is marketing planning season, what would you like to predict?

When you have an idea for a new product, it’s easy to fall in love with your own thinking. How do you make sure you get third-party, left-brain perspective?

Spigit for startups is a community of people who are interested in providing feedback regarding startups. If you’re considering launching a web-based business or product (though some non digital products are featured as well, such as these wind turbines), here’s a good way to get some feedback. Members of the community are provided a place for describing their new product or company. Then, other community members provide feedback and vote on the viability of the effort (spigs are good, scraps are bad).

While there’s a gaming aspect to the site (a mock stock market), what tends to be the most helpful are the individual comments, often highlighting competitive products or feature deficits. If you’re looking for some fast and inexpensive feedback, consider starting with Spigit.

It’s just not possible to research everything before you put it in front of your customers. When it comes to getting a quick reaction to something, there’s usually not many options between formal data gathering and “mother-in-law” research (just asking colleagues, family, or friends).

Consider Vizu as a new option for getting a quick read on just about any topic. It’s a research service that can syndicate a simple poll to over a 1000 different websites. In addition, the system automatically runs a series of demographic questions to gain insight into the audience of each participating site. So, when they present the results of your poll, they can also provide some demographic info as well. As you’ll see in these poll samples, you can also integrate graphics into your poll. This might be handy when it comes to evaluating any visual item (see these Vizu case studies).

Prices start at $99 for a standard poll that delivers 100 responses within 6 to 24 hours. While it’s not the kind of tool that should drive strategic decisions, it can give you some new data to draw upon when you’re really just looking to fine tune a tactic.

Have you ever traveled across the country to sit in the dark and eat M&M’s in cities that you would normally just fly over? That’s the experience marketers know as “doing focus groups.” While focus groups have a specific use (they should be limited to gathering breadth of perspective, not making decisions), did you know that there are new data gathering options that you can access right from your office?

With Invoke Solutions online groups, you (or your moderator) can engage hundreds of participants from anywhere in a conversation and an interactive survey (perhaps for a brand exploratory / ideation). Given that you’re in an online environment, you can also easily serve up different media stimuli and watch in real time as the participants answer your prepared questions. There are many other features of the Invoke system as detailed in this 5-minute demo

While this type of system costs less (but not bargain basement) compared to booking focus group facilities around the country, the real benefit is the ability to gather focus-group like perspectives in a lot less time. How long is your to-do list and how much do you like M&M’s?