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.

Ready to make a leap beyond a simple web version of your old resumé?

LinkedIn is taking a cue from its younger, hipper, and definitely, more social cousin, Facebook. Now you can add applications to your LinkedIn profile (or homepage or both).

Until now, the professional social network functioned more as an interactive business card – a way to find people, opportunities, and better jobs. The new suite of applications are designed to enhance your ability to communicate and collaborate with your LinkedIn connections. In other words, these are sales tools in disguise.

Consider the insight you could gain (or on the flip side, how you could better market yourself) with one or more of the following:

• Reading List by Amazon – Share books you’ve read or find out what books you should be reading.
• WordPress – Sync your blog and your LinkedIn profile. Let one sell the other.
• Box.net Files & Huddle Workspaces – Compact project collaboration tools that make it easy to work with your colleagues.
• Company Buzz – Follow Twitter activity associated with your company. Don’t Twitter? Your naysayers (or praisers) might, and that’s reason enough. Remember What’s on Tweety’s mind?
• SlideShare & Google Presentation – Two great presentation options here. Upload existing PowerPoint docs and embed in your profile.
• My Travel – Update your profile with travel plans or see who’s coming into town.

This is just the beta rollout, so expect more LinkedIn applications in the future.

While the web rules, there’s still room to play on the desktop.

One example is Twhirl – a social software client that lets Twitter users take their conversations out of the browser and onto the desktop. Built on the Adobe Air platform, Twhirl functions like your IM chat client but gives you all the capabilities and features of the Twitter platform – you can tweet, receive other tweets, look up user profiles, or cross post to other social platforms like Pownce and Jaiku.

Twhirl is a free software, compatible with both Mac OSX and Windows systems. You will need to download Adobe Air, a development tool and environment that lets you utilize web technologies, like XHTML/CSS and Flash, in desktop software. It too is a free download.

While we’ve all witnessed a web-based publishing revolution, one thing hasn’t changed. It’s still a pain to insert links and content in blogs, web-based emails, and web pages. Even if there are trillions of them.

That is, it used to be. Now there’s Lizzer. It’s a service that makes it easy for anyone to insert links, images, and YouTube videos wherever you need them. Here’s how it works: Just enter a term in the Lizzer search bar, identify the content that you want to link or embed, then click on the link or insert button to make it happen. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything that’s faster at putting in those links to Wikipedia for definitions or even just adding a simple link to a company or your friend’s blog.

You can play with the Lizzer demo site at Lizzer.com, but the really powerful application is the bookmarklet. Once you’ve dragged the bookmarklet link to your bookmarks bar, you can then use Lizzer wherever you are on the web. In other words, say you’re typing up a blog post in WordPress. All you have to do is click on the Lizzer bookmarklet and there you have your little instant linking and content embedding tool. Even better, you can just add your flickr account name or YouTube account and then be able to easily insert or link your own images or videos. If you’ve been looking for a way to add your images to your emails without having to jump back and forth, here is the tool for you.

While Lizzer works best with WordPress blogs, Gmail, Google Docs, or even new blog tools like Tumblr (On the rocks) or Posterous (Start me up), it’s still handy to use in “manual mode” (when the text editor doesn’t allow instant linking). If you want to add links to Facebook or MySpace, it’s handy to just be able to search across Flickr, YouTube, Google, and even Twitter at the same time. All you have to do is find what you want and then grab the code – still faster than having to leave your work to find a link, image, or video elsewhere.

So, how does Lizzer make money? Alpha users will see on the bookmarklet based application that there’s a small “drawer” at the bottom that carries an ad. Currently it’s carrying a simple display ad for feed growth! (some crazy site about digital marketing ideas). However, there’s more to come. Lizzer is targeting advertisers who would like to use the bookmarklet as a delivery vehicle for advertiser links or content. In other words, advertisers will be able to put their own, proprietary content into the bottom drawer, in the same way an advertiser might use product placement investments in TV and movies.

So, for example, the next time you want to promote something new and have it “placed” in blogs, emails, and websites, you can do so. As you’ll see in the example, you might want to give potential publishers access to special photos, videos, widgets, or even MP3’s.

Even better, Lizzer is able to provide you with aggregated  insertion information, so you know if your ad placements and ad insertions are actually working. You can just contact Lizzer to learn more.

Finally, it wouldn’t be just to leave out what may be the most important thing about Lizzer. Warts and all, it’s our baby. The team at feed growth! and digital scientists developed Lizzer in part to help with the linking and content embedding required for the maintenance of this site. We’re not solving some problem that we dreamed up – we’re solving one that we experience every day. Please be sure to check out Lizzer and sign up for the invitation-only alpha (we’re not snobs, we just want to make sure that everyone has a great experience- ergo, the invitation requirement). That way you can give the bookmarklet a test run and see how you might be able to use it to make your blogs, emails, and web pages even more compelling (and sell more!).

Is your company hesitant to embrace social networking? Maybe you need a light version.

Such is the case with Livebar, the latest offering from white label, social networking solution, Liveworld. Livebar lets you run a “mini social network” on top of your existing website. Imagine the functionality of Facebook or Twitter – chat, forums, blog posts, short format messaging – but running in tandem with your website content – no redirects necessary.

Livebar hibernates on your site until a user activates it – appearing as a translucent box at the bottom of the screen. Check out the screenshots of Tulane University’s Livebar which will go live at the end of this month. Users can engage each other in conversation, “soapbox” (the equivalent of blog posts), or send out a “shout” (similar to Twitter tweets, maximum of 140 characters). Conversations are contextually-relevant to the page visitors are on – i.e. Livebar knows where you are and only serves up conversations about that page.

There is no pricey web design or development costs associated – Livebar runs on a single line of JavaScript and can be deployed within minutes. So if you aren’t ready to jump into the deep end, investing in a small-scale social networking app like Livebar is an easy way to create a community experience for your company or brand.

If you’re taking the time to create a blog, it pays to invest in making sure that people can actually find it . . . even if they’re only reachable on their phone.

If you want to reach the people that use Twitter (yes . . . the Twitterati), you should just tether your blog to Twitterfeed. It’s an easy way to automatically twitter your blog’s RSS feed, blasting your friends and followers with updates as they happen. You may recall Twitter from our article Stay close to mother hen. In a nutshell, it’s a real-time messaging service that lets you broadcast “tweets”, or short messages. Unlike Myspace of Facebook, Twitter is meant to be a quick communication (or micro-blogging) platform. Tweets alert the world (well, your Twitter network) of your feelings, thoughts, or intentions.

Here’s how you get started: Sign up for a Twitter account or give Twitterfeed your existing Twitter login and password. Then, login with your OpenID account. OpenID is a service that lets you sign in to multiply websites with a single username, and like Twitter, it’s completely free. Once you are in, give Twitterfeed your blog’s RSS feed address and specify how often it should post your content (once daily is enough for a smaller blog).

Now all you have to do is post a blog article and watch as Twitterfeed alerts all your contacts of the update and gives them a link back to the article.

Some lessons are so good, they deserve repeating. And when it comes to open source tools, we are happy to sound like a broken record.

As you may recall in Moshi Moshi, we sang the praises of an open source social network called Insoshi. There’s actually a more seasoned contender. LovdbyLess is a free and fully customizable social networking platform, built using Ruby on Rails (an open source language and framework that is de rigeur in web development circles). Lovd developers have offered their code to anyone with an itch to socialize and the server space to host it. It comes with many of the same features and functionalities of its loved-by-more counterparts, Myspace and Facebook, such as:

• blogs with comment capabilities
• photo galleries with captions
• profile bio and information
• the ability to follow a user or “friend” them
• site search for friends
• user-to-user messaging
• profile comments
• user dashboard (recent activity feed)
• emailed activity
• flickr integration
• youtube integration

If you’re looking to stand on the shoulders of giants, okay, just a lot of other developers, here’s a good place to start.

If there were to be a dig against Digg, it would be that it’s overly focused on all things technology. And, daresay, all things Apple.

Now there’s another player available that goes well beyond tech stories, a site called Mixx. You might have seen it as it’s featured as an option at the end of every story on CNN.com. Needless to say, that feature on such a popular news site is driving all sorts of new traffic. It works much like its competitor. As an example, we’ve added the feed growth! post from yesterday. Please go on and promote it so you can see Mixx in action.

If you have an interesting blog and are looking to reach a more targeted audience, here’s your change. Just sign up, then start adding your interesting articles … to the Mixx.

Keeping your finger on the pulse of an industry is no easy task – especially when it comes to search marketing. You can easily spend more time sifting through data than gaining true insight.

One good way is to plug into a community of insiders, like Sphinn. It’s similar to Digg but geared to search and interactive marketers. It provides a space to share and discover news articles and blogs, and lets the community sphinn it! (vote) on the most relevant topics, which appear on the homepage. You can filter discussions by category as well. Let’s say you only want to focus on Google. Sphinn breaks down all Google content into individual service offerings. So whether it’s Google Adwords or general Google SEO, so you can hone in on content that matters to you.

Sphinn is an easy way to learn about search marketing and to see what one segment of the community is talking about.

We’re big fans of open source tools to do just about anything. From operating systems like Linux or content management systems like Drupal, there are lots of options.

Now there’s one for social networks too, called Insoshi. While it’s not for the non-technical, it can let you create your own social network for a very low price – zero. All you need to do is download and configure the software, then customize it to work for your customers. If you want to see what it looks like, you can just sign up and play around to get a good idea. Here’s my profile with one silly blog post to boot.

The current version of Insoshi has the following features:

• Activity feed
• Personal profiles with photo upload and comment walls
• Internal messaging system with read/replied/trashed messages
• Contacts list
• Blogs with comments
• Discussion forum
• Search for profiles, forums, and blogs
• Admin panel with site preferences
• Option for email verification and activity notifications

If you’re looking to engage your customers in a social network, here’s a low cost way to get started.

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?

Even if you have moved a lot of your company’s interesting information online (or maybe all of it lives there), your customers might not always want to be online to access it.

Now you can reverse gears and publish from a website to a book using SharedBook. As you might imagine, this isn’t a capability that you can just flip a switch on and have it work. The best way to see how it works is to visit a site who puts their system to work, like Allrecipes.com. On this top rated recipe site, you can print your own cookbook, using just about any content available. Select your recipes, order your recipes, add your intro and images wherever you would like, then purchase a printed version (professionally printed hard or soft cover).

You can even then share the online version of your book and let other people add to or change it for their own use. Other companies who have figured out that people might want to create a customized book include Random House (customized children’s book), Seven Seas Cruises (cruise souvenir), and many others. Would an offline version of online content be something your customers might buy?