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.

There is only so much marketing can do to “sell” a product or service. Often, it comes down to the speed and acuity of your sales force to close the deal.

That’s where a service like EchoSign comes in handy. EchoSign is a web-based, signature workflow solution, which is really a fancy way of saying you can execute contracts digitally (and fast). EchoSign is part e-fax, part document repository, letting you send, sign, track, and store sales documents in a single system.

To get started, upload an electronic copy of your document to EchoSign. EchoSign supports Microsoft .doc & .xls, as well as text and PDF files. Then, enter the email address of the recipient(s) and click send. When your document arrives, they can e-sign instantly or print, sign, and fax back. EchoSign supplies a free fax number and special coversheet with your document. This coversheet contains a barcode, which EcoSign uses to route and store the document when it comes back to their system. When all parties have signed, EchoSign automatically sends a PDF copy to you, the signee, and your designated contact list (e.g. you may want to send a copy to the legal department or your assistant). The beauty of the system is you can always see the status of any document or quickly pull up a contract that has been executed and archived.

EchoSign offers free accounts for the occasional user and $29.95/month for unlimited sending and signing. However, the true value here is removing the obstacles that stand between you and that signature. The longer a contract lingers, the less chance you have of making the sale.

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.

Thursday, November 13th at 6:00 PM

For November’s MeetUp, we’re going to focus on RSS to Email tools. We’ll have someone here from MailChimp to lead the discussion and present some of their tools for customizing RSS emails. We’ll focus on the basics and then dig into finer points regarding styling and ad placement. In the interim, you can learn a bit about the topic in our feed growth! posts entitled Monkey Business and Really Hot Mail. This should be a great way to learn about one of the hottest things in email marketing and also get to know some of your fellow digital marketers. The MeetUp will be held at our office and please make sure to RSVP through the Atlanta Digital Marketing MeetUp Group.

We’ll be sure to post some follow up information from the meeting for those readers outside the Atlanta area.

RSS feeds are excellent tools for content distribution, but they haven’t been adopted by the masses. Most customers still prefer to get their updates and promotions via an email newsletter.

Thanks to MailChimp’s RSS to Email service, modern day bloggers and old-fashioned email lovers can meet in the middle. The service automatically sends out an email campaign when you update your blog content. And while RSS to email is not a new concept (we discussed such a service in Really Hot Mail), MailChimp gives your more control over the design and delivery of your campaign:

• Style your email template so that it mirrors the look and feel of your web site. Or, just use the templates they have on hand. Either way, MailChimp pulls your RSS content and repackages it in a nice, neat email format.
• Take advantage of MailChimp’s advanced merge tagging system, which lets you target customers by geography and tailor the content they receive – a handy feature if you want to integrate advertising or promotions for a specific area.
• Manage your subscriptions and track who opens your email and clicks on links. You can even integrate Google Analytics!

MailChimp charges based on the size of your mailing list. Bottom line, if you’re a business who utilizes a blog to communicate with your customers- and you factor in the convenience of the platform, the design controls, and the value you get with the tracking and analytics – MailChimp might be a good investment, especially if it means that you can stop going through the regular hassle of creating a standalone HTML newsletter.