Marketing Insights

My colleague Greg Lui is located in Eloqua’s Singapore office and is responsible for managing our presence in the APAC region. As you can imagine his day includes interactions with many different languages. In cases where he needs some translation help, he recommends Babel Fish. If you interact with vendors, clients, partners and colleagues from multiple countries you may find this a helpful resource as well. (One thing Greg notes is that it’s not always completely accurate, but it’s usually close enough to give you an understanding of the text.)

Simply enter your text, choose the translation type and click the Translate button and you’re off and running!

Today’s tool is Dropbox – a handy (and FREE!) file storage system. You can sync your files across multiple computers, share files with others, and access them online. The Dropbox folks say it better than I ever could: “Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!). Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.”

Why I love Dropbox:

• I backup some of my most critical files here (both work and personal). (Note: my old method was to email files to my Gmail account…Dropbox is simpler.)
• I can easily share files with other people on my team. Dropbox automatically keeps roll-back versions of your files for 30 days so you also get the benefit of some version history as well.
• I use a Mac at home and a PC at work and Dropbox works seamlessly on both.
• It’s free — get up to 2 GB of storage for $0 per month.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Today’s tool isn’t really a tool, but more of a helpful hint about an application that you probably already use: Microsoft Outlook. The default setting in Outlook 2003 and 2007 is to display a small 3 line preview of incoming emails in the system tray down by the clock. This little window fades in and out innocently enough, but it’s a major distraction. There you are, hard at work on your next great marketing campaign, when up pops a little blue window notifying you that the latest ClickZ newsletter has just arrived. And wouldn’t that be a lot more fun to look at than your next great marketing campaign copy?

Don’t be lured in! I turned off these notifications two months ago and I have really noticed a difference in my workday productivity. I am able to take more tasks all the way to completion each day, and because I’m a task-oriented person, that makes me quite happy.

Here’s what to do: (Note — these instructions are for Outlook 2007, but Outlook 2003 is quite similar)

1. Click the Tools menu, then Options
2. Click the E-mail Options… button near the top of the Preferences tab
3. Click the Advanced E-mail Options… button (they don’t make this easy!)
4. In the middle of the window, uncheck the box that reads Display a New Mail Desktop Alert.
5. Enjoy your day with less interruptions!

Do you have a productivity tool that you love? Share it with me: heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com

Thanks to Joel Rothman for today’s tool: Paint.net. He summed it up nicely when he said, “It’s free and it’s awesome.”  If you’re tired of the limitations of the clunky Paint program that comes with Windows, but you don’t have the budget for Photoshop, this is a great alternative. It has the concept of Layers (pioneered by Photoshop), unlimited Undo, and some built-in special effects (such as drop shadows). And did we mention that it’s free and awesome?

Do you have a software tool that you just can’t live without?
Tell me about it: heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com.

Today’s tool is PDFCreator and it was recommended by my colleague Adrian Azcurra. This is helpful tool if you don’t have access to the full version of Adobe Acrobat for creating PDFs. You can use it from any program that has a Print function because PDFcreator installs like another printer on your computer. It can also combine multiple files into one PDF, which has come in handy for me several times when producing my expense report. Enjoy!

Do you have a tool that you just can’t live without? Tell me about it: heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com

When I polled my colleagues for their recommendations on productivity tools, Snagit was on everyone’s list and it’s definitely at the top of mine. I use Snagit approximately 8,456 times per day on average (okay, maybe not quite that many…) and I find it indispensible.

What is it? It’s screen captures on steroids. You can highlight areas of your screen, combine two captures into one, make notes with the text tool, and much more. The new version 9 also has excellent image tagging and library functionality which have been a lifesaver for me.

As marketers, much of our work life is visual and Snagit makes it easy for me to share those images easily with my clients and coworkers.

BONUS: I encourage you to sign up for the free 30-day trial of Snagit because they have a masterful follow-up campaign. On the confirmation page for the download (right here) they only ask for one piece of info: email address. Then over the course of 30 days you learn how to use many features of the software through their drip campaign. There are some great lessons here for marketers!

Do you have a productivity tool that you can’t live without? Tell me about it: heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com.

I’m excited to tell you about Fences – it’s a tool to organize your Windows desktop and keep all of your icons tidy. It’s been a tremendous help to me, especially my new little Fence for “To Do” documents. One of my favorite features about this tool is the ability to hide all of the items on your desktop with a double-click in a non-fenced area. I do many web conferences during the week and often share my desktop, so this feature has been been a hit.

Thanks to Chad Horenfeldt for telling me about Fences.

Do you have a productivity tool that you use regularly? Share it with me: heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com.

For the next several weeks I will be focusing the Friday Quick Tip on helpful productivity tools that can make your work life a little easier.

Today’s tool is PureText, which was suggested to me by my fellow Eloquan Andrew Stafford. This is a simple little application that runs in the background on your Windows machine (sorry, it doesn’t work in a Mac). You access it via a hotkey combo that you can customize (for example, Windows key + V). It will take the text that you’ve copied and convert it to plain text format and make it available for pasting. They explain it well on their site: “PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.”

How is this helpful? If you routinely copy text out of Word and paste it into your marketing automation system, for example, you’ve noticed that all of the yucky Word formatting comes along for the ride. This tool will strip out that extra “fun” and let you start with squeaky clean goodness.

Do you have a tool to share? Drop me a note and I’ll feature it in an upcoming tip (heather dot foeh at eloqua dot com).