The Web Uncovered

If you are a technology nut like me, you are always interested in trying out the latest applications or tools available. Several months ago, I was lucky enough to get an early preview invite to join Google’s new communication and collaboration tool, Google Wave. The online tool is reinventing email one wave (conversation) and blip (message) at a time.

The platform combines email, instant messaging and online collaboration into a real-time system. It can be used by two people or a whole group of people. Instead of cc’ing a person on a message, you can add that person to the conversation. Users apart of a wave can follow messages in real-time, play back the entire conversation timeline and even add to or edit any part of the conversation.

While it seems confusing at first, these videos shine a light on Google Wave’s simplicity and functionality: http://simurl.com/simplewave

Although my time on Google Wave has been limited, I can already see the value in this new form of online collaboration. Instead of having an inbox full of emails back and forth between two people or a group of people, Google Wave provides a live timeline of events and updates with full editing functionality. You can even collaborate on documents in real-time as a group and embed photos, videos and maps in to the conversation.

More than one million users are actively using Google Wave in preview mode. New outlets and publications like RedEye Chicago are hosting daily waves to discuss timely and relevant topics with their readers.

There are still some kinks for Google to work out, but once Google Wave advances past preview mode and catches on with the masses, I can see this as a revolution in the business world. A

Blip me at www.googlewave.com/jabraha7

Written by Twitter Handle @jabraha7

For those of you who already use Gmail, you can stop reading immediately.  For everyone else, Gmail is revolutionizing email with some very basic technologies.

Archiving:  With over seven gigs of storage, you never have to delete emails, furthermore it works perfecting with Labels.

Labels:   These color-coded tags works the same way as folders, only you can have more than one label on an email.  This allows you to create sub-categories, or criss-cross organize anyway you see fit.

Conversations:  Emails are listed as conversations.  This means that if three people respond to the same email with you cc-ed, it shows up as one tab, with three parts.  For those of you in large organizations, this means instead of finding 45 new emails from lunch break, they are seperated by topic into the six conversations.

Filters:  Whether you want to automatically archive all emails from your mother, or have all your golfing buddies’s emails go into a special label (which then looks like an inbox on the sidebar), filters can save you time.  It takes only a few seconds to set up, and can filter by email address, topic, keyword, or other methods.

Spam:   Google has the best spam guard in the business.  Furthormore, it holds spam emails in a special folder for 30 days, just in case your important contract in an email from an unknown friend’s address ended up there by mistake, you’ll have time to save it.

Apps:   Google has some of the best integrated applications, including calendar, documents, and many more, which can save you lots of time, and are extremely easy to learn and implement.

The Takeaway:

While moving your email could seem like an intense process, it’s easy to sign-up for google, and takes less than a minute to set-up your email so that you can send and receive email from your old address.  Furthermore, you can set it up so that you can send emails from countless addresses and domains.  Test it out, you have little to lose, but it can save you enough time to make it worth the short time it takes to figure it out.

Having collected or gained access to a thousands, or even just a few, of potential clients is one sure way to get business moving. Direct marketing, both online and offline, has been seen as one of the best tools to generate real results. However, the question is, once you have your email addresses, what do you do with them?

Rather than creating your own excel files that require upkeep or trying to draft your own html emails (or worse send basic text emails), an email management system is definitely the way to go. We here at The Web Uncovered are crazy about one in particular, Constant Contact, as it has the most value-added systems for its cost.

Not only can you import and export your email lists through Constant Contact, but you also are html email templates that you can customize for your campaigns, such as name-addressing, adding your logo, and more. Also they have a feature to add polls, which is a good way to create user interaction.

Takeaway: Now this is a paid service, so you need to evaluate how much time you think you will save, and how much you think you will use it. For me personally, the feature that put me over the edge was the analytics feature, where you can see who clicked on links in your email. Not only does it give you great feedback on your campaign overall, but I have used this to create personal follow-up emails that closed deals. All-in-all, this is a technology that is unappreciated and may become a make more vital part to online marketing in the year to come.