Four Great Free Tools for Business Research

Every business needs to stay informed of least two things all the time, even if there is no obvious immediate financial benefit.

They need to know what their current and potential customers are saying, and they need to know what their competitors are saying (and doing).

But if everyone had to do all of the research for themselves, it could be a major time-sucker, and so many smaller businesses are simply not doing it at all.

Thanks to the power of the web, though, many of the smaller tasks can be automated, organized, and even shared with your team, your clients, or your customers for free.

Here are four powerful free tools for conducting business research, monitoring your reputation, and organizing all that information:

Google Search Alerts and RSS Feeds: Run a search for the name of your product, your company, or yourself, with Google News search. Are the results on those pages flattering to you? Find out the next time a news story is posted with your search terms with either an email alert (link is at the bottom of the search results page) or by subscribing to the RSS feed for that search (at the very bottom of the page). Do the same thing with Google Blog search. Put them in the same folder of your RSS Reader (alerts, or mentions, or press), and now you’ve only got to scroll through one folder with the day’s searches and alerts.

RSS Reader: Subscribe to the industry leaders, your competitors, and press release feeds for your field with an RSS reader. Google Reader is a great free feed management tool, capable of multiple folders and labels to sort the incoming posts. Set up a Shared folder and give access to it to your team or your employees, and you can easily share the best information with them with a single click. I first started using Reader for my feeds, but have since become a huge fan of Feedly. Feedly works with your Google Reader subscriptions, but has some added features that I like to use for organizing and sharing, such as integration with Evernote.

Digital Capture: Evernote is one of those tools that you can’t imagine living without -  it’s like having a digital personal assistant. The easy web clipper works with your browser to capture some or all of anything you see on the web. It also manages multiple notebooks, including a Shared one, and has a robust search function which makes finding notes a breeze. The tags enable quick sorting and scanning, and because this filing system is in the cloud, you can access it from anywhere, including your smartphone. Evernote can also ‘read’ handwritten text and text from photos, so take a picture of the whiteboard at your next meeting, email it to Evernote, and you’ve instantly got the meeting saved, with searchable notes. If you use Feedly for an RSS reader, ‘Save to Evernote’ is one of the options for each post, so it’s easy to save the good stuff for yourself or for a Shared folder when going through your feeds each day.

Twitter Search: The high rate of flow of Twitter can be intimidating to a new user, but even if you never Tweet, you can use it to listen and learn. Sign up and follow those in your field, and then keep some keyword searches running in a Twitter client or browser tab: HootSuite or Seesmic Desktop are my favorites. Scan the results regularly, and when you see links or people worth another look later, use the Twitter to Evernote capability to send a direct message with the original Tweet straight to your notebooks to read or reference. I’ve found that this workflow takes only a short time each day, but it can yield huge amounts of information.

These four tools will help keep you informed and organized, with a minimum of time commitment. They also make sharing that information with others as easy as one click.

What are your favorite free tools for business research?

Image: © Arto – Fotolia.com

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