27 Innovative Methods of Connecting with Your Market

Connecting,
collaborating, and engaging with your market holds more benefits than
just increased sales – Feedback from your audience is invaluable if you
want to create a quality product (or service) that actually appeals to
potential customers. In this post I’ll outline a few of the tools that
will help you do this:

Google Talk Chatback
Google
Talk has a handy little feature called Chatback which will allow
visitors of your website to send messages straight to your Google Talk
account; all you need to do is install a simple widget on your website.
Your visitors don’t even need an account – They can simply start writing
messages directly via the widget.

Audiopal
Oddcast
introduces AudioPal: an online service to allow individuals and
businesses an easy and effective way to add audio to their online
message.

BabelWithMe
Communicate
with anyone, anywhere in up to 45 languages. BabelWith.me is a simple,
free group chat that automatically translates your conversation as you
type.

Grapevine
The
Grapevine vision is to be the universal choice for online collaboration
and voice communications with groups of people – and to allow people to
participate when convenient for them individually, not on the groups
schedule. Therefore, Grapevine allows people to dip in and out of voice
conversations as they individually have time and gives you the presence
and feeling of sitting in the same room with a group of people, even if
you are thousands of miles apart.

Sparkeo
Sparkeo
is a knowledge transfer solution for Infopreneurs professional
knowledge entrepreneurs such as lecturers, teachers, bloggers and
consultants.Sparkeo provides Infopreneurs with a one-stop-shop for the
all the tools necessary to create, communicate, market, monetize and
analyze their professional instructional content.

Twingr
With
Twingr, you can create a microblogging community and communicate with
friends and other people that share your same interests.

Wadja
Wadja
is a service that helps you organize and manage your online social
presence so you can better communicate and connect with friends, family,
and contacts. Wadja is unique a social media and messaging service that
is open and transparent, providing all its users with a variety of
communication options such as SMS, email and mobile web messaging.

Tagga
Tagga
allows anyone to create instant SMS and Mobile Sites so that you can
interact, sell to, or simply communicate with mobile users.Promote your
band, your house for sale, your business, organize your sports team,
club, events and more.

Dabbleboard
Dabbleboard
helps people think and communicate visually. Unlike other alternatives,
it makes powerful features easily accessible, so that using it feels as
natural as using a real whiteboard. Since it’s digital, Dabbleboard
allows reuse of old drawings, and since it’s on the web, Dabbleboard
enables sharing of drawings with people anywhere in the world.

Tatango
Tatango
is a service that offers the simplest, most effective way for groups to
communicate through their mobile phone. As an all in one solution,
Tatango allows you to collect, manage and mobile message all of your
group members both from your computer and mobile phone. Tatango allows
any leader to update their members on meeting times, events, and
notifications; anytime, anywhere.

Moot
Moot
is a piece of social software that brings you together with other
people who share the same location – a local service for local people.
It works at home,at school or on the move. When Moot is on, new impulses
and possibilities will come your way, for example when you’re
walking down the street or taking the bus home – new impulses
will come your way through interaction with other Mooters.

SnapYap
SnapYap
is a video communication tool that allows you to participate in live
video calls, record video messages, and send and receive video emails
with absolutely no downloads. Designed to be as straightforward as
possible, the applications on SnapYap.com make video technology
available to anyone with a webcam and an internet connection.

Pipio
Pipio
is a social operating system that aims to give people the ability to
share and communicate in real-time. You can search what other people are
communicating about in real-time based on contextual, geographical, and
chronological relevance. As an operating system, Pipio allow full
functionality of third party web apps within the Pipio ecosystem.

Lexy
With
its Talk, Listen & Share phone service, Lexy totally enriches the
way people – you, for example – communicate and collaborate while using
their mobile phones. Simple. Lexy gives you all the richness of today’s
Internet communications on the voice channel of your mobile phone.

Abobe ConnectNow
Adobe
ConnectNow is a personal web meeting service that enables you to
instantly communicate and collaborate using your own online meeting
room. To start a meeting, just go to your meeting room and invite others
to join you at the same URL. As the host, you will need to download a
small add-in in order to share your screen. Meeting attendees will not
need to download any software unless they will also be sharing their
screen. There is no need to schedule meetings in advance.

Badoo
Badoo
is a truly worldwide online community that provides its members with
the ability to communicate and share their lives with people both
locally and around the globe. Its many features include the next
generation in photo/video sharing and social networking. More
importantly, though, Badoo allows its users to gain an instant mass
audience for themselves and their work.

Hikkup
Hikkup
is a tool that allows users to communicate with their friends
anonymously. Users can send messages via email, MySpace, Facebook,
Tagged, hi5, and various instant messengers.

Jott
Jott’s
goal is to let you easily save and share thoughts using that unique and
powerful tool, your voice. Jott turbo charges your ability to remember
and communicate, and thus manage your life.

Google Wave
Google
Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web.
People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text,
photos, videos, maps, and more. Any participant can reply anywhere in
the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the
process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what
and when. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can
have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in
real-time.

Sync In
When
multiple people edit the same document simultaneously, any changes are
instantly reflected on everyone’s screen. The result is a new and
productive way to collaborate and conference on text documents, useful
for meeting notes, brainstorming, project planning, drafting sessions,
training, and more.

Zbang
Zbang
integrates all your online activity into a single place, allowing you
to seemingly work across different platforms, without having to flip
from one site to the other. By using Zbang’s interface, you can share
your digital content with your friends via social media venues and
collaborate with colleagues.

Evoca
Evoca
will change the way we communicate by empowering voices in ways never
imagined before. We envision people everywhere speaking their minds,
sharing their ideas, and storing their memories on Evoca. We see voice
becoming the next tool for publishing and communicating online and
through your telephone

BrightCove
Brightcove
lets you realize the potential of online video with the most
comprehensive Internet TV service available today. Brightcove empowers
content owners from independent producers to major broadcast networks to
reach their audiences directly through the Internet. At the same time
they help web publishers enrich their sites with syndicated video
programming, and give marketers more ways to communicate and engage with
their consumers.

Meebo
Meebo
is designed for anyone with a home on the web. If you’ve got a web page
where you’d like to communicate with your visitors, meebo me allows you
to see the people who are visiting your web page and chat with them.

SixApart
Six
Apart, provider of the blogging software and services chosen most often
by individuals, organizations and corporations worldwide, has partnered
with Bokee, the leading blog hosting company in China, to make it easy
for Chinese businesses to communicate with their customers and for
employees to communicate internally through blogging.

SayNow
SayNow’s
voice services are being used for marketing, entertainment, and
educational purposes by a broad spectrum of users, including musicians,
actors, actresses, sports teams, politicians, inspirational figures, and
high school students. Anyone with an audience can use our broadcasting
service to communicate with fans, get instant feedback, and sell
merchandise. Fans are using SayNow to send voice messages and to hear
from their favorite people in a way that’s easy, personal, and direct.

Mindjet
Capture,
collaborate and communicate. Mindjet visual mapping makes it easy to
capture and share your ideas, manage the flow of information and share
your vision