Five Powerful Websites I Have Grown to Love
by Paula Satow, Managing Member, Satow Strategies, LLC

These days, marketers everywhere understand the sheer power and immeasurable value of the Internet. Thanks to a torrent of tools available online, we can use the web to identify strategies, research industries and even implement programs to enhance our bottom line. And, if you are like me, there are a few websites in particular that have become my secret weapons and I return to them again and again. They have made my job easier and my results more tangible than I ever dreamed possible. But, since there are no secrets, I thought I would share my five favorite online marketing tools with all my fellow marketers. Of course, please feel free to share your favorite secret weapons with me too!

1. The WayBack Machine www.archive.org/web/web.php The “Wayback Machine” is a service of the Internet Archive. Through it, you can visit a website’s archived pages. Like the Ghost of Websites Past, it allows you to surf through 55 billion (!) web pages that have been archived since 1996. Imagine the thrill of exploring a company’s old web site designs, its past press coverage or its communications from decades past. Witnessing a business’ past can only help when it comes time to plan its future.

2. Trademark Search Engine www.uspto.gov/main/trademarks.htm Conduct one trademark search on the TESS (Trademark Electronic Search System) system and you’ll quickly understand the power of this indispensable search engine. TESS contains more than four million pending, registered, and dead federal trademarks. It is an invaluable tool for marketing people in search of the perfect brand name, marketing term, or tagline. The USPTO main site at http://www.uspto.gov/ is also very helpful.

3. Visual Thesaurus http://www.visualthesaurus.com/ As a writer both of marketing materials and fiction, I have often dreamed about a resource just like this one. Thanks to Thinkmap (http://www.thinkmap.com/), this dream is now a reality. Visual Thesaurus is a commanding 3D visualization tool for finding just the right word. This site literally brings words to life, forming highly interactive and animated displays of words, related words, and their meanings. Marketers cannot go wrong when they are looking for the right word. You can try it out at no charge and annual subscriptions are quite reasonable.

4. Enterprise Search Platform http://www.grokker.com/ Grokker (named comes from the term “to grok” — to deeply understand — from Heinlein’s science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land) is an enterprise search engine from Groxis that enhances the ability to “explore, organize, and share digital information.” It links corporate databases, subscription content, and search engines to create highly visual and interactive maps about any subject under the sun and then some. Market research will never be the same.

5. Branding Newsletter http://www.brandchannel.com/ Founded in 2001, Interbrand’s Brand Channel claims to be “the world’s only online exchange about branding.” I think this site is a valuable resource for brand practitioners everywhere. Offering a truly global perspective on brands and enough articles, glossaries, white papers and book reviews on the subject to sink a ship, this website should be a regular click stop for any marketer in virtually any industry.

When you want help tapping into the power of the internet to enhance your marketing capabilities, please contact Satow Strategies at 602-481-1942 or info@satowstrategies.com. We’re ready to help you succeed.

*Other trademarks and brands are the property of their respective owners.