I have to preface this review by saying that never in a million years would I have thought I’d be singing the praises of this type of software. But when software does it right, you have to give praise where it’s due. Here’s the story.

I number of years ago–maybe 2002–I was doing a lot of email marketing at my agency. There weren’t all of the SaaS offerings there are today, and in fact, there weren’t a whole lot of options out there for small companies trying to do serious email marketing. Somehow I came across MailLoop, and I have to tell you I was dubious. No matter how you access information about the software, you wind up staring at a wall of long-form marketing copy. “But wait, there’s more!” You know, the kind of marketing that’s used to sell get-rich -quick schemes to people ready to make millions from the comfort of their own home. What can I say? I was desperate for a piece of working software and willing to try anything. I kind of chuckled at the “lifetime upgrade” offer and I pulled the trigger.

I was surprised to find that the software was actually really well built, and did all of the basics I needed it to do. Most of all, it allowed me to manage multiple lists of any size, automate opt-out and exclude lists, and set up newsletters as well as email. I used it for a couple of years, went through at least one upgrade, and then moved on to a new role where I didn’t need to manage my own email marketing. That was over 4 years ago.

Fast forward to this week. I’m doing a webcast next week on social media marketing, and I wanted to send out an email invite to a couple of my contact lists. I’m in the middle of transitioning away from SugarCRM, after a lot of frustration with list management and email marketing. I could send the email out via an Outlook mail merge, but my hosting provider jams any email with over 100 recipients. I could set up an account with iContact, or Constant Contact, but the last thing I want to to do at the moment is sign up for another service. I just need to get some emails out.

And then I remembered MailLoop. Only problem was, I’d upgraded all of my computers since I last used MailLoop. I didn’t have the software anymore. But I did have that “lifetime upgrade”, remember? So, with nothing to lose, I found MailLoop 7 on the internet, complete with their new and improved long-form copy. Sheesh. But I finally found a corporate number, called support, and believe it or not, after buying the software 6 years ago, they simply asked me for my name, updated my account information, and sent me a link for the latest rev of the software. I had it installed on my machine 20 minutes later, and works just like it should.

Now, I’m not comparing MailLoop 7 to all the other email marketing products out there. I know there are a lot of SaaS options that are well regarded. But when a company creates a solid product that’s still solid after 6 years, and they provide customer service like you expect without making you jump through hoops, and they do all of that at exactly the moment you need to solve a problem–they deserve a good review. Long-form marketing copy notwithstanding. And if you’re interested in the product, I can help you cut to the chase. It’s $395 after you do the free trial. I think the deal comes with a number of other free software products guaranteed to make you a millionaire.

For many marketers, search engine optimization is one of those items on your todo list that seems to roll over every cycle and never get addressed. Unless you have a heavy-hitting marketing budget and SEO is critical to keeping your pipeline full, chances are your online traffic isn’t well optimized. It’s like yardwork. It’s something you know needs to get done, but there’s always something else more important to do at the moment.

So I was intrigued when I saw what LotusJump is doing. They offer a $99/month on-demand service that tees up SEO tasks for someone on your team to execute. It’s an interesting position. They’re not providing an SEO service per se–which would be a whole lot more than $99/month. Instead, they’re automating the messy legwork that prevents most marketers from getting SEO done on their own, such as:

• Identifying directories where your site can be listed
• Finding places where you can submit articles with links back to your site
• Finding existing articles and blog posts where you can write comments, and link back to your site
• Finding competitive backlink opportunities, where your keyword competitors are already linked

It’s a pretty simple concept. If you had all of these opportunities teed up and ready to execute with the click of a mouse, you could farm out the work to people on your team to get it done–and everyone would be the smarter about SEO and your marketing strategy.

So I asked LotusJump for a demo account to see how easy it is. And yes, it is easy. Once you subscribe, you simply enter your web site domain and a list of three keywords or keyword phrases around which you want to optimize. Within minutes, your task list starts to fill with the directories and sites to which you might want to submit your own web site and articles. Most of these directories and sites are indexed in LotusJump’s database, and they have explicit step-by-step instructions for how to submit to each directory, so even an intern could pick up some slack. Within hours, or at least over night, the buzz links and competitive backlinks opportunities start coming in. These are collected as LotusJump scans the Web to find content related to your keywords, and your keyword competitors, that you can leverage by submitting your own comments or posts with links back to your site.

The interface is easy to use, and has basic workflow features for viewing and managing your task list. It’s hard to imagine how it wouldn’t be worth $99/month if you’re one of the many marketers who neither has the budget for outsourcing SEO, or the time to manage in-house SEO tasks. I don’t yet know how the net results would compare to outsourced SEO since we just ran through the setup, but if you’re doing nothing now, it’s not hard to benchmark. Just take a snapshot of your traffic today, run LotusJump for a month, and compare your traffic then.

I definitely like the concept, and I think it’s an interesting market position that likely has a critical mass of prospects. I’m thinking of asking LotusJump to keep our demo account open for a couple of months so we can benchmark traffic and report back on results.

I started messing around a little bit with Trendrr last week and was very impressed   with its options and functionality. Basically, Trendrr mashes multiple lightweight and mostly free Web trend tracking tools (over a dozen data fields including Google, Technorati, FeedBurner, Quantcast, YouTube etc) and lets you easily drag output graphs from these trends into a single graph with an easy interface, making comparisons really easy. The free version lets you make 20 graphs tracking one or multiple query terms. You can share those graphs with others pretty easily — not that this is very hard to build but its a nice feature. While Trendrr does not have the deep feature sets of the truly pro Web tracking and brand measurement suits of software, it’s a lot cheaper and can probably do 80% of that those pro versions do. Trendrr also has better breadth of coverage — the range of online tracking mediums is very impressive. I drove it through a couple of trend terms and could definitely see how this would be useful to both DIYers and brand managers seeking to get insights into causalities between trend terms and events or just general buzz patterns. It’s not grandma-ready yet — the initial start up interface is a little bit hard to understand and the help section is somewhat sparse. But this will be a very interesting vehicle and I look forward to using it more. There is an enterprise version, as well (freemium model), the allows for unlimited graphs and much more robust term reporting capabilities. You can export the raw data into CSV, spreadsheet, or other common export mechanisms.  Regardless, start with the free one to check it out and make sure it works for you and then move up the paid version.

Marketing automation is a big and complex space. There are a host of traditional on-prem application vendors, and a growing number of impressive on-demand providers, like Eloqua and Marketo, all competing for market share in a space that has often gotten short shrift behind CRM and SFA. So it’s interesting to see a startup like Marketbright earn Series A investment this past summer–especially in the the difficult early-stage VC environment we’ve seen this year–and go on to start earning some market share of its own, primarliy in the B2B space.

The Marketbright team comes out of marketing ops at large enterprise technology companies, so it’s not surprising their focus as an early stage venture has been building the tools and systems necessary to streamline large-scale demand generation programs. Marketbright offers the essential basics of marketing automation, including campaign execution, lead scoring and qualification, closed-loop marketing analytics, and integration with CRM/SFA tools. But addressing the more complex challenges of larger scale marketing programs, Marketbright also provides channel marketing support, enabling marketers to syndicate channel campaigns and push leads out to partners; event management with support for managing event registration and event content; and content management support for corporate Web sites. Marketbright also pays the obligatory obeisance to Marketing ROI and performance accountability with a dashboard for program metrics.

While Marketbright has been building their customer base among companies like Business Objects, VMware and Serena, they have on-demand solutions for SMB as well, with pricing based on number of seats. They have a link on their solutions page that says “click for an online demo”, but there’s no link. Guess you have to call for a demo. I did call just to check it out, and after one click through the phone tree, they had a real live knowledgeable person answering the line. So if you’re shopping for marketing automation solutions, Marketbright is worth putting on the vetting list.