by Sarah Casey, account executive at Maven Communications and secretary for PRSA Philly

I tend to disagree that ‘the best things in life are free.’ However, I jump to try a free web tool or application. Although I may be giving away some of my research secrets and the following are all free, I thought I would share the wealth:

In case you have been living under a rock:
Google alerts: : Email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

Facebook: A social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.

Twitter : A real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now.

HARO: A social media service that brings reporters and bloggers, news sources and small businesses together to tell their stories, promote their brands and sell their products and services.

Others I like (in alphabetical order because I can’t pick favorites):
Addict-o-matic: A search tool that uncovers the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images.

Alexa: A Toolbar and web site provides information about websites including Top Sites, Internet Traffic Stats and Metrics, Related Links, Online Reviews Contact Information and more.

AllTop: A search tool that collects all the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic and groups these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. It is a good place to start a research project.

BackTweets: A simple tool that shows your tweets linking back, shortened too, to a particular URL.

Bit.ly: A URL cruncher with metrics enabling measurement of number of clicks, countries clicked from, conversations around URL, etc.

BlogPulse: An automated trend discovery system for blogs. BlogPulse applies machine-learning and natural-language processing techniques to discover trends in the highly dynamic world of blogs.

BoardTracker: An innovative forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when posted.

Compete: Compares and reports competitor site traffic but estimates only of monthly visitor data. Best used on large high-traffic web sites but produces nice looking graphs.

Social Mention: A social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information. You can set up alerts too.

Wordle: is a ‘toy’ for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. Plus, word clouds are pretty.

There are plenty more like Delicious, Pitch Rate, HowSociable, TweetDeck, etc. These are just a few of my go-to free tools but they might not be the sharpest in the shed, so please visit the Maven Communications blog to comment with your favorites and why!