Red Door Interactive's president explains how Xobni, LinkedIn and RescueTime can make your work and life more efficient and effective.

As interactive marketing professionals we know the value of analytics. We use analytics every day to discover how tactics are performing on our websites, advertising campaigns and applications. Every day, there is more information for us to access. Analytics help us make sense of that information.

Lately, a few smart companies have surfaced to help us better track and understand information related to what we do. I hope that these companies and tools spark other people's imagination so that we can further access and learn from the information available to us.

Xobni
While Xobni offers many other features, the one that sticks out to me is the company's inbox analytics. I have been using this product (still in beta) and found that it discovered a few special bits of information that I find useful. This product will tell me how often I email a specific person, how often he emails me, when he sends me email, his contact information (extracted from his emails), who else he is connected to (from past cc's and to's), etc.

This kind of information, in real time, deepens my understanding of each email I receive and of the person with whom I am communicating. 

LinkedIn
I am sure that if you are an active LinkedIn user, you are aware of the new "company profile" feature, which provides you information and statistics about specific companies. If you click on a company name from someone's profile, you can get data such as recent hires, how many people are at the company, what other companies those employees are connected to, average age of employee, etc. All of this information is regularly updated by people managing their personal profiles. I have found this information to be more reliable (on matching subjects) than Hoovers or other data providers (though some information does come from CapitalIQ/an S&P company).

This information has been sitting there, for the most part, untapped. But it is incredibly useful information; it is very valuable to know more about a company than just its financials, descriptions and headcounts. 

RescueTime
This product is intended to help people optimize their day by understanding how they spend their time. This application keeps track of time spent on various activities on the computer and reports it back to you. The expectation is that, by knowing how you spend your time, you can set and achieve goals to better optimize your performance at work. One common theme, for example, is to reduce time spent on email and bouncing around from task to task.

Mint
This site provides analytics on your personal finances. It reviews your various financial accounts, provides you with a look at how you spend your money from looking at your credit card statement and bank accounts and then compares it to other people, as well as your individual history. The site provides users with recommendations on how they can save money and meet their financial goals.

As you see from the short list of companies I've listed here (and these are just a few that come to mind for now), there is an exciting trend occurring right now. A host of companies are taking previously passive data and turning it into actionable analysis. And, there is a lot more of this information that has yet to be tapped. Marketers should be thinking about this trend even within their own organizations; in many cases there is a lot of information available to them within their own organizations (a la CRM strategy).

Once this information is identified and aggregated, marketers can use it to make better, more informed decisions, as they do currently (hopefully) with web analytics and CRM software.

Reid Carr is president, Red Door Interactive.