‘Tis the season for merriment and joy.  Happiness can take the form of ooey, gooey, warm chocolate treats dropped off at your door, or a visit from a distant relative. And sometimes happiness comes from finding ways to make life easier, or discovering how to eek out a little more result from your efforts.

While we don’t have any bright paper packages to send your way, we do have a few tips, tools, and tricks sure to delight any online marketer this season.

social media marketing gifts

Project Management

Get It Done and Asana are two project management applications I like. They’re both great for small businesses and consultants because they’re both easy-to-adopt with clean interfaces, drag-and-drop functionality, and Delicious-like tagging for easy search. Both allow task delegation, email reminders, appointment setting, and native mobile apps to keep you up-to-date and on task throughout the day.

I’ve worked in Basecamp, Zoho Projects, Desk Away, and other programs but could never actually commit to sticking with any of them. I don’t find the Basecamp organizational structure to be particularly intuitive, and Zoho feels very fragmented between tasks, projects, and client-level components.

Content Planning and Publishing

So part of your job involves curating and publishing content? Scoop.it, Tumb.lr, Pinterest, and other niche sharing sites are a great way to distribute interesting branded content to your audiences. Sure, you can share photos on Twitter from y.frog and Twitpic. But the occasional post with a photo attachment doesn’t create the same kind of branded experience that a Pinterest board does for surrounding customers with creative visual stimuli to furthers your brand’s interests.

Multimedia Production

Have you ever done an impromptu hallway interview after discovering someone whose work you love is at the same conference as you? Audacity is a handy, free application that allows you to edit an audio file. Trim off excessive seconds, minimize background noise, add intro music and voiceover, you name it – Audacity can help you produce great media-rich content.

Camtasia Studio and Jing are two software products that make creating informational “how-to” video demonstration a snap.  With Camtasia, you can mix screencast content with video footage plus add really impressive effects. Jing is a way to capture screen shots that can be shared with others (like a customer or Help Desk attendant).

Twitter Conversation Tracking

If you moderate a Twitter chat or otherwise evaluate conversation around a hashtag, then Hashtracking may be for you. The application pulls tweets containing the hash tag you specify so you can see participants and conversation flow. Use that information to create chat transcripts for your audience (pro tip: collections of Twitter chat transcripts used to create blog posts can be used to create great  sneeze pages that drive website traffic!).