It's a crazy week here-- I spoke at Social Business Edge on Monday, and am attending 140 Characters Conference, a two-day Twitter conference -- so I'm forgoing an update on the book marketing to share some quick ideas and tools that might be useful to other writers and authors for both external marketing and internal communication (with your publishers, collaborators, and more).

The marketing and publicity group at Berrett-Koehler has me email them every time I get a media hit, arrange a new speaking gig, or otherwise do something that significantly markets me or the book. This not only helps them catch things they might have missed, but also lets them know that I'm on the ball, which they like very much.

Here are some tools I'm using for this:

Google Alerts. I do a search for my name in quotes (so that it finds me, and not just all Deanna's and Zandt's), but instead of having it delivered to my email address, I have it send to the "Feed" option. This allows me to save an RSS feed to my reader and check for updates at my leisure. (What's RSS? Watch this video.)

Saved Twitter searches. Since I'm very active in the social media sphere, I keep an eye out for people mentioning me there, too. But sometimes people don't know my Twitter handle (@randomdeanna), and they use my name... so I saved a search with my name (in quotes again). You can either save searches to your account on the website, or you can save the results as an RSS feed.

Backtweets. Again with the Twitter, I know, I know. I also track when people are linking to my site on Twitter, without mentioning me or my handle. I go to BackTweets.com and enter my website URL as the search term: http://deannazandt.com. I can save these results as an RSS feed, or keep the tab open in my browser and check every few days.

Delicious. I like to save all my references in one place so I can go back later and easily find media hits and whatnot. Delicious is a social bookmarking service-- instead of saving the bookmarks to your web browser, you save them to an account online. You can then add keywords, called "tags," and descriptions to the bookmarks to make them easier to find later. I chose the tag "mediahit" to mark all of my self-referential bookmarks. (I have most of them marked as "private" right now, so they don't appear on the site, and just in my account.)

Google Docs. As we're prepping for the "book tour," there's a lot of info that has to be passed between me and various people at the publisher-- the woman in charge of making sure books are sold at appearances, the marketing folks, the publicity folks... the list is endless. Instead of emailing updates and documents back and forth, we've started sharing two documents. One is for book orders, and one has the tentative tour schedule. This way, we can all see what's happening and make updates without wondering if this is the most current version. For major updates, though, I still plan on sending emails to the team notifying that there's a big change.

There you have it! Hope these tools help you -- feel free to leave questions in the comment on any and all of them.