Kwaga's SmarterEmail Engine Detects Critical Business Data Inside Emails
Are you a GMail or Google Apps user? Are you bad at updating your contact list? Is keeping in contact with your networking contacts important to your business?
You need to look at WriteThat.Name. It is the perfect business networking and relationship building tool.
What does it do?
When you receive an email that has a signature, WriteThat.Name will update your contact list. It has to do with semantic engines and what not. All I know is that it keeps my contact list for business and personal use up to date. You also get an update from the service every day to let you know which contacts were updated, and if any of the info is redundant or incorrect for some reason, you can correct it from the daily email.
They are offering 30 day free trials for this service, and they will keep giving you free months for every friend you get to join. After your trial periods are up, you can continue using the service for as little as $3 per month.
I have been using it since June 15 and I must admit it is nice having someone else constantly updating my contact list.
If my layman explanation doesn’t do it for you, read a more technical review from this link from Gear Diary.
Notify.me has been one of my go-to services in this social media age. It is such an important program and delivers the goods so efficiently, you forget that you are using it. Which may be one of the reasons it is closing its doors on October 4th. I try to talk this service up at lectures and workshops, but because it works so well, I sometimes take it for granted and do not remember to bring it up each and every time. For that I apologize.
During college basketball season, this tool is critical for me. As a Syracuse Orange fan, I am not able to watch every game on TV because I attend a lot of events. I have the twitter feed from the Syracuse Post Standard sports writers going to my notify.me account so that it gives me scores and game action via email and/or text. When I’m on the bus or walking on the NYC streets between meetings, notify.me keeps me in the loop. That’s on the very personal side.
On the business side, I will occasionally take a journalist/blogger/editor’s twitter feed and put it in my notify.me account in order to keep abreast of what topics are catching their interest. Or to find ways to connect. I have set up good relationships with folks in the press, by taking advantage of this. I have been able to get media opportunities for clients by doing this. Also, two or three years ago it was a much more consistent way of getting notified if your name or brand was mentioned on Twitter.
I know there are other ways to stay abreast, but this is the way that I chose in 2008, and it has been a great assist to me. I will try the suggested replacements and let you know which one is going to stick.
So instead of saying goodbye, I will say thank you, notify.me, for all the important news you delivered to me (almost) instantly.
Saying Hello To Long Lost Colleagues Can Be Profitable
Last month, I did a post on collecting biz cards. Now, I wanna know how often do you go through those old contacts and reach out? How often? Damn. What good is it if you have all these contacts and you don’t interact with them?
Last year around this time, I was looking through my old contact list so that I could find someone to say, “long time no speak.” I was also looking to drum up some business as well. As a small biz owner, no matter the economic climate, you should constantly tap into your networks in order to find work. Well I did catch up with quite a few folks. And while some of them couldn’t hire me or jump in to some ventures with me immediately, a few of them came back to me months later with some checks (or Paypal transactions).
I think it’s obvious to guess what would have happened if I didn’t decide to reach out and touch some old colleagues. I truly believe that when you are in your respective game for a long time and run your own shop, you don’t get biz by mailing out your CV. It’s not what you know, but who you know. And Larry Sharpe would go one more step by adding, “It’s not who you know, but how well they know you.”
So get out there and nurture those relationships. Saying hello after 5 years makes (dollars and) sense.
Have any of your dormant friendships turned into dollars?
I was sitting in my boy’s office, when the receptionist rang him. Someone needed to buy insurance.
When he got on the phone, he determined that the insurance in question was really a property/casualty matter. Since he was on speakerphone, I heard the conversation, and I immediately grabbed my BNI biz card book and pulled out my prop/casualty guy’s card. We gave the woman on the phone the info and told her to use my name.
She called my guy and the paperwork is in the pipeline.
Everyday, there is an opportunity to do good and send business to your colleagues. Use your ears and listen for those opportunities. Keep your friends top of mind. I am constantly thinking about ways to refer business or good people to the other good people I know. And I know that there are associates of mine who are trying to do the same for me. A networking guru called it Giver’s Gain.
Not a bad credo to live by.
Also, when you are constantly looking for opportunities that may benefit others, you will end up putting money directly in your own pocket at times.
So please don’t let these opportunities pass you by.
(And yes, I know the above video is not 100% authentic)
No Intervention Necessary, This Obsession Leads To Opportunities And Business
What do you do with those business cards you’ve collected over the years? Do you scan em? Send them off to CloudContacts? Throw em out?
I put mine in huge binders. Years worth of contact info. I still have my very first rolodex from my admin asst days in the music industry (1990). I refer to them often. A few years ago, I was looking through my binders trying to find a printer I could invite to my BNI chapter. I came upon a guy’s card who was quite memorable. I met him in 2004, when I used to belong to Ryze and happened to attend one their networking events. For some reason, we got to talking about Jersey and its hip-hop stars. It was a great conversation.
So in the spring of 2007, I found his card and sent him an email about being my guest at a BNI meeting. While it was not his primary email, it was forwarded to one that he checked regularly. In a few hours, we were on the phone catching up. Now mind you, it was a Tuesday late afternoon and my meetings are Wednesday 7am. Guess who showed up on Wednesday morning? And shortly after that, he joined. And then 3 years later, in one of his last acts as a member, he brought a guest that became a business partner in another venture of mine.
So, don’t throw your old biz cards away. Three to six years later, they can still turn into something. Not to be cliche, but there is a reason they are called business cards.
Notes From A BNI Junkie...Strung Out For Over 13 Years
My notes from the BNI meetings are called the Kool-Aid Kronicles. BNI is an acquired taste – it’s very regimented and orderly. It’s also 7am every week. If you are going to do this 45+ times a year, you have to be maybe a little crazy or very devoted to networking or to a networking guru. In other words…sippin’ that Kool-Aid.
For the last thirteen years, I have been a member of BNI. This networking group relies heavily on word of mouth marketing and has kept many a company afloat. Many of the professionals in my chapter have dispensed weekly nuggets of wisdom for years on how to become a better entrepreneur. It’s a little rough out there, so it’s good to hear about everyday folk who are keeping their heads and making things happen. Here are a few things I heard and learned the past few Wednesdays from my colleagues:
Even though the photographer wasn’t at the meeting, his substitute let us know that he was shooting someone for Inc. magazine.
The graphic designer is getting lots of print/paper work, because there may be a “backlash against the backlash.” I love it.
The image consultant changed her tagline to “saving the world one outfit at a time.”
If you rent an office in Manhattan, hire a commercial real estate firm to negotiate the terms of the lease, because as the owner rightfully pointed out, most tenants to not keep the details of their lease handy.
Please give my BNI colleagues a look. And of course you can check out the full roster here.
All of you busy networkers who think they don’t have time to tweet, please listen up. Twitter can be noisy, but if you tailor it to your needs, it can be one of the most useful tools you will ever employ.
Even the most dedicated tweeter cannot watch their Twitterstream 24 hours/7 days a week. They use monitoring tools. And many of the good ones are free and simple to set up. The one that I have recently been playing with is SocialOomph (formerly known as TweetLater). In the free service, you can schedule tweets from multiple accounts, make extended Twitter profiles, and save drafts of tweets. In the paid version, you can schedule Facebook status/wall updates and multiple blog posts. I’m not going to list all the features, you can go to their site to see the full list. I use SocialOomph to track several keywords and my mentions/retweets in a digest email that is sent twice a day.
This a great way to find people who are tweeting about your topics. Publicists are always looking for free ways to build up media contacts/tastemakers list. At the end of the day (or week), I check my SocialOomph digests and find new Twitterers to follow and new people who may be interested in my clients and/or projects.
Try it and comment on which features appeal to you.
Keep All Your Contacts On Blackberry With Dub...w/o Crashing
I love my Blackberry, but the one thing that pales in comparison to the others is the hard drive space. And if you network like me, your contact list is sizable and important. Try operating your Blackberry with an address book of 4000 contacts. Multiple battery pulls per day, right? And yes, I have discussed it before. It is a pet peeve of mine.
I have also discussed Dub aka DubMeNow.com. I have a love/hate relationship with them since the summer of 2009. Dub is a mobile app that sends your digital business card to anyone’s email address. An extremely useful service if you run out of traditional biz cards or you want people to have access to information that is not on your biz card (or you just wanna go green). At some point in 2010, whenever I would send my Dub card, it would not get received, it would just disappear into the ether. Customer support tried to help, but on their end everything looked normal. So I stopped using it.
In mid-January, I received an email about new features and updates. So I checked it out. Big improvement. Like Gist, Dub can take all of your email and social media contacts and spit it out as one comprehensive address book. At the site, you can print it out as a spreadsheet. On Blackberry, the app lets you access all of your contacts with extreme quickness. I have almost 7K contacts on Dub, and searching through the list takes little time. Another plus: I went to the website to see if a Dub card I sent a few days ago reached its intended audience. It hadn’t, but it saved the email address. When this was happening to me before, the email address would not save. This is a big change. And now Dub also offers the opportunity to resend the card.
Bottomline, if you want to have your entire contact list on your Blackberry, without crashing your phone, load the free app called Dub. Think about that. No more waiting to get back to your office to find a number or email address. Or no more printing out a contact list to stuff in your pocket or briefcase. Or no more battery pulling because searching for a phone number froze your Curve (especially when you’re on deadline to reach that particular person).
Serious networkers and folks with large contact lists need to load Dub.
It’s also available on iPhone/iPod (for those that like to play with toys).
Networking is a must for all entrepreneurs. If we don't get out there and shake hands, kiss babies, or join a group, it will be rough sailing. My goal is to inspire you to do as much schmoozing as you can. And there are some great new tools to help you do your job, do not be intimated by them. My stories and tips are simple...we all can and must do this.
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