What to Do with All Those Contacts: Part 1

Since you never know where your next business lead will come from, it’s more important than ever to network online and offline. Using so many social media sites and attending so many networking events can have a way of making one feel fractured and pulled in too many different directions. This series will focus on how to better organize and focus your networking efforts.

The first place we’ll start is your desk. You know that stack of business cards you have stuffed in the drawer? How do you get those contacts onto your desktop where they can actually do you some good?

The do-it-yourself approach:

If you have an iPhone 3GS, you can use the Business Card Reader application by SHAPE Services.

Or you use the NeatReceipts NEAT Business Cards to scan all your business cards into your computer. It also installs a button in Outlook and ACT to scan directly into those files, if you use those programs.

If you can’t be bothered to scan in all your old business cards yourself, there are services that will do it for you.

The please-do-it-for-me approach:

Shoeboxed will scan, enter, and organize your business cards as well as those pesky receipts for expense reports and taxes. Then you view it all on your online account. You can import your contacts to Outlook, Address Book, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Gmail and other programs. And you can send your receipts to Quickbooks, Excel, PDF, Quicken, FreshBooks, Outright.com and Evernote.

Cloud Contacts will scan or transcribe your business cards, too. Then you can use their Web interface, to access your contacts from anywhere at anytime. You can import your contacts to your iPhone or BlackBerry, your email application, plus Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, SalesForce, Highrise, and Plaxo.

No matter how you tackle that stack of business cards, you’ll feel a whole lot better knowing you took the first step toward making the most of all those contacts you’ve met over the years. Because the best way to keep all those contacts together isn’t with a rubber band.

Corporate social media networks: a good deed or a drag?

Hachette Filipacchi Media (HFM), a New York-based publishing company, has launched an internal social media network. The New York Observer quotes a HFM memo to employees, which read in part: “The goal of this online community, which functions like Facebook, is to bring us closer together and establish new relationships.”

After reading that memo, you have to wonder how many employees’ first thought was along the lines of, “Do I really have to ‘friend’ the loud mouth in cubical D and the snob in cubical S?” Apparently there was at least one immediate naysayer. An HFM employee e-mailed the Observer with this message: “The idiocy is mind-blowing. As if we need more distractions during our workday. Good lord.”

But there could be an upside to having this network in place. As the Observer points out, it could help bring together employees at HFM, a media giant that has had to downsize. In fact, according to Peter Bradwell, who conducted a study on social networks in the workplace, these networks actually can help businesses maintain stability by giving employees more freedom and flexibility.

So, you might say that the moral of the story is that if your company has launched its own social media network, or has one in the works, it’s best to go with the flow. Having to communicate a little more with the loud mouth in cubical D could help save the company, and possibly your job.

It’s okay to postpone that post

It’s a tenant of social media that we should make frequent posts on sites like Twitter and Facebook. But it might be time to rethink that strategy. I admire people who contribute relevant comments every day. But it backfires for people like me who don’t have tweet-worthy insights or news on a daily basis.

According to Richard Edelman, who leads one of the world’s largest independent public relations firms, the economic climate has made many people more cautious about their online associates. His firm recently released its latest Trust Barometer. In a recent article on AdAge.com, Edelman is quoted as saying that we’re in “a more-skeptical time.” His study indicates that the huge number of friends we can amass via social media is leading to an erosion of trust in those friends.

My first thought when I read that: The quality of the content we post on social media has a huge impact on our credibility. If we allow ourselves to post only when we have something interesting and helpful to say, maybe we can re-ignite some of that trust.

Creative Uses of Twitter: Brand Bowl

Super Bowl Sunday was a day of high expectations. We not only expected to see the best players on the field, but the best commercials during the breaks. While we indulged in beer and chips, we got to see America’s top brands put all their chips on the table. We hoped to see big ideas to match those big budgets. Some rose to the occasion. Others fell flat.

What set this year apart is that we got a chance to share our opinions of these TV spots with other people, besides those who were in earshot, thanks to Brand Bowl 2010 – the brainchild of Mullen Advertising and Radian6, a leader in social media measurement.

These companies teamed up to measure Twitter responses to commercials based on the top scoring brands, most popular, most volume, most effective, and least effective. You can read more about how they determined these categories and the final scores here.

The Kids Are Mostly Alright

When I was a kid, my big media event consisted of flipping on the TV every Saturday morning and watching as many Laurel & Hardy movies as possible. If you’re a Baby Boomer you may be able to relate. If you’re a teenager you may be muttering “lame” as you flip through your iPod. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

As much as I wish Laurel & Hardy could be part of the lives of today’s kids, I admire young peoples’ ease with social media sites and various electronic devices. That ease is reflected in the results of The Kaiser Family Foundation’s recently released study, Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. The study concluded that on a typical day, today’s 8-18 year-olds spend an average of 10 hours and 45 minutes consuming media content.

The study authors note that cell phones and other mobile devices help make it possible for these kids to be plugged in for what amounts to more than a full work day.

Many jobs of the future are likely to involve heavy use of a new crop of mobile devices and Web tools. That means young peoples’ devotion to this type of technology could help them land good entry-level jobs. But before they start job hunting, the young electronic media mavens should consider another finding from The Kaiser Family Foundation study: The kids with the heaviest media use reported getting fair or poor grades in school.

If students, parents and teachers can get together and fix that flaw, the kids will be more than alright.

How are the kids in your life using media? How has it affected their lives and yours? Let us know by clicking on Comments, below.

Creative Uses of Twitter: Tracking a Taco Truck

If you think business has been tough for you the past couple of years, imagine having to relocate every 30 minutes if you were in a residential area or every 60 minutes if you were in a commercial area?

These are the laws mobile food vendors face in and around Los Angeles. The penalties can include hefty fees, impounding of trucks, or even being shut down.

When Kogi BBQ was told to keep moving, they came up with a solution that was as creative as their Korean-Mexican dishes: they use Twitter to keep their loyal fans up-to-date about their ever-changing locations. And to keep them enticed, they have a regularly updated blog with savory pictures of their menu items.

Their social media strategy has worked so well, they currently have over 52,000 followers and expanded their business south into Orange County.

Which only begs the question: What can your business do to solve a business problem and spice up some sales with Twitter and social media? Think about it. Or better yet, ask us to think about it. An outside perspective may be just what you need to gather some fresh ideas. We’d love to help you create your own success story.

Er…”How do I find followers on Twitter?”

Logging onto Twitter is a bit like walking into a major airport terminal and wondering who to strike up a conversation with – Who do you turn to? What do you say?

Whether you’re using Twitter to market your brand, expand your professional network, or make new personal connections, you want to find followers who are a good fit for your goals. How do you find them? Tweepsearch is a great place to start. It’s a powerful search engine that culls the keywords people use in their Twitter bio profiles.

So if you’re looking for a SEO consultant, type in those words and 1,117 contacts will pop up. Professionals from all over the world, who impart their own specialized expertise and more 140 characters at a time. Want to find someone more local? Narrow down your search by city or state. Click on a profile to view more about this person – their bio, tweets, and number of followers. You’ll see if he or she is an active Twitterer or hasn’t logged in for a couple of months. If the profile looks good, you’ll need to sign into Twitter at this point in order to follow them.

Before you know it, you won’t be asking, “Where do I start?” Instead you’ll be thinking, ‘Wow, the possibilities are endless.’

A Tweet to Your Health

It’s that time of year to make earnest New Year’s resolutions about getting fit. We do it even though we know that we’ll probably stop showing up at the gym by February 1st.

But wait, here comes Twitter, making it harder to dream up excuses for not getting in shape and staying there. For example:

If you’re a smoker, you can enlist the help of Qwitter to quit the habit. This service, brought to you by Tobacco Free Florida, makes it easy to keep track of the number of cigarettes you smoke and record your feelings about the process of becoming a non-smoker. To monitor your progress, all you have to do is alert Qwitter every time you light up and Qwitter will post each smoke on a progress graph.

If you want to burn a few calories during your work day, there’s Twittercize. It delivers one tweet per hour that orders you to perform a particular exercise and describes how to do it. Each exercise takes less than a minute. A sample tweet from Twittercize: “Standing Karaoke Drills: Arms up, fast feet, cross those legs, get that heart pounding for 1 full minute!”

Twittercize won’t replace a serious gym work out, but it gets you out of your chair. And don’t forget the added benefit: with no aerobics instructors screaming at you, you get to do your sit-ups in peace.

Creative Uses of Twitter: The Laundry Room

If you’ve ever spent an entire Saturday waiting for a laundromat washer to become available, you’ll appreciate the ingenuity of Olin College student Roland Crosby. In 2007 he created a Twitter bot that tells his fellow students at the Needham, Mass. engineering college when washers and dryers are available for use at the school’s laundromat. Its Twitter name is Laundry Room. Check it out at any time of day and you’ll find a screen full of tweets that lay it on the line in single sentences such as “Two of two washers available, one of two dryers available” followed by the time and date.

Laundry Room’s bio on its Twitter profile reads, “I am a laundry room at Olin College. I have two washers, two dryers, and a condom dispenser.”

What’s to Dislike?

A couple of weeks ago, I received six requests to sign a petition for a “Dislike” button on Facebook. All came from my male friends. This made me grin. Call it stereotyping, but I immediately surmised that my women friends didn’t jump on this bandwagon because they didn’t want to be perceived as being mean or confrontational.

Personally, I was afraid I might hit the proposed “Dislike” button completely by accident. Like that embarrassing time I sent an email to all instead of just the recipient.

Then it made me think, what could these guys possibly dislike?

An invitation to play Bejeweled?
A virtual pillow fight?
A friend who uses Facebook as their personal political soapbox?
A friend who dresses up their pet pug?

Hmm, maybe this “Dislike” button isn’t such a bad idea after all. Perhaps that’s why Facebook offered it up as optional application last week. Way to go boys.