Make GMail Social with Rapportive
A few weeks ago I visited an old friend who has spent his entire career in outside sales. He asked me what my company did so I explained that we provide clients with technology solutions to business challenges; however, as soon as I mentioned Social Media he crossed his arms and got a sour look on his face. I asked him what was wrong, and he said “Social Media is just a way for people to tell their friends what they had for lunch. Who cares???”
Unfortunately my friend’s opinion of Social Media is not uncommon, although it is misguided. Social Media is one of the newest ways for people to communicate although some have refused to try it and thus don’t understand it. While Social Media is revolutionizing how humans are able to connect with each another, it’s still in its basic form, just another set of tools for people to use to communicate just like email or telephones. And while there are those who use it to broadcast their daily culinary choices, there are millions of people who use social networking for business – just ask the 59 million Americans who use LinkedIn or the 4 million businesses with Facebook fan pages. But what if you’re busy? What if you don’t have time to keep up with Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and every other social network out there? Luckily, Rapportive is here to help.
Rapportive, pictured below, is a plugin for your web browser that consolidates social information about your contacts right into GMail. Not only does it list your contacts’ name, title, and company right next to GMail’s “Compose” or “Reading” panes, but it also shows you their profile picture, latest status updates from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more.
As you can see above, Rapportive shows me all the networks I currently have connected to the plugin. If I’m viewing one of my contacts, it shows their information instead of mine as well as updates for the social networks that contact participates in. I now have an easy way of keeping up with my colleagues’ and clients’ social updates without having to dedicate time to checking Facebook and Twitter for them. If I’m emailing someone Rapportive will even identify when I’m not yet connected to that contact on a given social network and show me a button I can use to connect with them in one single click!
Rapportive was purchased by LinkedIn (NYSE: LNKD) earlier this year but so far it is a free product and supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Mailplate (but not Internet Explorer or Opera). To get started, all you have to do is go to the Rapportive install page and add the plugin to your favorite web browser, then link Rapportive to each of your social networks. All in all installation and setup take only five minutes, depending on how many social networks you plan on connecting.
If you end up installing Rapportive come back here and let us know what you think about it. Are there other tools you use to keep up with your business contacts? Leave a comment below and let us know – we’d love to hear from you!
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The Great Twitter Experiment – Listening for a Change
Yep, we’re doing an experiment. The Great Twitter experiment. You see, large companies like Coke already had global brand recognition before they engaged in social media so it’s no surprise that they were able to quickly grow to over 26 million Facebook fans and tens of thousands of Twitter followers. But what about the the little guy? How can “Joe the Plumber” or any other small business owner grow their social media following? And more importantly, how can the small business owner grow a quality following? The one word answer is “relationships”. And hopefully we’re going to prove that.
Why relationships? Because that’s what social media is all about. Sure, social media gives anyone a platform from which to spread the gospel of their business or their product, but who’s going to listen? Established brands like Coke have spent billions of dollars to acquire their customer base and build their brand. How can a small business do that on a small business budget? Well, it’s not easy but it’s simple:
- Listen to what people are saying in and around your industry.
- Ask questions.
- Make some new contacts who share some of your interests.
- Grow relationships.
- Share your expertise.
Growing your following is so simple in fact, that for the month of May Denton Business Solutions is going to be listening for a change. Rather than sharing content that we think would be useful to small business owners we’re going to be using the Twitter “Search” feature to actively listen to what people are saying and try to learn more about their technology challenges. We’ll also be actively engaging with other people who work within some of our core competencies such as Google Analytics, Social Media, etc and work on developing some new peer relationships as well.
What we won’t do is self-promote. We won’t post a link to our website or blog unless it’s in direct response to a person’s question. We won’t retweet other people’s posts, and we won’t be tweeting any new content unless it’s in response to another person’s Tweet we found through searching on keywords. We also won’t seek out new followers. We won’t redeem any Twiends seeds or ask anyone to follow us. We will continue to auto follow-back.
In summary, if we knew what the results of our experiment would be we wouldn’t do it. Over the course of The Great Twitter Experiment we’ll be checking several metrics. First off, the rate of Twitter growth, our Klout scores, and website traffic. Secondly, we’ll be tracking other interaction escalation from Twitter to e-mail, phone, RSS, or web traffic. All in all we’re pretty excited about what the month may bring. If you have questions, comments, or predictions let us know. Otherwise let the Great Twitter Experiment begin!
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