New Social CRM Add-Ons for Outlook, Gmail, & Your Inbox

And they won’t cost you a dime (smile). It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. I’ve jumped into doing the networking thing full-time and that has been fun. All three of our groups are growing and I have some pretty significant projects that I am collaborating on that will make our groups even better. Additionally, after a “training” absence of over 20 years, I will be conducting a workshop on Social Media Basics in conjunction with Action Coach and which is being sponsored by Key Bank. This occurs on March 18 and you can click here to learn more and/or to register.

It has been some time since I have done any posts on social media applications so let’s get caught up a little in that area ……

Social CRM:

Outlook decided this past week that they had better get jiggy with the program and introduced something that they call “Social Connector” which right now only connects with LinkedIn although they did announce plans to also do so with FaceBook and …MySpace? MySpace? Maybe I’m missing something with that (smile). Oddly, nothing was said about Twitter. It’s fairly obvious that the folks over at Microsoft want to offer something of their own to compete with a fantastic existing add-on … Xobni. This also struck me as being somewhat unusual in that LinkedIn already offers its own “LinkedIn Toolbar for Outlook”. At any rate, I did load the application and was pleased to see that it did not conflict with either my existing toolbar or my beloved Xobni which, by the way, has started to roll out its beta application for BlackBerry. I did receive an invitation for this but am moving away from Outlook and more toward Gmail so have chosen to pass on that at least at this time.

At any rate, Microsoft’s new social connector does show promise. Unlike Xobni, it will search on all email addresses identified in the “to” and “from” fields on any given email. It also activates when using your contact list. And, it slowed my computer down significantly while it seemed to constantly be searching for this information and seemed to never want to give up. There was some confusion in early information released about this product as being available for Outlook 2010 only. I use 2007 and you simply need to download a 32 bit utility to facilitate the interface first and it loaded up and worked fine. At least, as fine as it seemed to work. Me, I’m sticking with Xobni which already offers FaceBook and Twitter in addition to LinkedIn.

Gmail keeps getting better and better as email but it is worthless as any kind of CRM let alone a social CRM. I did run across something interesting last week called Rapportive which bills itself as a slick new Social CRM tool for Gmail. While I’m not convinced of that claim, it certainly is way better than nothing which is what we have now. The article does make comparisons to Xobni but the reality does not even come close. The “Social” segment of this is that it will search networks and then show you a profile of that individual including their photo, titles, and links to a variety of sites including FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more where it is able to identify that individual’s membership. The “CRM” part of this is …. Are you ready? A notepad for each contact. My level of enthusiasm overwhelms me (smile). It is fair to say that I understand this application to still be in beta but, it does seem to have challenges identifying all networks that this individual may belong to (or even the individual themselves) and my guess is that this is caused by the fact that a lot of people use different email addresses with their different networks. Xobni, at least, does try to help you identify accounts correctly in this occurrence by suggesting several profiles that may be the person you seek. Rapportive also lists the contact’s age and I am not sure where it is getting that. I have also seen where it seems to drop 10 years from your actual age when it does this reporting.  At my advanced age, and for that single feature alone, I am nominating Rapportive for “Best New App of 2010″. LOL.

Social Network Digests:

A lot of folks have found Feedera to be an invaluable tool and I would be counted among those. This past week I found a new tool called Nutshell Mail and this one of the coolest applications that I have seen in a good long while. What makes this neat is that it integrates with, and monitors all of, your major social networks and then emails you a digest of their latest tweets, updates, status updates, etc. and you have a tremendous amount of control over what type of information that you wish it to send you and how often you wish that to be delivered to your inbox. The interface is beautiful and interactive allowing you to initiate things like retweets and comments directly from the email itself. It also tells you who has chosen to unfollow you on Twitter since your last email update and will allow you to return the favor. Get this …. when you choose to unfollow someone who has already dropped you like a bad habit. it creates a tweet for you to send out that looks something like this “@xxxxx When you look back at the ruin that your life has become, you will regret the day that you chose to unfollow @craigmjamieson“. I laughed so hard I almost wet my pants!

Well, that’s about all the time I have for reporting right now but that’s o.k. because I have probably overstayed my welcome with you (smile). Thanks so much for visiting!

Craig

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