Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’

Intero Cool Apps: Business Contacts, Rock-Star Style

By John Thompson | March 18th, 2011 0 Comments

Being busy is good, but it can quickly go awry as all other things in your life get tossed aside. Two of the first physical pieces of evidence here are business cards and business receipts. Who among us hasn’t simply tossed these items into a jacket or pants pocket, laptop bag or backseat? Then they become lost at sea.

Now with new services like CardMunch you can nip this behavior in the bud and become the world’s most organized Realtor when it comes to managing contacts. You’ll be the envy of all your peers. How does she manage to have so many contacts all at her fingertips?

CardMunch was recently acquired by LinkedIn, which makes it even more interesting. One can only assume there could be more synergies between the two applications down the road.

In fact, the first cool feature to come out of the acquisition is that CardMunch is now free!

CardMunch is a mobile app that works only with iPhone right now. (Sorry Android and Blackberry users!)

How it works:  You download the app from the iTunes store, then snap photos of business cards using your phone’s camera. The images are then reviewed and transcribed by actual humans (I know, right?), and the information is sent back to your phone and stored as contacts within minutes.

Amazing.

Some other cool features of this app include:

  • A rolodex-style way of flipping through your new business contacts.
  • One-tap LinkedIn invites: After a new business contact comes back to your phone via CardMunch, you have the option to click one button to request your connection to them on LinkedIn.
  • You get to choose which address book you want to store your contacts in:  the one native to your iPhone, the one provided with the CardMunch app, or both.
  • Back up: CardMunch synchs all your contact data to your account. What a lifesaver that could be should you happen to lose your phone before you’ve had a chance to synch new data.

Give it a test drive if you’re an iPhone user. If you’re on Android, you could give CamCard a try (though it’s not free). I would hang on though, as the app market moves pretty fast and I can’t imagine CardMunch is not already developing apps for other devices.

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Cool Apps: More Help for Twitter

By John Thompson | October 29th, 2010 0 Comments

We have a theme running through these weekly Cool Apps posts: making the most of your social media efforts without killing yourself. We all have limited hours in a day, which is why it’s so important to maximize our social media marketing and make what we’re doing count.

The bottom line: If you’re spending more time tweeting or facebooking than selling homes, then you’re not doing social media right. This can be tricky since a lot of social media in the beginning is a try-test-adjust cycle.

The good news is that there are many tools out there to help you. In fact, there are almost too many. We’ve already covered a few like: Social Oomph, ManageFlitter and Seesmic Desktop. But let me spotlight an old favorite in case you haven’t come across it yet: TweetDeck.

If you thought Twitter was a noisy mess the first time you used it, and also the tenth time you used it, then do yourself a favor and try TweetDeck. It’s a downloadable application that sits on your desktop (and of course there’s also an app for iPhones and Androids).

With TweetDeck, you can manage your Twitter conversations, set up columns for searches, follow specific conversations via hashtags, and even pull in your Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and other social streams. It’s meant to be your social dashboard – an easy one stop for sending out tweets, a quick glimpse at conversations you’re interested in, and checking any replies or retweets you may have missed.

By far, my two favorite business uses for TweetDeck are:

Multiple accounts: If you find yourself managing more than one Twitter handle (an account under your own name, for instance, plus maybe one that is more vertical or branded to your neighborhood), TweetDeck makes it easy to send tweets from each account without having to log out and log in under a new name each time.

Ear to the ground: As a real estate agent, you need to know what’s happening in the neighborhoods you serve. TweetDeck makes it easy to set up a search that pulls in related conversations. For example, you can set up a column for the key phrase “San Jose housing” or “San Jose real estate” or even a hashtag like #realestatetech. Then every time you launch TweetDeck you’ll see a stream of the latest tweets containing these terms. It’s a cool way to find people on Twitter who are talking about things you’re interested in.

Give it a try!

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Cool Apps: A Cure for Social Media Schizophrenia

By John Thompson | September 17th, 2010 0 Comments

If you’re out there on the social web communicating, connecting, branding, selling, you’re no doubt on at least a few – if not several – social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Manage these networks for a day and you suddenly see the need for an application that can help you pull them altogether like HootSuite or Tweetdeck.

The market for these third-party apps just keeps getting bigger – which is great for agents who may be looking for a good solution to keep it all organized. After all, the goal still is to sell real estate, not to spend all of your time figuring out your online social circles, who’s saying what and who’s responding to your messages and links.

The latest to come out is from Seesmic, which last week released a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application. The new desktop app allows users to log in to more accounts from one dashboard and customize activity through plugins for various other applications.

At launch, the available plugins will enable you to connect with Google Reader, Ning, TwitPic, Salesforce and even Zappos, to name a few. Seesmic also has set up a plugin marketplace where presumably more will be created.

The Seesmic Desktop app is all about customization, which offers users like us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we want to see and do. This enables you to pull in everything you want and get rid of everything you don’t want – making it a sort of “Swiss Army Knife” for social applications. This is really what makes it different from say TweetDeck, which is a great app for pulling in multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, but wouldn’t presently support something like Google Reader for your news feeds.

The key with social media is to try new things, test them and adjust accordingly. But as I mentioned, as real estate agents we really can’t spend the whole day logging into several different sites. The new Seesmic Desktop has a lot of promise to be the one social app you’d need to log into. Let everything else come to you there.

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Cool Apps: Don’t Be Blue, Get BatchBook!

By John Thompson | April 23rd, 2010 0 Comments

Each and every day, it seems that there’s a new social media channel on which we need to keep tabs. Whether it’s making professional connections on LinkedIn, managing our personal Facebook profiles, our “fan” pages, Twitter feeds, FourSquare checkins, not to mention email, and the things we use to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our clients, there’s an endless stream of, well…streams to monitor.

How can we do it without sacrificing our work ethic or our commitment to providing the highest quality work to our customers and clients?

BatchBook may just be your answer.

BatchBook, developed by the big thinkers over at BatchBlue Software, features contact management, social media monitoring, email forwarding, communications tracking, to-do lists, the ability to create lists, reports, and Web forms, and integrates seamlessly with Google Contacts, Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, and Zendesk. These features, combined with some of BatchBook’s unique offerings, might make it the most powerful social monitoring/CRM tool around.

First and foremost, BatchBook is a contact management powerhouse. It makes it possible for you to track your business, personal, and social media contacts and share them, if you like, with team members or coworkers. You can create a database from the ground up, or import your contacts from any of several different existing systems. BatchBook has a great feature, which they call “SuperTagging”, which you can use to create custom fields that’ll let you monitor the information that’s important to you, not just those that conform to the software.

Its social media monitoring helps keep the lines between personal and business contacts on social media channels clear. For each of your contacts, you can see their most recent tweets, blog posts, as well as their LinkedIn profile.

Another cool feature is the ability to track communications. If you want to know the last time one of your team members contacted a client, you can see it in BatchBook, whether it was an email or phone call, you’ll have a complete record of all of your communications with your clients. And with BatchBox, your emails can get forwarded directly to BatchBook and attach them to your contact, so you’ll know exactly where you stand at all times.

BatchBook gives you the ability to collect information about your clients and other business-specific information. Not only does it do that, but it gives you an easy-to-use system with customer support that’s second-to-none.

Got the contact management blues? Get BatchBook.

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How to Win Friends and Influence People – on Facebook and Twitter

By Dawn Thomas | September 17th, 2009 0 Comments

Harry Potter aside – I’d guess that many people today would cite Dale Carnegie’s classic book  “How to Win Friends and Influence People” as one of the most influential books in their lives. But it was originally published way back in 1951 – when the average home cost $16,000, a gallon of gas cost 27 cents, and “high tech” meant CBS experimenting with color television broadcasts.

How does Dale Carnegie’s classic hold up to today’s Twitter generation? Really well!

The first part of the book focuses on personal relationships – and it is as relevant to Social Media in the 21st century as it is to our in-person relationships today.   It recommends-

  • Never criticize, condemn or complain. With the Internet-  you can rant, rave, and ignite flame-wars more publicly and permanently than ever before.  But really.  As a consumer – what do you want?   One really awesome Palo Alto restaurant recommendation from Yelp! or 15 rotten reviews?
  • Become genuinely interested in other people. Carnegie recommends that we remember people’s birthdays and other important details.  Today – this is easier than ever.   Reconnect with your best friend from third grade, send an instantaneous birthday message via Facebook, join a tribe of left-handed ukele players on Ning.   It’s never been easier to add a personal touch to the lives of our friends, family, and colleagues.  Carnegie would approve.
  • Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. Carnegie was ahead of his time.  Focusing on the other people’s interests is the golden rule of Twitter.   If he were around today, I doubt you’d find Carnegie only promoting his webinars and ads for acquiring 37,000 followers in 12 minutes on Twitter.
  • Be a good listener. So how do you listen on the Internet?  Subscribe to blogs & post useful comments and questions.    Follow people on Twitter & read their tweets for a bit before jumping in.   Respond to requests on Linked-in for recommendations and introductions to help a friend’s job search.
  • Make the other person feel important. One of the cool things about the Internet is that you can say “Thanks” in so many ways.  You can Retweet on Twitter, you can share someone’s event on Facebook or Linked-in to help them promote it,  You can Digg an awesome webpage, and of course –you can say “thanks” directly to the person.
  • Use Names whenever possible.   In the olden days, a business card only needed space for your name, physical address, and telephone number.  Now we squeeze in our fax, email address, Facebook vanity URL,  Twitter handle,  Linked-in profile, Website address, and  Blog address.    In bold 4 point font.   And still – one of the sweetest things is to have someone personally address something to you with a unique touch so that you know it genuinely comes from them.
  • Smile. Positive enthusiastic energy transmits as easily over the Internet as the telephone.    We would just need to give Carnegie a dictionary to interpret our sign language. LOL!  :0)

Win friends & influence people – in social media and in-person.

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