Steve Dotto here. How the heck are you this fine day? Me? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m
an embarrassingly high 9, maybe even 9 ½ out of 10. Things are going pretty good. I’m
enjoying things. Now one thing that I don’t necessarily enjoy is the frustration that
I occasionally have around my contact manager. We end up with duplicate contacts. We’ve
all got issues with contacts, don’t we? You’ve got them. It’s like calendars and
contacts, you just can’t get them to work properly.
Well, there was a tool that I really liked that was part of my contact manager tool kit.
It was called Rapportive and every time I was in Gmail, Rapportive would give me nice
contextual information about the people that I was writing to and corresponding with. I
loved Rapportive but then Rapportive was bought by LinkedIn and LinkedIn is changing Rapportive
to make it work better for LinkedIn, which isn’t really making it work better for Steve
and for most of you. A lot of us are kind of a search to find the Rapportive replacement
in our life. I might have found it. It’s called FullContact. This is it right here.
I think it is worth having a good look at. So today, we’re going to talk about contact
management utilities, especially for Gmail but you can use it on other places, today
on DottoTech. Way back in the way back machine, we found
this very cool tool, and we’ve done videos on it in the past, called Rapportive, one
of my favorite tools as a matter of fact, one of my favorite utilities. It such a good
utility that it was bought by LinkedIn. They saw how valuable it was. They bought it and
now they’re changing it and it’s not as good anymore. It’s no fault of LinkedIn,
I’m sure. I’m sure they’re trying to make it better but they’re trying to make
it better for LinkedIn, not necessarily trying to make it better for Steve and for you. So
a lot of us who used Rapportive have been whining about this ad nauseam and we’re
also looking for a better solution. I came across FullContact and FullContact
seems to philosophically be looking at helping us manage our contacts in a really rich and
fulfilling way so it is worth a look. Look, right there at the top it says FullContact
for Gmail. They also have full on Gmail integration which is exactly what I’m looking for. But
you don’t have to use FullContact with Gmail. You can use it outside of Gmail should you
choose. Now what FullContact is basically a replacement
contact or address book that allows you to sync your other address books to it. It acts
as an address book hub and address back center for all of your different address books. What
it will do is it will sync all of our contacts between our different address books, very
valuable, especially if it does a little duplicating them and that sort of stuff. Awesome. It says
it will fix duplicates. It will keep all of our contacts up to date which is a cool service.
It’s constantly browsing things in the online world. This is where that social media integration
comes in constantly. If it knows what my Facebook profile is and it knows about my Twitter account,
it’s constantly looking to update information with individuals, very valuable. It will clean
up your contacts. It will also do some importing of business cards. They put it up as a fairly
important feature. I’m not sure it’s such an important feature for me. Most of us now
use our smartphones to import our business cards anyways but they do have that feature.
It’s free to set up. You can sign in with Google or you can create an account. When
you sign up, you will end up in the web interface. This is the FullContact interface on the web.
We haven’t gone into how it works with Gmail yet. We’ve just basically kind of been setting
up our account at this point. At this point, everything that we’re showing you is free.
I still just have the free account so everything I’m going to show you today is included
in the free account. Now what they do is they kind of give you
main tasks, two things that you can be doing here in the center of the screen: reviewing
your new contacts, cleaning up any possible duplicates. Then they give us notification
as in nine hours to sync. One of the benefits of the premium software, the premium version
is it does real time syncing. It’s constantly bringing your contacts up to date. The free
version syncs I think every 24 hours. Now here’s a list of all of my contacts
but what’s interesting is if we go to the left-hand side into the Tools, we can get
to these main areas like going in and dealing with our duplicates and all that sort of stuff.
But they also have the ability to add tags. I am a big fan of tags. I use them on Evernote
a lot. I use them in my CRM, in my customer relationships management system. Tags allow
us to create context around different groups of people so you can apply multiple tags.
If you have a person that is say a blogger that you follow and they’re also personal
friends, you can give them two tags, blogger and personal friend so that when you’re
sorting just personal friends they will come up, when you’re sorting on just bloggers,
they will come up but if you’re looking for specifically bloggers who are personal
friends, they might be the only one that comes up. So it gives you the ability to be able
to search by adding these tags for context which I find to be very valuable.
This is the overall interface. The idea is this is going to sync between our different
address books but where it really comes to value as far as I’m concerned is when we’re
actually in our email and when we’re dealing with our day to day activities. I’m going
to jump over to my email. What I’ve got here is my update email. That’s why there
are so many messages in it. Don’t worry. But I want to show you how it looks when we’re
using it because this is where the rubber meets the road. When you’re in your email
and you’re actually writing an email and communicating with someone, that’s when
you want all of the different context-sensitive information that FullContact is going to provide
for us. So I’m just going to choose somebody here,
somebody like Chris Brogan. I follow Chris Brogan, I read all of his blogs and I subscribe
to his newsletter. This is what an email looks like when it comes in from Chris Brogan to
me. In the right-hand side, this is my FullContact screen and this gives me my contact information.
Now I have added Chris to my address book. One of the reasons that I added him to my
address book is not because I plan to write to him all that much but instead so that he’s
white-listed as far as my email is concerned so that his emails always get through to me
and aren’t classified as spam or anything else. That’s why I added him as a contact.
We can see here if we look at the icons here, it’s got some little tools that allow me
to do things. If he wasn’t a contact already, it would allow me to add him here as a contact.
If I click here, it will bring up his contact information. All of the different information
that it has in the contact manager, it brings up including the tags that I’ve added to
him down here at the very bottom. I’ve also added notes. You can add notes to each of
your contacts which is a tremendously valuable feature. That’s one of the things that they’ve
taken out of Rapportive that’s making people go a little bit crazy. You used to be able
to add notes to people. Now you can add notes using FullContact.
Here I can add new tags. In the tags that I can create, for instance I already can give
him the blogger tagger and maybe I’m doing some free webinar consulting, I might add
that tag. So you can add tags or create new tags here so that you can sort and organize
people as you move ahead. There are the tags that I’ve applied to him. It’s cutting
it off a little. Graphically, it’s not quite perfect how it sits in the side bar in my
version of Chrome but for the most part, it’s certainly usable as it sits here.
The other thing you can do is you can schedule a calendar invite. If it’s a person that
you normally are corresponding with an awful lot, in this case not kind of like a celebrity
type or somebody that you’re reading about, if it’s an actual business contact you can
quickly create a calendar invite to invite them to a meeting or you can start a Google
hangout right from here as well. So you’ve got some nice additional information happening
here. You can also see access to all of the different
networks. Now Chris has an awful lot of different social networks that he’s engaged in and
you can access any of his accounts right from here. You can jump to the Twitter feed or
jump to the Facebook page right from here. This gives you the different contextual information
that you’re looking for around a contact for free. There it is with Chris.
Let me take you to a person who maybe I have not yet signed up with. Oh there, Rob Hatch.
I’ve just started following him. Here is another blogger that I’m starting to read
his newsletter. This is how a person will look when you’ve just first received contact
with them. If I want to add him now to my contacts, I click here and it creates a contact.
So I do that and now he’s been added to my contacts. He’s been added to my FullContact
contacts. He won’t be added to my Gmail contacts until the sync happens which I think
notification has told us is in nine hours. So nine hours from now, Rob will also be in
my Gmail which means that as I start to write an email, it will autopopulate his address,
etc. It will do all those sorts of other things. It constantly is looking for new information
out on web. It’s constantly trying to update information so over time, it will start to
pull down Rob’s social networks that he’s involved in and I’ll have the same kind
of rich information that I’m getting say on Chris Brogan, for example. So this works
on multiple levels for us. It’s constantly trying to update information for us. It’s
looking to fix duplicates. It’s syncing our contacts between multiple address books
which is a fairly large issue and it’s doing all of that for free.
If you want more information, just drop by the FullContact site. I’ll have a link in
the show notes below. For me, I’ve had it now for three or four weeks. I’m liking
it. It doesn’t do everything that Rapportive does. Graphically, it doesn’t tuck in quite
as well in Chrome. At least it doesn’t look quite as good as Rapportive used to look but
I’m sure they’ll fix up those user interface things. The adding of tags and the ability
to integrate notes is crucial. That makes it a very valuable tool as far as I’m concerned.
The ability to quickly just add and create a calendar invite, that sort of thing is also
tremendously valuable. Take a look. Think that you might indeed like it.
I hope you found our video today to be useful. There are three ways that you can stay in
touch with us here on DottoTech. First, please subscribe to this channel. Second, subscribe
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Finally, DottoTech is a community-funded channel. We are funded through the support of you,
our viewers, through the site, Patreon. Drop by Patreon and take a look. It’s a very
cool concept. That’s really it for today. Till next time, I’m Steve Dotto. Have fun
storming the castle.