Steve Dotto here.
Thanks for joining us today.
Today our topic is Address Book Management.
Now we’ve talked in the past and we will talk in the future more about the importance
of managing our own address book, but I’m going to take a slightly different tact on
today.
Today, we’re going to take a look at how you can help others with your address.
See as important as just having your address book in order so that you can find the people
you want to communicate with when you want to communicate with them, it’s equally important
that the important people in your life can communicate with you through your preferred
channels when they want to reach back to you.
So making sure that their address book is up to date should be something that’s important
to us.
But of course we have very little control over that.
I showed you a product a couple of months ago called WriteThatName, which I really liked.
It’s basically an address book assistant that watches all of my correspondence and
email, scrapes through it on a regular basis, and pulls all of the relevant information
making sure that my address book is as up to date as possible with the people who I
correspond with.
They’ve got a great offering going.
It’s a nice service.
When I go into my account with them—by the way, there is a video on it which we have
a link to here so you can watch that video a little bit later to see the entire services—when
I take a look at the list of different tools I have in my account, they’ve also got this
one called the Add Me link which is way cool.
Here’s what it does.
It allows you to put a little link in your email signature that will automatically populate
the recipient’s address book.
Now it doesn’t do it without permission but take a look.
This is what happens.
So there’s going to be a line at the bottom of the email and when the people click on
it, it’s going to pop up a window like this that says my name, all of the relevant information,
my social networks, my email address, that sort of stuff, and a single click to add it
to my Google Contacts or into my Outlook or other address book.
It is very elegant and very stick.
But it does more than just do this in email and I will show you that in a moment.
It’s one of those tools that give a little bit more than what you might see right on
the surface.
What you have to do first of all is you have to go through and you just have to incorporate
your relevant information into the link here.
So you give your email address, any social networks that you want to have automatically
populated into people’s address book, LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
You can add all of those and then it processes it and it generates a link for you.
Now you can add some extra features like changing the color of the background of the actual
message and that sort of thing.
But this is the link here, this blue link here, this is what’s going to actually appear
in your friends’ address book.
Now you want to do two things.
First of all, you want to copy your “Add Me” link, which they walk you right through
it.
Now when we’ve done that, we can now paste it into our Gmail Settings, which means it
will now appear in our signature.
In my case, because I use Gmail as my primary account in Gmail.
Actually they make it really easy here.
If I just click here and I open that in a new tab, it will then launch Gmail Preferences
into the proper area for me.
It can save me even one extra step here.
Then I just scroll down to my Signature in my Settings.
Let’s say I want to put it right here at the top.
I want to make it very high.
I just paste it here and that link there is now available for people to automatically
populate their address book.
Very, very cool.
But it gets better.
Let me show you one other thing you can do with this.
I’m going to take a step back here and I’m going to click on the link itself so I can
see exactly what it looks like.
That’s what my link is going to look like.
I want to copy this URL here.
Because this is just a static web URL that has all of my information, if I copied this
instead of the embed code that I just did, then I’m going to go in to my Text Expander
and what I’m going to do is I’m going to create a snippet which will allow me to
then put this snippet in here.
I’m going to make the abbreviation for this snippet “myaddy” and I’m going to add
it to My Snippets.
Again, we’ve got a demo on Text Expander which you should take a look at.
It’s one of the most valuable productivity tools in my tool kit.
But by creating this snippet, now when I’m doing something like being in Twitter—let
me launch my HootSuite account here—if I am talking to somebody, direct messaging somebody
back and forth in Twitter and I want to give them my address, instead of having me when
I move this to phone or to email, instead of having to do all of the typing in of information
back and forth, I can just type in “myaddy” and it automatically puts in the link.
Of course, I would probably add that to the link here and shrink it down so that it takes
up a little less space but I’ve got the ability now to send my address to anybody
in any instant messaging form and in any communication, I can send in that link which will allow them
to autopopulate their address book.
Isn’t that cool?
I think that’s cool.
Thanks.
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I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for joining me today.
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