Gmail may be the social networker’s best friend, because nothing and I mean nothing, lets you connect so quickly, easily, and thoroughly with a new network like Gmail does.
The free functions available
For one thing, you can feed any email account into your Gmail account. I run my business account and three other personal email addresses out of my Gmail account, but the person on the other end never knows. Messages come in to my business address, and when I reply, they go out from my business address.
For another, while I don’t like their Contacts functionality (it’s basic, clunky, and non-customizable), I’m willing to deal with it since their API is so widely used; I can upload my Gmail contacts with any network I join. Since those networks all search their own databases for people based on their email address, it’s an easy way to add my contacts.
(A caveat: If there are people you don’t want to connect with, please note that most networks don’t give you the ability to pick and choose before you hit that final submit button. If you don’t want to connect with a particular person — an ex, a boss, a co-worker you loathe and despise — you may want to delete their address from your list.)
Here are four ways you can use Gmail and Google Contacts to build your network.
Upload your Contacts list to your LinkedIn account. Connect with everyone you can or want (you can choose who you connect with here), and be sure to type a message that doesn’t look like the generic message LinkedIn usually sends out. Then, export your LinkedIn contacts to your desktop (LinkedIn is the only social network that will let you do this), upload it to your Gmail account, and do a Find & Merge Duplicates. Now your list of professional contacts will be clean, thorough, and complete. Do this about every 3 – 6 months.- Sync your Gmail with any other email program you might use. If you have a work email, and if it’s possible, either sync it with your Gmail, or at least download the address book and upload it to Gmail. Do a Find & Merge Duplicates to keep it cleaned out. You’ll need to do this, because you never know when you… will no longer have access to your work email. If you’ve built up some good contacts, you don’t want to lose those. Do this at least once a month.
- Get the Rapportive plugin. Rapportive works like the “Find Your Friends” feature on LinkedIn and other networks, only it does the searching on several different networks and pulls it in to your Gmail window. And since you’ve plugged in your own networks, it will look to see if you’re connected on them; if you’re not, you can connect right from there. You can also trick out your Rapportive profile to include your other profiles on YouTube, Blogger, Posterous, Flickr, and will even pull in your Klout score so other Rapportive users can see the myriad of places where you can be found. Rapportive works on Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, so if you’re still using Internet Explorer, make the switch.
- If you’ve ever seen the email footers that include icons that link to different social networks, you’ve seen WiseStamp. You can link your profile URLs to the appropriate icons and have them appear at the very bottom of your footer, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Blogger, Facebook, Google Calendar, FriendFeed, and even Delicious. Plus WiseStamp lets you put other text, including html code, into your footer. (I have a link to my book on Amazon.) Whenever you send an email, people can then connect with you at your other networks. This Gmail plugin works with Firefox and Chrome, and says it’s available for Safari, but it’s not available at the moment. However, if you’re a Safari user, create your WiseStamp footer with Firefox or Chrome, and save it in your Gmail prefs. Then you’ll have access to it when you use Gmail in Safari.
There’s a lot of added functionality that makes Gmail much more useful than all but the most robust email programs, thanks to Google’s designers and the 3rd-party designers who create their own widgets and plugins. If you don’t have a Gmail account, get one. If you have one, but you haven’t used it yet, fire it up. It’s an extremely useful program, and best of all, it’s free.
Author:
Erik Deckers is the co-owner and VP of Creative Services for Professional Blog Service in Indianapolis. He has been blogging since 1997, has been a published writer for more than 24 years, and a newspaper humor columnist for 17 years. Erik co-authored Branding Yourself: Using Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (Pearson, 2010) and also helped write Twitter Marketing for Dummies.
