I live in my email client. Probably 85% of my written communications with the outside world are done with email. I'd bet it's the same for you.
I also do a little bit on social media, mostly LinkedIn with a little Facebook and Twitter thrown in. But I have many business contacts who are much more active on social media.
If you are in sales, you know that a big part of your selling job is establishing a relationship with your customers, especially if you are in the kind of sales that has the same customers over a long period of time. If you've read any of Harvey Mackay's books, you know about the Mackay 66, a set of questions designed to help you get to know your customers better (http://www.harveymackay.com/tools/mackay66.cfm). In sales parlance it's called building rapport.
There are tools to help you integrate your email usage with your clients' social media activity. They are very useful to help you expand the range of inputs you have about what's going on in your clients' lives.
The first one I tried, but gave up on about a year ago because it lacked Outlook integration at the time, is Gist. They've since added Outlook integration as well as integration with Salesforce.com CRM.
Gist (http://www.gist.com) takes your email contacts, your streams of emails sent and received, and your social media contacts and combines them into a single, consolidated database of the people you know and communicate with. Then, from the various social media, including blogs and some sites I normally don't frequent, they create a dashboard of activity, even emailing you a summary if you want. Gist makes it possible to proactively keep up with your contacts, perhaps responding, or reaching out when appropriate.
I have to say I tried Gist, found it interesting but since it wasn't integrated with Outlook not hugely useful since it was another step I needed to take to use it. I recently tried Gist again, and would find it useful in integrating various social media channels but found it hard to "tune" to present what is important to me. It's default settings highlighted people and companies I'm not sure were really relevant. But I'm sure that if I were to spend more time with it, letting it know what is important, its daily summary email would be much more useful.
The other tool I have been using for about a year, is Xobni (http://www.xobni.com). If you are wondering how they came up with such an unpronounceable name, it is inbox spelled backwards. I switched to Xobni because it integrated with Outlook before Gist had that option.
I have stayed with Xobni because it is really useful. One feature I wouldn't have expected to use much, because it overlaps a feature built into Outlook, is its ability to index and search my Outlook PST files. That's a big deal for me because I have pretty much every email I have sent or received since 2004 when I switched over to Outlook. Before you panic, at the end of each year I do an archive to push the emails from that year into its own PST file. I also travel a lot. So when I leave town, I use Microsoft's free SyncToy (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=c26efa36-98e...) to copy my PST files onto my notebook. When I return, it's the reverse back onto my desktop. That really messes with the indexing of both Outlook, driven by desktop search, and Xobni. But with Xobni, I can easily tell it to reindex, "finding" all those emails sent/received while I was traveling.
Xobni works as an add-in to Outlook, adding a display pane to your main Outlook screen. I use a dual monitor arrangement on my desktop, leaving a whole wide-screen monitor dedicated to Outlook. There is enough real estate that I can have my folders on the left, my inbox along the top, a preview pane below that (99% of my emails I read in the preview pane), a Xobni panel to the right of the inbox/preview and finally my to-do panel on the very right.
When I have an email hightlighted, the Xobni panel shows a picture of the person (from one of the supported social media profiles), contact information, recent email conversations, files or links we might have exchanged, that person's network (combined from all supported social media profiles) and a tabbed option to view that person's various social media profiles (or twitter stream). In other words, a lot of information that I can use when communicating with them.
In my business to business use of Xobni, one "social network profile" that is interesting is the Hoovers profile of the company, derived from the person's email domain. Obviously if you are communicating with someone using AOL or Gmail, that isn't useful (or even populated), but otherwise you have basic information about the company as well as the person.
I like the way Xobni puts almost everything about a contact in one place whenever I am looking at an email to/from that person. I do miss Gist's proactive notification, especially if it were turned better. I guess that's one feature of Plaxo I find so useful. It alerts me about birthdays in my network letting me easily send eCards and giving me reasons to stay in touch with an extended network.
There are great tools out there to bring social networking into every day business communications, what tool, or group of tools, is working best for you? If you answered none, it's time to try out one of these tools.
