How do you make sure your contacts can always get a hold of you? 

First, set up your free AddMe link!

Then, you have more possibilities than you might have first imagined!

1) Add your AddMe link to your signature in your gmail settings.

2) Post your AddMe link in a Linkedin status update (and if you’re not sharing much on linkedin here’s the “how-to” and 7 great dos and dont’s).

3) If you change jobs, addresses, phone numbers etc, here’s the best way to share that info with your contacts.

4) Add one of these widgets to your website/blog/anywhere by personalizing the code below:

    or  

• Insert your specific AddMe url where it says “ADDME_LINK”  (ex: this is what Brad pastes)
• Change addme1.png to addme2.png if you want the longer ribbon image.
• Change right/left/bottom/top to align the image on your site.

 
 
I’m here should you have any questions!

Cheers,

Brad

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EVER been scrolling through your phone’s contacts and wonder who some of the people are and how they got there, or wonder why you see them 3 times ?!?!?!  

You might just have ADDRESS BOOK OVERLOAD !!!!

I certainly have been there ;-) and fixing that is what I’ll be addressing in this post.

 
 
 
 
1) First, backup to be safe. 
 
Making massive changes, and syncing two similar address books, if not done carefully, can create havoc on your address book.  Backup for google contacts (export), and here for iphone.

2) If you have already synced your iphone with google contacts
 
Then go to step 3 UNLESS you have duplicates on your iphone.  If you have duplicates (probably from a bad sync between two similar address books or a loop), then either purchase a de-duper app, or (and this is what I did)

i) Stop the sync (VERY IMPORTANT… otherwise it could delete your contacts both on the iPhone and online)

ii) And if all of your iphone contacts are in google contacts (which they should be if you’ve been using a two-way sync), then delete all of the contacts on your phone with this app or alternative ways as explained here, and then proceed to step 3.

 
If you haven’t synced your iphone with google contacts, here’s why you should:
 

• What if your contact changes their phone number?  How annoying is it to have to change it online, on your computer, AND your phone… or worse, have different info everywhere?  
• And what if you add a new contact to your phone?  Wouldn’t it be swell if that number was automatically and instantly online too?

Sync relieves you of these worries as it automates it all, making sure that all of your contacts online, phone and computer are exactly the same.   It is VERY much worth the 5-minute effort to set up, so do so now with Google CardDav, iCloud or soocial. 

3) Improve and Make sure your address book is up to date. 

Open Google Contacts now as it’ll be your home for the next 5-10 minutes.

4) Get the most complete info and automate any changes in your contacts
 
At this point, you’re ready to improve and update your address book, and to automate that process, WriteThat.name analyzes your incoming emails to update your contacts’ information. If you’re not signed up for WriteThat.name yet, I encourage you to test it out for a month for free.

Also, to make sure you have all of the info on your contacts, consider purchasing Flashback from your WriteThat.name setting to reach back a year or 5 years into your email history.

5) Dedupe
 
In google contacts, do a “merge” by clicking on the “more” button at the top.  You’ll be presented with duplicate contacts or folks that have more than 1 email address.  Make them one!  

Also Scrubbly, a 3rd party service does this well.  

6) Choose your MyContacts. 

This is the big step that’ll make a difference on your iPhone.
 

• You may have people in MyContacts that you will never call.
• Alternatively, there may be people for whom you have no phone number, and as google automates who is in your MyContacts, you need to now manually chose who deserves to be there.
• You can of course have TONS of “other contacts” in Google, but do you really need email addresses with no telephone numbers on your phone?

 

So, open up the MyContacts label in google contacts and remove the MyContacts label for all of the contacts you don’t want on your phone like so (…hopefully it’s not 1000s but 100s!)

7) Watch the magic happen 

As you’re synced (or soon will be), when you remove someone from MyContacts, they will then be taken off your phone (as long as it’s a two-way sync which is the case with Google CardDav, iCloud and Soocial).  It might take 5-15 mins to show up depending on your iphone settings, but from here on out, you’re set and with those contacts that matter most to you.

Just in case…. Google Restore

Besides your backup, if you run into any problems at any point, Google Contacts’ Restore is VERY powerful.  You can restore to the exact minute any change you made, and this once saved me hours as I accidentally deleted a group from my computer’s address book after a ton of changes online…

Feel free to share your sync stories, mishaps, services, apps, hacks and other tips for our readers below!

Cheers,

Brad

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Last week WriteThat.name was featured in a great Linkedin article by Ilya Pozin.

10 Tools To Add An Extra Hour To Your Day

Beyond being alongside skype, activeinbox, buffer and unrollme, what most blew us away about the article was its impact, and how long it sustained attention.

We’ve felt very lucky to get a nice amount of press over the past year, but what we’ve never seen is an article that somehow keeps going, keeps beings shared, and keeps driving incredible and sustained traffic over 3, 4 days.  Normally a big article gets a 3-12 hour explosion of traffic and sign-ups and then we go back to organic user adoption growth.

Now, many folks who follow tech news will know that this is directly in line with Linkedin’s announced strategy— to become the king of business content, and not so much just another social media for professionals.  When I first read about it, I thought… makes sense but how are they going to compete with the likes of professional journalists and sites whose main goal is producing quality articles hour after hour?

Now that I’ve seen it in action, I think I understand.  They’re attracting top-level CEOs and part-time journalists (and even Arianna Huffington) to produce content which then drives their own recognition up because of immense internal shares on Linkedin (as it is a social network, and the only current “big social network” where you can read/comment/promote entire articles (and not just intros/140 words + links).

I’m impressed.  Whereas Facebook and Twitter seem to draw a ton of social media and marketing attention, I have a strong feeling that Linkedin is really onto something here…

Whaddya think?

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Want Your Gmail, Outlook Address Book Automagically Updated?

Get your 30 day-trial of WriteThat.name now!

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I’m actually kind of a fan on the new gmail compose window.

(made default last week by google)

And you?

For certain things it does seem more nimble and the most clear user case for me is having 2 email exchange contexts visible in a single screen.  Example: often I’ll need to search for information in one email exchange to share in another I’m composing, or changing a contact’s info while writing them.  

Before, this required opening another gmail window (waiting for it to load… searching… etc).

Otherwise, the static window seems better than the old compose window where sometimes you had to scroll up and down to change formatting or hyperlink something, attach etc.  Of course the UI is a bit tighter and it’s been growing on me, but…

THE BIGGEST things I’ve been missing since trying out the new compose window is one of the 3 favorite email solutions shared here on the blog a year ago.  

Rapportive 

 
 
If you’re not using Rapportive(the social CRM gmail plugin) you have to try it out today, and it is the one reason I’m going back to the old compose window.  With the new compose window, there’s no sidebar present and no place for rapportive to show a photo of whom I’m emailing and what they’ve been saying on social media.  Bummer!  As these small details really help to connect with the folks you’re exchanging with. 

I couldn’t agree more and even retweeted Dmitri (who, by the way, is the growth hacker for Sanebox, another email solution we mentioned last year!).  Rapportive is not a tool I want to work without, so GOODBYE new gmail compose window, which brings me to this:

Customer Relations thought:  ”People are way more focused on what you take away than what you give them” on Seth Godin’s great post on “How to Downgrade”  Should we even mention “Google Reader” or the similar iPhone Maps ordeal.  Sometimes these kinds of decisions are strategic, but Google tends to be fairly good about leaving options and not going back on its promises ie Google Contacts 1.0 is still live as is the Old Gmail.  Google Apps is still free for the first users (like Kwaga)… but will this default compose window soon become the only compose window 100%?  We’ll see. 

Geeky entrepreneur thought:  wouldn’t be amazing to know how many of Gmail’s millions of users clicked back to the older version?  I’ll give them credit where credits is due, though… they allow that, whereas with Maps on the iphone… well that’s a whole other story.  Likewise, I wonder what % rapportive server requests have dropped because of this new compose window.

SO… what are your thoughts on the new window? Using it or already gone back to the old version?

UPDATE: Gmail has since designed the new compose to center itself in the interface thus presenting the ad sidebar that Rapportive conveniently slips into… so I’m back to trying it out!

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New product encourages email correspondents to save the sender’s customized contact details in a single click

 April 3rd, 2013 – Paris: WriteThat.name, a cloud-based, cross-platform service that automatically updates addressbooks for Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce and Lotus Notes has added a new product to its contact management suite called AddMe. AddMe is like a virtual business card in a link: AddMe users include this personal link within their email signature for their correspondents to add contact details to their address book in a single click.

AddMe joins WriteThatname’s flagship services that discover and automatically update valuable contact information by scanning email exchanges.  The three  products address three key issues in contact management for professional and personal email users:

• The consistent, silent assistant that collects contact details from your current and future correspondents: Writethatname
• The personal time manager that revisits email history to update all of the contacts you never had the time to take care of: Flashback
• AND NOW, the proactive sharer: empowering your correspondents to save  the right contact information in one click: AddMe

“There are very few if any secure solutions for building, organizing and efficiently expanding a contact database,” says Philippe Laval, CEO of Kwaga, the parent company of WriteThat.name. “AddMe is an exciting addition for us as it allows our current clients and future clients to be more proactive in sharing their details.  Having someone’s telephone number lost in an email somewhere is clearly not the same as having it in your address book available on the go, and that’s why AddMe is so important for anyone who wants their correspondents to always be able to get a hold of them.”

AddMe will retail for $4.99. The fee will be waived for the 30-day product launch period here: https://www.writethat.name/push-contact-details-to-email-relations/

 Screenshots:

Step 1: Add your information

Step 2 – Verify your information

Step 3 – Customize your AddMe Link

Check out the result: What does it look like in your email signature

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You’ve heard of Flashback…

NOW INTRODUCING….

Thanks to your feedback, we’ve decided to really step up the game and do something OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD. Just imagine— knowing who you’ll be emailing 2 weeks from now, a year from now, in 5 years.  It’s going to change the way the world does business!!!

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There’s a lot of buzz around email and innovation these days, and at the same time, it remains a tool AND like any other tool it needs to be used efficiently or else… it isn’t efficient.  
 

Hence these 10 signs you’re rocking out email!

1) You’re too busy elsewhere PRODUCING, CREATING, SELLING, TEACHING, LEARNING to read your email right now… and more than a few times a day at most!
 

2) Your email isn’t open right now