Dear Executive,

These two topics are closely related, because I get a lot of questions about Social Networking and another common question,“...what tools do you use?” So I’ll cover both topics and share my recommendations about some of the tools I use.

Social Networking
A year ago I had almost no involvement in Social Networking, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc. and now I get frequent inquires from clients to create a page, and place icons on their website, eNewsletter, email signatures, etc. I won’t comment on whether you should, or should not, or try to tell you how to do it—people write entire books about those topics. It should be treated like any other sales and marketing project; balance the cost against measurable benefits.

One note about many of these sites-they are frequently changing; case in point the ‘new’ Twitter. I had created a background that worked well with the ‘old’ Twitter, but not with the new Twitter. It took some time to find a description of the ‘new’ Twitter background, so I could develop the layout with confidence. (I didn’t find it on the Twitter site.) You can see the new layout by clicking the Twitter icon at the top right corner of this page. The security changes are another example of the shifting sands (quicksand) and require close monitoring.

Tools Tips
I have recently been using a very slick add-in for Outlook - xobni. If you use LinkedIn, you'll like xobni; it also works with Twitter and Facebook. It provides thumbnail pic’s of your contacts. It also aggregates and displays emails/files exchanged, and common network contacts. And, it provides the contact phone and email address...all right at your fingertips! Did I say it was FREE!

Because I do a lot of graphics work, one of my favorite tools is Snagit. One of my early TechTIPs, (07/06/05) described how to capture the entire screen or active window using PrnScrn and ALT+PrnScrn respectively. That is satisfactory for many people, but when you need to select specific content off the screen, even if it is scrolled out of sight - Snagit is the tool to use. You can try it for FREE for 30 days, the list price is $49.99, I found it on Amazon selling for $44.99.

I have clients around the world and more of them are using SKYPE VoIP for conference calls. I have been using SKYPE for several years, primarily for videoconferencing with family members, but there are other useful business applications too. SKYPE supports drag-n-drop file transfers, so if you have a file that is too large to send as an email attachment, and don't know what an FTP client is, you'll be pleasantly surprised how well SKYPE handles this task. You can do other collaborative tasks too, like WebEx. Best recommendation I can make is that my Mother loves it! She doesn't compress files when she takes pictures any more, she just throws the whole thing on SKYPE.

I always strive to guide my clients in Best Practices and how to use technology to save time, and gain efficiencies. Hopefully, you will find something in this issue that helps you.