A person emailed me about small town retail development a while back. I recommended he talk to Mandy Vavrinak and listed her email address. He emailed back, asking for more information about her. I thought to myself, “What more could he need?”
 |
| That’s me with Mandy Vavrinak, At the 2011 Social Media Tulsa Conference. |
If he’d been using any of the many available social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools I recommended in Tools To Get To Know Your Customers, he would have had an instant profile of Mandy. When I put my mouse pointer on Mandy’s email address in my Gmail window, Rapportive shows me her title, company, Twitter account plus recent tweets, and links to her Facebook, Flickr, and her LinkedIn profiles. Gist and other tools could do the same thing. Gmail itself has started including some similar social CRM tools.
Using a tool like this means he could have handled the situation in a very different way. He could have looked at one or two of her profiles. Then he could have asked an informed question about her business or specialty, or asked for my personal opinion. (I think she’s very smart, for the record.) He’d have learned a lot more.
New to SmallBizSurvival.com? Take the Guided Tour. Like what you see? Subscribe.
- Cheap placemaking idea: instant murals - September 11, 2020
- Refilling the rural business pipeline - July 7, 2020
- Huge vacant buildings: grants to renovate? - June 9, 2020
- Economic self defense for small towns - June 7, 2020
- The best things you can do for local businesses in light of coronavirus - March 27, 2020
- How to get more parking downtown without adding any spaces - March 7, 2020
- Exact Yeti Blue mic volume and Windows settings to reduce background noise - February 17, 2020
- Getting local businesses to cooperate with you: Shop Hopping Around Brownsville - December 16, 2019
- Survey of Rural Challenges 2019 results - December 5, 2019
- Shop Indie Local adds a new twist to tired Buy Local campaigns - November 11, 2019
Becky, thanks for your kind words and recommendation. And yep… I completely agree. Using smart tools to aggregate information just makes sense. I am still amazed when someone emails me to ask for a recommendation… which causes me to take some time and think about the request and the need… and then when I reply with my rec, the asker emails me back asking for examples of their work, or more information, etc., etc.
From now on, I will just send extraneous askers the link to this blog post!
Oy. The above comment was mine. I am not sure why it’s Unknown. Perhaps a cosmic comment on the state of my soul?
I was wondering who “Unknown” was! :D