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You’ve heard of the 6 degrees of separation I’m sure. It relates to an experiment during the 60s and 70s in the US where Stanley Milgram set about to prove that anyone was literally only 6 people away from contact.  The experiment had some success but only mildly. But let’s not let the facts get in the way of my story.  After all, the web and LinkedIn didn’t exist then.

Two weeks ago my husband and I were watching a movie on TV and the lead guy reminded me of Clint Eastwood. I wondered if it might be his son.  I googled the guy to find out information about him and wasn’t able to ascertain if he is related or not (different name and no mention of his parentage) however one of the google links led to a LinkedIn profile of the guy. And would you believe he was connected to me – 3 levels down!  I immediately sent a request to connect to him direct and introduced myself to him and why I was writing. He accepted 2 days later!  Amazing.  Who knows if it will lead to anywhere but now I’m connected to a Hollywood movie star.  woo hoo!

Tags: LinkedIn, Networking by Kathie Thomas
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Yeah, me too. And what about thanking a client for something special? You meant to but it slipped your mind and now some time has passed, it seems almost irrelevant or an after thought.

How would you like to fix that problem? You don’t even have to go to the shops to buy a card or a postage stamp or anything, you can do it completely online. You would? Hoping you would say that.

Introducing my newest service…

As a distributor for Send Out Cards and also as a Virtual Assistant, I’m in the unique position of being able to set you up with an account and then help you create your lists and set up the sending process on your behalf.

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• Create your account (there are three types available – Retail, Wholesale and Entrepreneur packages)
• Sort and import your Contact list or database
• Set up reminder services for birthdays, anniversaries or anything else you may have in your calendar
• Create and send personalised cards using your own images or the many thousand already available with Send Out Cards
• Create and maintain Campaigns for you.

You know personally what it means to you when someone takes the time to send a card to you expressing their thoughts and feelings. Now you can do the same without having to go to the shops to find the right card, write in it and then take it to the post box. It can be done completely from your computer – or mine if you want me to handle it on your behalf. Imagine… you never will forget a birthday again!

Why not try out a gift account on me and see how it works or give me a call and I’ll walk you through the process. +613 9754 8310 or email me.

Tags: Business Operations, Networking by Kathie Thomas
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All this social media stuff can certainly get you tied in a knot or going round and round in circles. Especially once you start adopting other methods for posting or linking various tools.

I had my blogfeeds set up to update at my Facebook profile regularly.

Then I joined Twitter and found I could use Twitterfeed to feed my Twitter account from my blogs.  So I linked those and then discovered Facebook had a Twitter application which I added.  Which is both good and bad.  My Facebook profile was now getting duplicates of my blog feeds – direct from the blogs and direct from Twitter.  So I disabled the blog feeds at Facebook as it only needs the information once.  But Twitter wasn’t updating my LinkedIn account so I needed to look at that.

Enter ping.fm – easy enough to set up but wouldn’t allow multiple custom URLs (my blogs) but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.  Ping.fm will feed all these places but doesn’t pick up the feeds.  Which meant I had to physically enter posts at ping.fm and I didn’t want to have to log into yet another place – defeats the purpose if you’re spending all day just posting and nothing else.

So, what did I do to untangle this mess I’d gotten myself back into?

I revisited Twitterfeed and discovered it would feed ping.fm. I’d not noticed that before but perhaps that was because I wasn’t looking at the time – or perhaps it wasn’t available.  Whatever, it is now and I have noticed it. So, to me it made sense to set things up like this:

All blogfeeds > Twitterfeed which in turn fed Ping.fm.  That then fed Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin which kept my status updated at each place without duplicating information.  Mind you, I will keep revisiting and updating as there is always new tools being developed!

Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Networking, Social Networks, Twitter by Kathie Thomas
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A recent conversation with a client set me thinking.  They wanted accounts set up at various social networking tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc and have everything automated (rss feed from blogs, automatic responses, etc) so that they could literally ‘set and forget’ the tools. This isn’t the first client who has requested this – I’ve had others ask for it too, thinking that engaging a Virtual Assistant to set things up for them and do occasional maintenance was all that is needed.  I don’t agree.

It made me realise that they didn’t understand the reason why these tools exist.  They’re not for automatic promotion of business services and products to generate quick sales, but rather to facilitate networking, relationship building and over time, may generate business. In fact I know they do because I’ve seen it happen for me and know others personally who have had that experience too.

In this day and age of instant gratification and quick responses, people tend to forget that some things need to have a seed planted, nurtured, watered and carefully grown over time.  And networking is one of those things, irrespective of what vehicle or tool is used. What do you think?

Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Networking, Social Networks, Twitter, Yahoogroups by Kathie Thomas
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