Scott Schnaars, regional sales director for web 2.0 software vendor Socialtext, was recently featured in an interview by Fernando Labastida focusing on how to use Web 2.0 tools to sell more effectively. We were thrilled to discover Scott is one of our beta users and a proponent of our tool.
2.) Zentact - Zentact is a great way to stay in touch with people. You tag your key contacts with information that is relavant to them and when you hit a website that they might be interested, Zentact reminds you and gives you a form to send a link to your contact.
When I first found Zentact, it took me no time at all to realize how I was going to use this tool. I’ve played fantasy sports for the better part of a dozen years and it is always a challenge to keep track of which players are on which fantasy team. For example, in my ten owner National League only league, each owner has a roster of 40 players. That is 400 players on teams to keep track of — on top of trying to know which free agents I can add to my team. Compounding this problem is the fact that I’m not in only one of these leagues. It becomes an exponential problem pretty quickly.
Zentact saves me many mental cycles and much cross referencing between multiple sites. I’ve added a contact in Zentact for each of the owners in my league. For each owner contact, I’ve tagged them with all the players on their fantasy team. Now when I read an article that talks about baseball players, Zentact tells me which person in my fantasy team owns the players in the article. I don’t need to pop open a new tab and search by player name at the league page to mine that information anymore. Zentact does the player-to-fantasy team matching grunt work for me!
Fantasy sports have an aspect of information secrecy to them. I haven’t found myself reaching out to the owners I compete with to tell them how great their players are… just in case I want to trade for that player later. I do reach out to my co-owner very regularly, so that we are on the same page about what players to try to acquire. Once baseball season is full swing, I anticipate reaching out regularly to opposing team owners too to shoot them information about my players — seeding ideas in case about how awesome my players are.. just in case I’d like to trade them later.
Thank you Zentact team for creating this tool and sharing it with the world! I hope by season’s end I can also be thanking you for your help in winning me another fantasy baseball championship.
With our last release, we added new merge functionality. You can now add multiple email addresses to one user and have one set of tags for that person.
To do this, first find the two or more contacts you want to merge in My Contacts. In this case, I will merge the information I have for Carolyn Bruen and thus have checked her contacts.
After selecting the contacts to be merged, just click Merge. The resulting screen shows the merged email addresses as well as the merged tags.
Make any edits you want and then click Save Contact and you’re finished.
The tags are now related to both email addresses and can be edited when emailing either one.
Last night, we posted a new release of the web site and our Add-on. There are numerous new features to be discussed so I will start with one of my favorites - our new Twitter integration.
When looking at the contacts in our database, we discovered nearly 10% of the email addresses were linked to Twitter accounts. With over 500K contacts, we figured we could make this data useful.
For our users with Gmail (hosted or not), we automatically add twitter data on the fly for you. Email your contacts, in Zentact or not, and if there is a match, we will show you their latest tweet.
In the screen shot below, the first contact’s name and tags are missing because this email was the first I had ever sent to him. The other two, Jared and Eric, both have complete information since they are in my database.
This is the first of many features that will add real time, actionable data into your email account. To start to use this feature, just update your Add-on at https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi
When we first launched our private beta, we immediately got feedback from our users that they wanted a log of potential connection points. This ranged from:
When I am in a hurry, I don’t have time to reach out. Can you give me a list of the ones I missed.
to
I like the idea of Zentact, but I find it really distracting as I’m browsing the web. I’d like an option to turn off the browser popup and instead receive a full list of all the link suggestions either as a daily email or on my Zentact profile page. That way, I get all the value of staying in touch with old contacts, but I’m not interrupted as I’m doing other things on the web throughout the day. - Joe Lazarus via Get Satisfaction
Today, we launched Zentact Journal. With this features, we provide to you a list of places you could have made contact with your network but didn’t. We also enabled the ability to turn off those pesky alert boxes.
Want to give it a try, make sure you have the latest extension by downloading it from https://zentact.com/zentact.xpi Then use the web like you would normally for the next 24 hours. As you browse, Zentact will store missed connection opportunities.
Tomorrow, point your browser to http://zentact.com/journal On this page, you will see contacts which were matched to pages your browsed over the last 24 hours. On this page, you can:
Click the page title link to see the page you could have sent to your network.
Click to hide the site from future alerts and tracking
Click Reach Out to email or tweet your contact.
If you decide you don’t want to see the alert in the future, and only use the digest, simply go to My Account, scroll to Preferences and choose “Never Show Alerts” as your Alert setting.
John pushed another update yesterday. In case you haven’t upgraded, you should by downloading the extension from zentact.com. Much of the effort in this version is groundwork for our next site update so stayed tuned. New features include:
Page Titles are now Email Subjects - When sending an email, the page title will now be your email subject
Basic Frequency Controls - Some basic frequency controls have been added to reduce unnecessary alerts to reach out
Improved Handling of Large Contact Lists - A bug has been fixed with processing large contact lists
Just in time for the weekend, we have added some new features to Zentact.
Smaller Package with Same Power - A new and improved alert box with the same functionality in a smaller foot print.
Gravatar Images - Gravatar images for your contacts are now displayed on alerts and Gmail. Upload your image to Gravatar. More photo features to come - stay tuned.
To update, just login and click the “Download the Extension” link.
For those of you who are addicted to your crackberry or any other phone/email device, we have justed added the ability to use email to update your Zentact account. To do this, just email add@zentact.com with the person’s email address, name and tags. We ignore the body text so feel to write whatever you want there.
John just pushed a new version our extension for your networking pleasure. It includes:
Alert Tracking - We’re now tracking alerts. This will allow us to custom tailor your alert frequency and make using Zentact even more valuable in future releases.
UI improved on LinkedIn and Yahoo! Mail
“Reach Out!” added to alert box - Reach out to anyone about anything at any time. Add contacts and edit contact tags in Reach Out! to improve your Zentact experience.
Right Click Menus - Use a PC, just right click and select Zentact to “Reach Out”.
Improved Gmail integration - Fixed email matching quirk and single quote bug
Known Bugs in Version 0.6.8:
Zentact Does Not Alert when Personal Email Editor is selected. To fix: change your My Account settings to use the Zentact email editor.
to hide the site from future alerts and tracking