Zentact Blog

I find Keith Ferrazzi’s blog a great resource. He recently posted a video about not being top of mind and as a result, losing a sale.

He also has great idea about Thanksgiving Day cards. Worth watching.

http://nevereatalone.typepad.com/

Crenk.com recently posted their review and a short interview we did with them.

The review - http://crenk.com/build-better-relationships-with-zentact/

And the interview - http://crenk.com/crenk-interviews-zentact/

Fred Wilson’s recent posts about correspondence and the letters between Adams and Jefferson is worth a read.   Fred makes a strong argument that the internet is returning us to the past in terms of literacy and intellectual discussions are becoming more mainstream.   http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/12/correspondence.html

Zentact can become a powerful tool in making your correspondence more literate and hopefully more meaningful.   By helping you build contextual knowledge around shared interests, you interactions can become more interesting with less filler and more meat!

Interested in knowing more about how common your tags are - take a look at our completely alpha tag feedback page:http://zentact.com/tag_feedback.

Make sure you take the results with a grain of salt. My 300 plus tags are mostly accurate but some are not because of my own unique browsing. For example, “Hearth Restaurant” (entered with “AND”) shows as “May Never Alert”. It alerted two weeks back on a New York Times article about barrel aged beer due to a mention of the bar manager.

Let us know what you think.

And if you are in New York, give Hearth a try. It is excellent!

Hotmail users, we’re happy to report that you can now import your Hotmail address book into Zentact. A solution has been implemented to fix the recent Hotmail protocol change by Microsoft.

Simply go to the Import Your Contacts screen, click on the Hotmail tab and follow the steps on the page.

Yahoo! Mail, Gmail and a good ol’ CSV Address Book upload exist on the Import Contacts screen making it easy to add your contacts from many sources.

With New Year’s Eve parties rapidly approaching on Wednesday night, some of us will be facing an evening of both great conversations and boring small talk. Lifehacker’s has a great post on 10 hacks, http://lifehacker.com/399895/top-10-conversation-hacks, to help you with any conversation. I plan on testing #8 myself:

8. Ask sensitive questions indirectly to skip awkwardness.

When the info you need from someone is somewhat sensitive, check out journalist advice site MBToolbox’s suggestions for asking delicate questions indirectly. Use the bluff (”the breakup must’ve been hard, huh?”) or blame others (”so has anyone asked about your prison time?”) or the indirect inquiry (”what year did you get divorced?”) to broach sensitive topics with tight-lipped folks with more ease and less awkward silence.

Zentact can also help with conversations by providing context around shared interests and even names.   In my case, it helps me remember what is interesting to my friends.    With this knowledge, it is much easier for me to start a conversation and participate in a meaningful way.   Whether a ’simple congratulations for the TechCrunch’ mention or a ‘did you see this article’, I have meaningful things to say.

I got a Zentact today from a long lost colleague. I had no idea what he was up to so I looked him up on LinkedIn. I still don’t know what he is up to which made me think about using Zentact and your public profile.

If you are connecting with people you haven’t talked to in a while, you should make sure your public profiles are up to date.   Almost two years ago, Guy Kawasaki wrote a great post about what you should do on LinkedIn - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/linkedin_profil.html Lots of great suggestions!

On Saturday, the New York Times published the following headline:

You May Not Like It, but Learn to Network

The Career Couch column by Phyllis Korkki is a great read - http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/jobs/21career.html

Lots of tips and suggestions of what you should be doing including:

• Reciprocity is intrinsic to the process - you have to give to get
• Mutual interests are a great way to stay in touch and build relationships
• Face to face counts

While Zentact can’t help you with face to face meetings, it can help you with the rest.

We previously posted on the ability to add contacts via a Twitter DM. Scott Rafer called out that we didn’t use the originally discussed syntax and method. He’s referring to adding contacts via a public tweet to @zentact.

While we didn’t follow the “exact” syntax, we’re happy to announce that adding contacts via a public twitter message is live.

Here’s the Twitter syntax:

With a full name

@zentact @johnsampson John Sampson #Zentact #networking #San Francisco

Without a full name

@zentact @johnsampson #Zentact #networking #San Francisco

That’s all there is to it to add contacts to Zentact remotely. Becoming better at networking requires both online and offline interaction, this will help keep those interactions in sync. Use it at your next meeting, dinner, conference or whenever you’re away from your computer.

Quick Tips: Be sure you’ve added your Twitter account to your Zentact profile (enter it on the “My Account” link). Also, if you leave the full name out, the user will be classified under the “Unknown Last Name” section when managing contacts.

Why both public and direct message?

Consider using Direct Messages to add contacts when you’d rather not share tag information about one of your contacts with the world — keeping things more private. Otherwise, tweet away publicly - others will love to see how you’re using Zentact with your contacts.

How did we do it (technically)?

To extract your twitter contact adds, we’ve tapped into the Twitter publisher feed offered via the Gnip Consumer API. We parse all tweets sent to @zentact looking for the syntax listed above, and bang - your contacts are added to Zentact.

Thank you Scott!

Zentact lets you add contacts via Twitter. In order to use this, you must have a twitter account on file with us so let’s start there:

1. Log into Zentact
2. Click ‘My Account’
3. Enter your Zentact password into the ‘Password’ text box at the top of the page.
4. Scroll to the bottom half of the page, enter your Twitter name and password into the ‘Twitter Name’, ‘Account Password’ and ‘Re-type Password’ text boxes. (It has to be your user name, not the email address associated with the account.)
5. Click ‘Update’. You will see a message confirming your update.
6. Log into Twitter.
7. Browse to http://twitter.com/zentact.
8. Choose ‘follow’.
9. You will direct message Zentact to add someone. Use the format d zentact @twittername first_name last_name #tag #tag2 tag2 #tag3. E.G. to add me at A Donkey and Goat Winery with the tags syrah, Rhone wines and roussanne, you would tweet d zentact @donkeyandgoat Jared Brandt #syrah #Rhone wines #roussanne

A great guide for those of us who are not savy with Twitter can be found on the Wall Street Journal’sAll Things Digital website under “Birds of a Feather Twitter Together“.