Blogging Tips

I get a ton of e-mail from many different people. Keeping everyone straight can be difficult and those are just the people I know personally. I have a contact form on my blog and occasionally get people contacting me and asking me to try things, blog about things and for help. I don’t know these folks most of the time. However, I’ve discovered a great tool to help me identify people who are contacting me. The tool is called Rapportive.

When you install Rapportive (available for Chrome and Firefox) you gain some cool insight into the people that e-mail your Gmail account. When Rapportive installs it does a few great things right off the bat. It removes the ads that are on the sidebar of Gmail and replaces them with information about the sender of the e-mail. This is very useful in identifying exactly who you are interacting with.

I looked even closer at this and saw how it can really work well for you as you build up your blog and your personal brand. I installed Rapportive to see what sort of social information has been collected on me and where the information was coming from. Rapportive gets the information from Rapleaf.com and what Rapleaf calls the Online Footprint. Rapleaf looks at your e-mail and then pulls in the information associated with that e-mail address.

So I installed Rapportive and looked at my profile. I simply mouse over my e-mail address and up pops the profile in the right sidebar. Major information that gets pulled is from Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Hi5 and Flickr among others. This immediately gives you links to those profiles. There is also a personal note section where you can write notes to help you remember important things about each person. These notes are personal and private and just for you. It is sort of like writing info on the back of business cards to help you remember details about people that you have met.

If you want to make sure that your contacts are seeing the best information about you then sign up with Rapleaf and update your Online Footprint and link your multiple e-mail addresses to each other. By doing this you make sure that all of your social media info gets to the right people.

I did notice that when I updated the info it didn’t completely take. Each time I set my sex it went back to blank. I also tried changing a few other basic bits of info and they didn’t take either. So, I think that Rapleaf has some more work to do but Rapportive is still pretty decent. It is free and it removes the ads from your sidebar and replaces it with relevant information. That is very useful.