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August 26, 2013

Getting on Top of Contact Management Chaos

By Karen Veazey, TMCnet Contributing Writer

I am an e-mail person and my husband is a phone person. I like quick interactions on social media, while he likes in-depth forum discussions.  Nowadays, there is a medium for every kind of communicator that helps us keep up with friends, family and colleagues. Still, many of us feel overwhelmed, always responding, occasionally reaching out, and never managing to really catch up.



A new service aims to help manage the chaos online so you can divert your energies to more pressing parts of your world. And its offering a 30-day free trial so you can see just how well it works. Relately – found at www.relate.ly – tracks your interactions across the web giving you an instant overview of how well you are maintaining relationships.

At first it sounds creepy, and in terms of personal relationships it might be, but for business applications it’s genius. There are existing software modules to help businesses track interactions and record customer details but they’re primarily use in sales, for obvious reasons, or the nonprofit sector, for tracking connectedness to donors. And none of them track across the full spectrum of social media.

Beyond professional sales teams, Relately could be valuable for job hunters, freelancers and anyone who maintains a large rolodex – think journalists or social club leaders. Relately founder Matt Kress notes, “You have to do work for your clients in order to make money.  At the same time you also have to find ways to sell yourself and your product(s) so that you have clients for whom you can even DO work…A great way to increase your odds of success as a freelancer or consultant is by managing these cycles. To do that, you have to make sure that you’re always running the sales cycle or at the very least maintaining relationships and staying in touch with your key contacts consistently.”

The Web-based subscription service works by tracking your interactions across the most common social media platforms as well as email, weighting each appropriately and assigning a value. An e-mail is going to reflect higher value than a Facebook (News - Alert) ‘like.’ You can track your relationship “scores” on the dashboard which will indicate when a contact has dropped below a predetermined value. A daily e-mail offers suggestions of who to contact and even topic ideas if your social skills are flagging that day.  

If you hate networking or have trouble with schedules and organization, the structure of Relately could be an important resource to keep you moving forward in business.

The Relately website blog also offers a wealth of blog information on growing business relationships and navigating social media, a nice perk with the subscription.




Edited by Alisen Downey
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