Having been an online entrepreneur for many years, I have often wished I had a simple way to learn more about the current and potential clients that contact me by email.  What social networks do they hang out on? How can I connect with them, if I don’t already know their screen name for a particular network?

There was a time when a business owner knew almost every customer or client, because they walked through the door, chatted with the owner, and got to be friends or at the very least acquainted.

As business owners doing business online, we have come to accept a lack of information as the nature of the beast. We have accepted that we will need to do business by email, but that it will not necessarily help us build rapport with our clients. Well, now all that is changing…

Thanks to a gmail add-on called Rapportive, we can now have a great deal of information, about the people we receive emails from, at our fingertips. I have been using Rapportive for several months and have come to rely on the information it brings.

The very first thing I loved about Rapportive was that it replaces all the advertisements you get in the right sidebar of gmail with pertinent information about the sender of the email. No ads is a great bonus, but that was only the beginning.

What type of information does Rapportive provide?

• a picture of the sender, if they have uploaded one to google
• the information contained in their google profile, if they have one
• their job and company
• information about which social networks they are members of, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more
• where they are located
• their latest tweets on Twitter
• their latest posts on Facebook (you can even “like” and comment right from gmail)
• request friendship or follow them from within gmail
• connect to their tungle.me schedule from within gmail
• even make notes about the contact that will be available for future reference (only you can see your notes)

With all this information at your fingertips, you can now have a very good idea of who you are conversing with and be able to connect with them in ways that you may not have done before. Do you think you could build a bit more rapport with your current and potential clients with all this information?

There are even Rapportive “raplets” that allow you to use some of your favorite apps inside of gmail, like MailChimp, BrightPearl, and several others.

Is Rapportive a great service? Yes, I believe it is.

Is Rapportive perfect? Of course not. Sometimes no information is returned, and occasionally information is out of date because someone did not update their google profile.  But overall, I’d very definitely recommend Rapportive as a great way to learn more and build more rapport with people.

Interested in downloading Rapportive to your gmail?  Go here.

If you need assistance in designing a social media strategy or would like help managing the day to day details of your campaign, contact Social Bee Online.  We are happy to help.

Until next time…

Live with passion and purpose,
Vanessa

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