Tag: LinkedIn

Plaxo as a personal CRM business tool


In these days of below-the-line marketing, everyone should have a personal social-media CRM independently to whatever CRM they have in their office. This reflects the blurring of the work and play areas of life which is one of the recognised aspects of Generations Y and Z, as well as a very natural result of the interactive technology most of our readers will be native to and working in every day of their lives.

Plaxo (www.plaxo.com) is an address book synchronising and back-up tool which has a number of interesting features such as the ability to access your contacts from the net, to import and export as CSV files, to send greetings cards to check duplicates and synchronise in a limited way with google applications, facebook and other social media.

The interface seems to offer a lot of benefits and certainly the ability to send greetings cards is a useful one. There are, however a whole series of issues and bugs and incomplete aspects to Plaxo which means that it can easily be superseded as the personal CRM of choice by any app maker able to sort out these issues more efficiently.

1) There’s no official Plaxo app on Android phones and so the synchronisation goes via Google Apps and is clunky. Whenever codeword security runs out, it seems to stop synchronising. Also the synchronising doesn’t seem to work well all the time and in my case telephone numbers have been moved from one person to another, which is very troublesome.

2) There are not really enough greetings cards and they are in too few languages.

3) Intelligent updating from the web of what our contacts are doing seems not to be working half the time. Occasionally the robot makes a half-hearted attempt to find and update people, but nowhere near what you’d expect for the annual fee.

4) Above about 3000 contacts and the site works slowly. It is unable to offer you a print out of the whole database at that size.

5) It often loses the pictures it has imported from facebook and doesn’t seem to be able to import any at all from Linked In. It cannot update calendars directly to Android, again only via Google apps.

6) It doesn’t deal properly with any scripts beyond basic Latin script, so it mangles names written even with Polish or Czech letters, leave alone Cyrillics or Chinese names.

7) The folders are a clunky interface, but even when you have done the work of putting contacts into the appropriate folders, they don’t carry through to the greetings cards area, so you cannot, for instance, make a folder of people who would receive, let’s say, and Eidh card or a more/less traditional Hannukah card and then easily access that folder from the greetings card area. Also send outs of more than about 200 cards per time tend to fail and need all that work to be done again.

These are my main Plaxo gripes. I am airing them in the hope that Plaxo will finally get their act together and repair their product before their remaining users find another app on the market among the choice which seems to be growing every day that does all the things that Plaxo is expected to do, but still fails to deliver.

 

 

 

 

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What are you on?


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They might be on something...

At University, one of my Northern Irish friends used to say “What are you on?” if he heard anyone saying or saw anyone doing something he found strange. I believe he meant “what medications are you on, to make you say or do that?”

Well, today I’d like to ask my viewers the same question but in a slightly different context, namely, what social media platforms are you on?

I’m going to put a few of them, by no means all, into a poll, and please put a tick by all the services where you BOTH have an account AND use that account fairly regularly – the benchmark would be if someone you knew or an old friend tried to get in contact with you on there, could they do so and you see it and get back to them reasonably quickly, as in within a couple of weeks, say.

I have included Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Youtube and Twitter, which are largely of non-business use, and the rest are more the business networking sort of platforms, liked Linked-in, Viadeo, Xing, Ushi, Goldenline. I also included Google Latitude, which is in my view a new class of social media linking in GPS location to all the other things going on in social media. I’ve included in one line the fora of any newspaper you read that has discussion of articles where a regular crowd sometimes gathers.

Please add in comments, other than anything else you might wish to say about the relative advantages or disadvantages of these social media sites, any social platforms I’ve left off.

And please check back in after a few weeks, if you’re curious how it pans out, especially if you’re among the first to answer.

Remember – this poll has multiple tickable options, and there’s a supplemental question of how many ticks you put in – this is just so we can all see how many services our fellow internet people are using.

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