You may know from Stefanie's office visits this quarter (or you will when she gets to you soon) that we are both big advocates of Google's mail service called GMail. Available for free since 2004, GMail was one of the first services that really made AOL users think twice about paying for an email address.
Over the last few weeks GMail has been on a push to make itself even better. Stefanie noted a few weeks ago that they introduced multiple signatures and recently they cooked in some other neat stuff to streamline your email experience. One of my personal favs is the tool that embeds YouTube video into the email (so you know if the link someone is sending you is legit or maybe deserves a bit more inspection).
In November of last year I made the decision to give up on Microsoft Outlook and become 100% Google-tastic. I posted about it here (always funny to read stuff you wrote a while ago). In that post I mentioned that I was hoping to move more of you over, that I wanted you to learn more about GMail and that I wanted you to share the excitement I had for my new productivity tool (and my then-new phone).
What I learned after that post, however, was that many of you needed a more robust contact manager - something that could keep track of client info, remind you of things, and most importantly monitor things that were really specific to our real estate industry. So I backed off a bit and quietly pushed GMail to those who were nearby.
The other day Google upgraded its Contacts program - so now my cup of Google Kool Aid is full again. While some in tech aren't happy with the changes (mainly because they think Google didn't go far enough), as someone who looks for opportunities for REALTORS this is a home run. Still paying for TopProducer...bag it. Keeping your files in Excel...ditch that too. You now have a free tool that can import your contacts from any .csv file (which is what you get from all the services mentioned above as well as from Outlook) that is available to you anytime, anywhere on the web.
Truthfully, that part is not very revolutionary. The old Google Contacts did that. But the problem was (especially for REALTORS) that the contact record wasn't customizable...in other words you couldn't add fields for "house anniversary", "spouse name", "seller contact 2", etc. Now you can. Google Contacts now has a customizable fields that make storing your real estate data easier.
Of course (as I mentioned back in November) if you have an Android phone (or if you download the Google Sync tool for iPhone or Blackberry) you can have all that same data on your phone without ever having to connect or sync again. Having watched you do your business for years now that is a huge benefit to mobile professionals who often forget to sync up that random contact data.
So give it a try. If nothing else go to Google contacts and add in one or two just to see how well it goes. Maybe find your most in-depth record from the service you are using now and type it in...just to see if what I am saying is true. Then, if you are ready to make the big move, consider importing everything from your current service. I am sure Stefanie or I would be more than happy to give you a hand.
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