Meshstro: Coming to an Inbox Near You!

For the past month or so, I've been part of the Beta testing program for a very exciting new tool called Meshstro. Created by the forward-looking scientists at Xerox PARC, Meshstro has the potential to revolutionize how we use the rich mother lode of emails and associated information that constantly flows through everyone's inbox.

Residing as an Outlook sidebar, Meshstro creates context-driven relationships between emails, conversations, participants, attachments, etc. - - allowing you to quickly slice-and-dice all of the information in virtually any manner that suits your immediate needs. You can even activate links to your social media accounts and Meshstro will automatically take you to LinkedIn or Facebook profiles for the participants in any email conversation.

Using Meshstro, I've discovered that my Inbox doesn't have to be a hodge-podge of chaos to be grappled with and periodically cleared out. Instead it can be a wealth of useful information at my fingertips - whenever and however I need it.

And since Meshstro comes from the the folks at Xerox PARC, with their unmatched history of pioneering user-interface innovations, you can bet that this Beta product is only the beginning...

For more info check out http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?et=1103452729982&s=0&e=001hfGcPNPXb5vwjJMnhGp8SWjHzGuWyfJfHeXDJPfaeknasp8mcoZFX3epoMbLIsKq8ZnWfZ5YgjTodJMAFZebkkrREm1V8Mw8kw11o7h20Qs=

Social Media Marketing - Survey Results

Thanks to everyone who participated in our online Survey on Social Media Usage during April/May. Respondents included both large and small companies as well as industry associations.

Here are some of the top-level findings of interest:

1. Period of time using Social Media: 25% less than 6 months, 15% for 6 to 12 months, 30% more than 1 yr, and 30% don't use social media
2. Types of Social Media used: Twitter (63%), Facebook (68%), LinkedIn (47%)
3. Frequency of Twitter Posts:Every day (46%), Weekly (23%) Monthly or less (31%)
4. Reasons cited as "important" for using Social Media:Building company brand (94%)Finding customers/prospects (84%)Tracking competition/industry trends (60%)Drive product/service innovation (60%)Finding employees (30%)
5. Responsibility for tracking & posting updates:In-house primary task assignment (22%)In-house secondary task (27%)Out-sourced (15%)Ad-hoc or no assigned responsibility (36%)

These findings tend to track with other surveys that I've seen, which confirm a high level of interest in using Social Media for business purposes but a big gap between those companies that have well-defined programs and those that don't.

It has become very clear that social media forums such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others are now a key part of the overall marketing, branding and customer service mix for all companies. It's inevitable that your customers, competitors and partners are going to communicate about your market using these forums - - most already are.

The critical question is what are you going to do about it?