As small business owners, we all have something in common, a lack of free time! I recently came across a free Outlook “add-in” that can save you time in many areas. Social networking is the thing to be doing, building those relationships, communicating as much as we can. Xobni is a free plug-in that you download to your computer. It interfaces with Outlook to provide you a faster, streamline way to search through your e-mails, find people through different social networking venues, update your contact records accurately, find attachments and keep track of conversations.

The download is simply. Go out to their site, simply click the download button and run the install that is displayed. You will need to have Outlook closed to do this. If you forget, you are prompted to close it anyway so no worries there. Once you are logged back into Outlook, you will see a new section to the right of your Outlook client. Xobni will begin indexing all of your e-mails, sorting them, grouping them and providing some fun statistics. Who do you e-mail the most, who e-mails you the most, who responds the fastest to you and so on.

Here is where the cool stuff begins. I get an e-mail from a happy client saying thank you for some recent work I have done.

The e-mail is from Valerie Pegg at Best Fit Pet Sit. As a client, obviously we have communicated before. One of the first things I can see are the number of e-mails that we have sent one another. She ranks #4 out of all of the people I have communicated with. Looks like I am a bit of a stalker having sent her 223 and only received 25! I send a lot of group e-mails so I can see that I e-mail her a great deal. I can also see that I tend to e-mail her most later in the evening and vice versa.

I can also see her contact information at the top of the Xobni plug-in. She is on Twitter so I can also see her Twitter feed if I want to. If I wasn’t already following her, I could simply start following her from there. I can also tweet my own status right from there also, still staying within Outlook and not having to go out to the Twitter website.

Further on down I can see Valerie’s network. The network includes people that we have both communicated with on an e-mail. Rodney Camren is one of the people in her network. This means that Rodney is a shared connection or contact between the two of us, we have both been included on e-mails that are sent to him.

Conversations allows me to view a string of e-mails between Valerie and myself. I can see everything I have sent to her and received from her. This allows me to quickly sift back through the communication we have had with one another. There is a search function at the top that I can also use to type in key words. If I remember Valerie telling me about an event she is going to be at, I can use keywords to type in and see all e-mails including those as a match.

Files exchanged shows any attachments that I have either sent to her, or have received from her. Again, if I remember her sending me something but forgot to save it, I can easily get back to it from here. Appointments can also be searched through, but only with the Xobni Plus version which you have to pay for. At $29.95, pretty darn cheap!

Along with Twitter feeds, I can also review her profile on Facebook, Linked In and see if her company has a profile on Hoovers. Xobni has also made it easy to send the recipient your availability by automatically formatting an e-mail including information based on your outlook calendar. Simply clicking a button will create a new e-mail for you to send out to a contact or new client.

Finally, you can review daily, weekly, monthly and yearly stats with Xobni Analytics. This allows you to review your e-mailing habits, see if you are making the most of your time, and the times you are most likely to get the most amount of work done.

I swear I don’t work for Xobni, and no promotional kick back to be seen, I just think this is an amazing tool! The more you can do to save yourself time, the better. Plus, this is FREE! You can’t get better than that. Try it, if you don’t like it, or don’t “get it” just remove it, nothing ventured, nothing gained. This is the way forward for e-mail management, time saving, faster searching, and it’s pretty fun too!

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