Two weeks a go I gave a lecture in a social media seminar. Now I’ve translated the presentation I used into English and made it easier to understand without seeing the actual lecture.

The presentation describes 20 social media practices that will help you in your daily life. It includes tools to monitor your web presence, ways to track interesting topics and conversations, methods to find people and to get answers, and more.

It revolves around the following seven categories:

1. People Database
2. Keeping in touch and more
3. Conversation
4. Search
5. Collaborating
6. Monitoring and News
7. Self monitoring

I’ll be glad to get your feedback and thoughts about it.

A bookmarklet is a piece of code saved as a bookmark. When you click it, instead of just taking you to a bookmarked website, it performs an action (which may include taking you to another website, but does not have to do that). Here are 5 recommended bookmarklets to boost your productivity by helping you instantly subscribe to, read, tweet, share and translate webpages.

This is an excerpt of a post I wrote on MakeUseOf. To read the full post visit 5 Recommended Bookmarklets To Simplify Tedious Tasks.

Once in a while I’m offered by a web service like Facebook, LinkedIn or Digg to give away my email username and password so that it could offer me new friends based on my contacts list. Being the key to all my other accounts and containing a lot of personal information, I’m not that thrilled to give away these details. The solution to that problem is to export your contacts to a file and then import it into the web services. Here is how to do that:

Example – Synchronizing Gmail with Linkedin

As an example, I will demonstrate how to import your contacts into Linkedin from your Gmail account, but the same apply for other web services and other email applications, including Outlook.

Export contacts from Gmail

1. Go to the “Contacts” sections.
2. Click “Export“.
3. Under “What format would you like to export to?” choose “Outlook’s CSV format“.
4. Click “Export” and save the file to your computer.

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Ever read a post or article and wanted to email it to others? Use The following bookmarklet to ease things up.

How to use it

To use the bookmarklet (which is a piece of code saved as a bookmark), simply add it to your bookmarks bar. Right click the button below and choose “Bookmark This Link” or just drag and drop it to the bookmarks bar:

Right click the button and choose “Bookmark This Link”

What it does

Whenever you click the bookmarklet, it’ll do the following actions:

1. Create a new email message (in a new window).

2. Set the title of the webpage as the subject.

3. Add a link to the webpage in the body of the message.

4. Copy all the text that was selected when you clicked the bookmarklet into the body of the message (see images below).

While you’re at it, you might also want to configure an new-email keyboard shortcut.

Gmail lab feature “Multiple Inboxes” allows you to have more than one ‘inbox’ in your default Gmail view. You can have up to 5 additional panels and set them to display labels, your starred messages, drafts or any search you want next to your inbox. Here is how to start using Multiple Inboxes and 7 great things you can do with it.

Enabling Multiple Inboxes and setting panels

First, to enable Multiple Inboxes go to settings > labs > enable multiple inboxes

Enable multiple inboxes

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Using Gmail keyboard shortcuts makes reading and organizing your emails easier and more efficient. Here are the five Gmail keyboard shortcuts I found the most useful.

(to enable shortcuts Go to settings > general > Keyboard shortcuts > enable)

the shortcuts

Keyboard shortcut: [ (left bracket)
Action: archive current email and go to the next one
Tips: ] does the same but goes back to the previous email.

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Every day we send and receive tens of emails (some of us less, some of us a lot more…). Have you ever thought of reusing some of them? I’m talking about the ones you spend more than a couple of minutes writing, those elaborated answers that take time to think of and write. Instead of sending and forgetting about them, here are some suggestions of how to leverage the time and effort you spend writing emails by transforming them into a whole new deliverables.

Additional uses for emails

Source for F&Q

Let’s say you’re a product manager. You frequently get question regarding the product (from external and internal customers). Collect these emails and display them on you company’s website in an F&Q format. It will improve the service your customers get (since they will spend less time searching for answers) and will also save you the need to answer repeatedly the same questions.

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When you send an email, the recipient must have enough free space to get it. If he doesn’t (i.e. his mailbox is full), your email will not be delivered to him. When that happens, you should Send it again, but use outlook’s ability to schedule the actual delivery time. That means that you’ll get this monkey off your back by sending the mail right now, but it will actually be sent in a later time. How does that solve the problem you ask? well, It is likely to assume that your recipient will have cleared his mailbox by the midst of that following day (since it is full and he will not be able to send and receive emails). Thus, he will get your email. If he didn’t clear it by that time, you will get back an announcement that your email could not be delivered.

Scheduling an email delivery

Take these two steps to schedule an email delivery:

1. Click the “options” button: write your email as you would normally do. When it is ready to be sent, click “options”.
    
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Have you ever sent an email asking a coworker to schedule a meeting, or a document for review to your boss, but remind bothered whether he will remember to do that or just read your email and forget?

Here is how to handle these situations. whenever you send an important task by email and want to be peaceful minded about it getting done, you should gain back control by scheduling a reminder. here is how to do that:

1. Include yourself as a BCC (that is, add your email address in the BCC filed). That way, you’ll get a copy of the email without the other recipients knowing about it. Then,



2. Move that email from the inbox to your calendar. Save it as an event a few days later (enough time for the other person to complete the task).



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Actually, the headline says it all.

Type question mark (press SHIFT + ?) when using Google applications such as Google Reader or Gmail, and a list of available keyboard shortcuts will appear!

(In Gmail you have to enable shortcuts first. Go to settings > general > Keyboard shortcuts > Keyboard shortcuts on)