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Despite rumours of a full featured CRM service from Google, we're left in wait. In the meantime, a small UK-based start up called Rapportive is seeking to fill that void.

Rapportive a new browser plugin, not unlike Xobni for Outlook, that adds dynamic contact previews to Gmail complete with profile picture, brief bio and links to their various social networking profiles. Part social, part CRM, Rapportive also features a minimalist notes area directly under the social profiles section of the sidebar.

These are very early days for the company but the basic concept, from what we can see, is that via a quick exchange of emails and little work, you're immediately given an accurate (or as accurate as Social Media can be) overview of who the person is.

Interestingly, Google Buzz could be seen as a competitor to the service. Both aim to collect various social profiles from across the web to give an up to date overview of a particular persons activities and bio. Both also find its place in gmail inboxes, sadly only one appears to have done it right. Another direct competitor is MailBrowser but after trying both out, Rapportive definitely currently appears to be the slicker of the two.

The Rapportive plugin is currently available for Firefox and Chrome only and only works with Gmail (Google Apps too but you need a start Gmail address book too). Although up and running, this is very early days for the startup who, if accepted, should find itself part of YCombinator camp.

 

OK, so you%u2019re a Foursquare user and you%u2019re the %u201CMayor of Starbucks%u201D in Hackensack%u2026 Whatever!

Maybe you use Gowalla and you%u2019ve just traded a virtual %u2018kettle%u2019 for a virtual %u2018bowl of noodles%u2019 at the Sewage Farm in Cleckheaton%u2026 Who cares?

Wouldn%u2019t it be more fun searching for some real treasure?  Geocaching could be the answer.

Location-based mobile games are hot right now.  Foursquare, Gowalla and others encourage you to %u201Ccheck in%u201D at various locations using smartphone apps in order to earn points or trade tokens.

However, when the novelty of wearing imaginary Foursquare mayoral chains whilst ordering your skinny latte wears off, what are you going to do?  When you%u2019re really hungry, but those virtual noodles from Gowalla fail to satisfy your appetite, where do you look?

Wouldn%u2019t it be great if you could search the world around you looking for real hidden artefacts?  With Geocaching you can do just that.  It%u2019d be cool if Foursquare, Gowalla or one of the other location games could build this in to their apps.

Like, Foursquare, Gowalla and the current crop of location based games, it%u2019s all about being mobile and making the most of the GPS in your phone or Sat Nav device to find hidden items.  The difference is, these items are for real%u2026  and they%u2019re all around you!

Geocaching is a global phenomena that%u2019s been steadily gaining popularity since its launch in 2000.  In almost ten years, over 3 million participants have hidden and searched for almost a million items around the globe.  What%u2019s more, they%u2019re all waiting to be found%u2026  by you.

Even better, if you%u2019re an iPhone user, there%u2019s an app from Geocaching.com, the largest GPS cache hunt site, to make it even easier.  Using the app you can search for hidden treasures near to your current position and navigate towards them.

When you get to %u2018ground zero%u2019 you hunt around for the hidden %u2018cache%u2019 which can be anything from the size of a coin to a sandwich box.  If you find it, sign the paper log inside it and there may also be a few items inside to trade with other geocaching fans.

Using the app or the Geocaching website, you can provide updates regarding your find before moving onto the next one.  What the app and the site currently lack is any integration with social networks, which might be just the thing a Foursquare or a Gowalla could introduce to the equation.

In the meantime, there%u2019s a health warning that goes with geocaching.  People have been questioned by the police for snooping around suspiciously looking for hidden booty, so if you%u2019re interested in geocaching, read up on the do%u2019s and don%u2019ts on geocaching.com or the wiki, before getting started.

Tags: foursquare. gowalla, geocaching, gps, location, timdifford 

Tim Difford
A leading innovator in the IT Outsourcing industry, Tim is often on the move but can be regularly found in Manchester and London, UK. His focus is on social and mobile technologies but given half a chance he'll try to sneak music or football into his blog-posts. Tim can be found at One Greener Day and you can also follow @timdifford on Twitter.

Google Reader has already a handy feature to share interesting articles and blog posts in an easy way: the Share link that appears below each item. With this link, as we explained before, Google Reader marks those items as shared and puts them online on an automatically generated web page. However I tend to star items more than to share them - I just find it easier to manage starred articles later on when I want to read or reuse them for any purpose, like Favorites. And the good thing is that starred items can also be shared%u2026 even on Twitter! All you need is three user accounts (one for Google Reader, one for Twitter and one for Twitterfeed) and follow these simple steps:

1. The starred items feed is set to Private by default, so first of all you need to go to Settings > Folders and tags and mark it as %u201CPublic%u201D from the drop-down menu.

2. Click the View public page link. This will open a website generated by Google Reader with all the items you%u2019ve starred. Right click the Atom feed link and copy the URL.

3. Go to your Twitterfeed account and set up a new feed with the URL you just copied. Tweak settings according to your needs (update frequency, post prefix, number of posts to be published) but try not to take over your follower%u2019s timeline with too many starred items.

4. Twitterfeed will take a while to check your feed and update it for the first time. From that moment on, all the items you star on Google Reader will be automatically published on Twitter.

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Facebook has taken its promising Lexicon tool down from the site. Perhaps this happened when they pushed their new redesign. Lexicon, like Google Trends, provided limited yet interesting data on site-wide trends. You can read more about it here.

From the Lexicon site....

"Thank you for your interest in Lexicon. We are removing the Lexicon product from Facebook for the time being. We may bring components of Lexicon back in the future, but we are focusing development on our analytics tools for Page owners, advertisers and Platform developers."

Analytics remains a major focus at Facebook for advertisers and page owners. They recently pushed out a tool that lets page owners see detailed data about their individual items. Still, I would like to see the social network emulate Google more in how they share global data.

The following is also my column in next week's issue of Advertising Age.

Go Big, Get Your Employees on the Bus or Go Home

Photo credit: Traffic by scottpowerz

The single biggest challenge that marketers face over the next ten years is attention scarcity. Bank on it.

According to Andreas Weigland, Amazon.com's former chief scientist, more data was generated by individuals in 2009 than in the entire history of mankind. Human attention, however, is finite - and arguably, it shrinks as we age. 

The end result is downright ugly. It's like 25 lanes of traffic trying to squeeze through two Lincoln Tunnel tubes during the peak of rush hour. Your marketing programs may be the biggest, baddest bus in the flow, but you're competing with everyone else for the same space and time. Chances are, however, your bus is empty. Park that idea for now. We'll come back to it.

Each individual, whether it's a stay-at-home mom or a twenty-something online addict, will develop his/her own coping mechanisms. Some of these decisions will be conscious. Many of them won't be. And that spells trouble for marketers.

Already one of the ways we're coping is by digging deeper into social networking sites to connect with our friends and interests. According to Nielsen, globally consumers spent more than five and half hours on social networking sites in December. This represents an 82 percent increase year over year. Human beings have always been drawn to each other. Social networking just makes this easier and scalable - or does it?

Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, discovered that we are only capable of managing 150 friendships - this includes brands. Once again, we're handicapped by our darn brains.

Marketers know they need to be engaged in social networks. Some 45% of senior marketers surveyed by The Society for Digital Agencies said that social network engagement is their top priority. However, many marketers that I speak to don't understand the sheer scale that's required, given the above challenges. 

To succeed in a world where attention remains scarce and our brains are limited, businesses must go beyond campaigns and move to real-time engagement. I believe the best way to accomplish this is scale. This means every business must become a social business by deeply integrating their often decoupled employee engagement and digital engagement initiatives.

In short, to revisit the aforementioned metaphor, you must go big, get your employees on the bus, put more buses into the traffic flow or go home.

So what exactly does this look like? It means unshackling your employees. It means equipping them with tools, policies and the means to engage with stakeholders around the clock. Finally, above all, it means allowing your workforce to unlock and share their company and subject-matter expertise. 

According to fresh data from our own Edelman Trust Barometer, we're desperately seeking expertise. Informed publics are more likely to trust what they hear from experts over any other source.

However, the reality there are very few companies understand this. Most are still taking a campaign approach to social networks where it's the brand, not the people, that are the voice - and there's usually only one.

What's worse, the Berlin Wall stands tall inside Corporate America. Robert Half Technology found that only 10% of corporate chief information officers grant their employees full access to social networking sites. Those that do probably aren't guiding them. Manpower reports that only 20 percent of companies have social network policies.

Change must begin at home. If you don't get your employees on buses, your competition will and it will be harder to covet attention. This is every business' challenge in 2010 and beyond.

Have you ever tried to contact someone but were not sure if you had the email address right?  You guessed “First Name dot  Last Name at Company Name dot com”.  You sent the email…it did not bounce back but you got no response.  There are ways to find email addresses sometimes but other times, you just have to guess.

above is the introduction to some putatively helpful advice on figuring out the email address for someone you are trying to reach. 60secondmarketer.com pulled the information from another blog dedicated to "using social media in the job search." I think the author is more interested in filling the idle hours for job searchers than helping them be more efficient.

since it's a blog dedicated to job searching, let's assume the goal is to make a contact with someone you do not know at a company where you wish to work. a cold contact. how un-social. so - you guess what the address might be and save it as a contact in gmail. then you use linkedin's "find contacts" feature to search your gmail for linkedin users. if your target is on linkedin and has that particular email addy registered, their name will appear in the results. name not there? try again with another email variant. be creative, and the fun can last for hours. and bonus - your gmail contact list grows too!

what if the target individual has not used the appropriate linkedin settings screen to enter other email addresses they use (or used)? (hint: it's under settings, personal, email addresses) you can try variants until you're pulling your hair out to no avail.

how about instead using social media in the job search? you have the person's name. so enter the name in people search. is it a common name like joe smith? the recent enhancements to people search let you filter to a granular level, so you're still likely to find the right person.are they on linkedin at all? if yes, you're golden. linkedin tells you who connects you. reach out to that person and you're no longer the friendless job hunter - you're a big bad networking force of nature and a skilled social media user.

if no, try twitter and facebook for common acquaintances. thanks to facebook's recent privacy changes, people's facebook friends are right out there for everyone to see (here's how to fix that, btw).

can't find any common acquaintances on other channels? go to the company website and find an email address for someone there. that will give you the formatting info you need without the trial and error of the suggested approach. no email addresses on the site? suck it up and call the company main line. tell the person who answers that the email you sent to joe smith bounced and you need to get his address. if she won't play, you don't want to work there anyway...