The next time you have an event to attend – be it a trade show, a networking event, a usergroup meeting, etc, do a little work ahead of time to make sure you meet with and get the contact info for key attendees.

Make a list of the people you want to be sure to meet at the event, and if you can, track down their email addresses. At the very least, you’ll be able to make a list of names to check off as the event progresses, but with a little effort you can do so much more than that.

Research:

Turn an Email Address into a Social Profile.

Do a litte digging on the people you want to meet. See if you can find their blog, their website, their facebook page, etc (use a tool like Flowtown to get headed in the right direction). With Flowtown, a simple email address unlocks the door to social profiles, and even compiles them all in once place. You can snag an image, jot down a few notes about the person, and maybe even connect in advance of the event. At the very least with a little additional insite to their personality you’ll be able to keep the conversation going with a few specific talking points.

Compile Your List:

Now take your list of names and email addresses and compile that will all the other little goodies you found about the people you want to connect with. You could put these together and print them on a small card (leave room for phone numbers and email addresses for those you don’t already have).

Get Tech Savvy:

Bump

If you’re really good, you’ll take your list of contacts and preload it – with all the additional info you found – into your phone’s address book. This way when you do get a chance to meet someone you can quickly add their contact info the address record you’ve already created. You could also try adding Bump or a similar app to your phone to make exchanging contacts super fast.

This certainly beats an akward business card exchange – and having to enter all the business card info into your CRM or address book later.

Another cool trick would be to use CardLasso from Model Metrics. CardLasso allows you to take a picture of a business card and have it automatically transcribed and entered to a csv file, your Outlook contacts or even to Salesforce as a new lead. I’m guessing the CardLasso trick is the least cost effective, but when I saw it at Dreamforce ‘08, it was really very cool.

Don’t forget to bring your business cards – you’ll still run into people who expect them – and create a plan of action for following up with all of your new-found friends in a timely manner.

Have any of your own networking tips? Share them in the comments.

My buddy Steve Caldwell and I came up with a simple work around that takes about 5 minutes to implement and doesn’t cost a dime. Rest assured, your org will still find a way to enter duplicate contacts, they always do, but this should help save some of your time and sanity.

1. Create A Unique ID Field

Create a text field (allow about 20 characters) and name it Unique ID. Make it read-only and don’t add it to any page layouts. Be sure you mark the field as a Unique ID field.

2. Create a Workflow

Now create a workflow that runs anytime a contact is created or edited. Assign a Field Update action to that workflow that combines the First Name and Last Name into one string in the Unique ID field. (John Smith unique id = johnsmith).

3. Update All Contacts

You’ll want to run the rule once to a. populate all the Unique ID fields and b. pull a list of existing duplicates. If you use the Apex Data Loader, this is really easy to do. Simply run a report that includes all of your contacts. You’ll only need to include the Contact ID column in this report. Then turn around and run an update through the Data Loader using that same list. Wa-lah! You’ve just updated all your contacts to have a Unique ID and your error report contains a list of existing duplicates you can go clean up.

4. Salesforce Administrator Triumphs

The next time a user tries to create a contact with the same first and last name as an existing contact, they’ll receive an error message that the Unique ID already exists and won’t be able to save.

This little trick should work for most objects you need to prevent dups on (leads, opportunities, custom objects, etc). If you run into multiple contacts with the same name, you may need to do something a bit more sophisticated or check the App Exchange for some paid solutions.

It’d be nice if you could just train people to provide great service. If there was just some half day training everyone could attend, or even a series of workshops – sure to turn even the most crotchety of folks into “service with a smile” types.

Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work that way. The knack for going the extra mile is one that’s hard to learn.

I’ve been working with a Drawloop over the past 2 months to implement an electronic document that feeds data to our Salesforce account. We pushed the envelope a little more than we realized with the project and ended up taking up quite a few more hours than anyone originally thought. Our contact over there, Caitlin, has been absolutely wonderful through the whole process.

She understands how important it is to understand our needs and foresee troubles we may run into down the road. She’s also always prompt and thorough with her responses to us. Her great level of service has gone a long way toward convincing me that Drawloop is a company worth working with and recommending in the future.

No level of training or protocol can create that for your business. Those things help streamline the experience and foster of a culture of good service, but it has to start with a group of people who are just plain good at it.

So, here’s a little teaser about something that will most likely be done this month. A while back, before all this new job stuff got going, I had the chance to interview a writer for Career Builder. One of the guys that gets posted to the front page of MSN quite a bit. I wanted to take a peek into their SEO training and level of knowledge. Its pretty interesting stuff, combining journalism with the Web. I think there are some pretty common ideas out there that to do good SEO you have to sacrifice good content, but we all know that’s just not true, right? So, look for that in the next week or so.

Also, I’m doing a total revamp of the Website at the new job, so I’ll be tracking some of my wins and losses with that for you guys.

In the mean time, don’t delete me, please! I promise I’ll be back in full force before ya know it!

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I’m a little perplexed by some of the people in my life right now. Not in my personal life (thank the stars), but my professional one. See, just about every other person I know is looking for a job right now. Let me actually rephrase that to “looking” for a job…

You see, in case you weren’t aware, the economy, is not good. Many, many companies are experiencing layoffs right now. I know a good handfull of the folks who have been laid off just in the last 3 or 4 months. All of them are out “looking” for a job now. But really, only a few of them are really looking.

I hear the excuses: “I haven’t actually started searching yet”, “My resume just isn’t quite ready”, “No one is even hiring anyway”, “I don’t really know what I want to do”, “The stuff on the job boards is all crap anyway” and it really just ticks me off. If you want to make a change in your life or you HAVE to make a change in your life, then just get started on it. Go watch some Gary V videos and get inspired to WORK for what you want.

Looking for a job doesn’t mean checking indeed.com once a morning to see what pops up. Its putting yourself out there. Its updating your connections on LinkedIN, its going to your local networking events, its learning something new about your field. Its WORK. Because in this economy, no one is going to get a job just by sending out a couple of resumes a day. And I hope it stays that way. I hope even after the financial situation returns to normal that it is still tough and competitive out there. Because that will mean the businesses in this country have finally learned to hire hard working, efficient employees who care about their jobs and their careers.

/rant

Wow, so I always assumed I had just a small little handful of readers out there, feeling lucky when I got a few legit comments here and there. I never really kept up with how many folks subscribed to my blog through RSS feed. I know, I know, bad me. I just didn’t really care too much about how many people were reading what I write at this point. I write for me, its good practice and I enjoy it. I don’t write for popularity.

So, I was shocked when I checked out my RSS stats today and found out that just since last month I have about 250 subscribers! I didn’t know you were all out there, reading, anxiously awaiting my next post, refreshing your Google reader over and over…

What’s that? You weren’t really all that interested in what I post and when? Ok, fine. But I’m going to pretend you were, cause maybe I do want to be just a little bit popular in this whole social media world.

Anyway, thanks so much for subscribing and reading, I’d love to get more comments and conversations out of you all now that I know you’re here, but I won’t ask for a miracle.