Exporting contacts from outlook.com is really easy. I’ll show you how to export, then follow step TWO and Step THREE from this post.

First, choose PEOPLE from the top-right option.  Click the drop down (#1) and it will show the four options (2).

Then, from the top menu click the Manage Drop down (1) and then click Export (2).

That is it – Outlook.com automatically exports your contacts to a csv file.  Again, do steps TWO and THREE from this post to import into JibberJobber.

In the release this week we added the “Custom Fields manager.”  Amazingly we have never had this… but it is there now.  The Categories and Tags managers have been in the system for a while but I don’t think I’ve properly introduced them.  So, let me introduce all three in this post.

The idea behind these three “managers” is to give you a place to clean up your Categories, Tags and Custom Fields.  You can delete them and you can edit them.

From the Contacts, Companies or Jobs drop downs you’ll see these three options:

When you click on any of those you’ll go to the “management” page.

I do this when I feel like I have too many Tags in my Tag dropdown.  I order them by the number of times the Tags is used, and then delete the Tags that have zero or one or two Contacts associated with it.

Same with Custom Fields… I have a ton because I set some up with good intentions but haven’t ever used them.

Thank goodness for these managers!  To access them, mouse over the Network, Companies or Jobs menu items and then click on whichever manager you want.

(note: there is still some work to do on the Custom Fields to polish it, but you can delete unused Custom Fields right now)

Lately I’ve been adding new Contacts to JibberJobber via email.  It’s one of the coolest features we have.  I simply find someone I want to put in my system, send them an email, bcc my ultra-secretive email address, and if the person isn’t in my database it will be added (along with the email contents, as the first Log Entry).

If you don’t know what I’m talking about (a) you are missing out and (b) you need to watch the video on this post (Email2Log – here is Part 3 where I talk about how to do this).

Anyway, back to how I find that person.  I’ll email them but I keep their LinkedIn Profile up so I can grab their picture, title, location, etc.  When I create the Contact record using Email2Log I am only adding the first name, last name and email address.

Normally my Contacts List Panel is ordered so I see the most recent Contacts I’ve entered at the top of the list.  But sometimes it is not ordered like that… and sometimes I feel it takes to long to come up and then reorder, or clear a filtered search or something like that (yes, I’m that impatient).

I have found a better place to find the new Contact.

Instead of going to the Contact List Panel I mouse over Reports and then click on the Log Entries and Action Items Report.

Anytime you use Email2Log you are creating a Log Entry, so it will show up in that report (which is a List Panel).

I have this report ordered so that I see the latest Log Entries or Action Items at the top.  I simply come to this report and look to see if the email is on the top.  I am showing the Contacts column (if you don’t see it, click on the manage columns icon and add it), and I simply click on the person’s name and it takes me to their Detail Page.

The Email2Log is on a 5 minute cycle, so it might take a few minutes before it shows up, but this is my fastest way to getting to that newly created Contact record so I can put more details on the record. For some reason I like doing it this way rather than going through the Contact List Panel.

Cool, huh?

I recently got a question about merging Contacts and keeping multiple email addresses.  It’s easy to do… here’s how:

1. From the List Panel, (1) click on the two (or more) Contacts you want to merge, then (2) click the merge icon:

2. On the next page you’ll see things you can merge.  Notice some things don’t have multiple discrepencies so there is nothing to choose/merge.  In other words, there is only one rank: 5 stars.  There is only one URL.  There is only one title.  You aren’t merging these.  BUT, you do want to merge (and keep) both email addresses)…

3. The email addresses that has a “selected” Radio Button is the main email address.  To keep the others simply click the drop down and choose the type of email.  I chose Personal. Note you can choose OTHER and create a new email type.

When you save the form you’ll keep all of the email addresses that don’t say — Choose an Email Type — (I need to fix the type-o there, don’t I… )

Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s a short video on how to export your contacts from your iCloud account (below the video is a link to export to outlook.com). It exports to a vcard file but you can then convert that to a csv file… not bad

The vcard to Excel (or csv) converter is: http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert (I know – it’s a site in China… I never thought I’d link to something like that)  This is a great site for anything Apple, since they like vcards so much.

NOTE: this is a video from some other system, not JibberJobber… I’m sharing this video so you can see how to get your contacts out of iCloud.

Exporting your contacts from Outlook.com – awesome post with pics.

JibberJobber launched in May of 2006. I had the idea in February 2006, just three months earlier.

Since then we’ve worked full-time making enhancements, big and small.  Last night we made a release with a bunch of things… here are the ones I can document (some are simply hidden from you or more for the admins than for users, so they won’t make sense to list here):

Premium Users: Send action item texts to your cell phone

This has been requested over the years and we finally did it.  You must go into the Account/Preferences page to set this up.  Once set up, and if you are a premium user, you’ll see this box on on the Log Entry / Action Item:

All Users: Custom Fields Now Show on List Panels

You can now choose to show Custom Fields on List Panels.  Simply click the Manage columns icon () and then you’ll see your Custom Fields on the list in the first column… click the checkbox and that Custom Field will show on the List Panel (these Custom Fields will now show on my List Panel):

All Users: Degrees of Separation more intuitive

Did you know we help you keep track of the real Degrees of Separation in your network?  It’s actually quite brilliant, and a bit different than how LinkedIn defines it.  When you meet someone through someone else, and enter them in JibberJobber, you can say they were “referred by” the person you met them through.

This image shows a snippet from a Contact’s Detail Page, on the right side.  You can see DoS with an image of 3… before that was just a text number and it always seemed kind of hidden (especially if the number was a 1… which just looked like a line).

Now it’s more obvious how you met the person.  If you click on the icon it will take you to the valuable Tree View.  It also shows, right under the number icon, who introduced/referred you.  I know this is a really minor enhancement (the functionality has always been there, we just changed the text number to a more prominent icon), but this is great info when you are networking!

All Users: Auto Save on Notes and Log Entries

One of my favorite users (hi Brad!) asked for this… he has been on a call with a prospect and then something happened to his browser or computer and he lost the notes he was taking…. now we are auto-saving Log Entries and Notes every 30 seconds to avoid that.  As you type you should see this message in blue (the message goes away after a few second):

All Users: Pull a URL out of an Email Address

This is another minor thing but I will LOVE it.  Many times I’ll put someone’s work email address in the system and then think “darn, I have to practically retype the URL into the URL field.”  No more insanity!  Now, in the URL field there is a little icon that, if you click it, will pull the URL from the email address.  Here’s an email address but no URL:

When I click on that little icon (), it pulls the URL from the email so I can have this:

Minor, yes, but we’re doing everything we can think of to make it easier to get data into the right places.

All Users: Easier to set dates to TODAY, yesterday, etc.

Another tweak to help you, with a few clicks and no typing, put dates into he system.

For example, on this detail page I want to say I met you last night at a networking event.  I double click the gray area to open the edit field, then I click the back arrow to go to yesterday, and Save.  OR, I can click on Today, and then use the arrows to go forward or backward… easier than (heaven forbid) I actually type the date in.  I will overuse this feature

All Users: Get Emails is now a free, not Premium, feature

We have had discussions about what should be free, what should be premium.  I’ve finally figured out my “guiding principles” to help me figure it out, which means a number of previously-premium features will be moved to the free side.

From the Contact List Panel you have a bunch of icons on the bottom, one of which allows you to select a bunch of Contacts and then get a “report” of their email addresses, formatted perfectly for copying-and-pasting into an email.  This is now a free feature.  You are welcome  Here’s the icon you would click to get the email addresses:

Once you click on that icon, the Contacts you have checked will show up in this report.  Sorry for erasing out the contact info but you can see in highlight the separation… the format is this:  ”Jason Alba” <Jason@JibberJobber.com>, “Next Name” <email@address.com>, etc….

… and a number of other fixes, minor enhancements, typos and other things that I’m not going to mention here.

My team is awesome, and I really appreciate them.   It still consider it a miracle we’ve been able to build something so cool and valuable for people to manage and own their careers and networking!

I can’t wait until the next release… it will be some of the biggest news we have for JibberJobber… and we’re all on pins-and-needles with anxiety until it releases

Today we got an email asking how to track something on a Job record.  Liz (who many of you have met online) responded saying to use Tags.

Tags are… awesome. That is, A.W.E.S.O.M.E.

But sometimes Tags are not the solution.  Sometimes you want to use Custom Fields.  Here is how they differ:

Tags are like a label.  Just like you use on Gmail (aka, labels), Flickr, etc.

Custom fields have two parts.  Think of it with this example:

Job Number: 123124

When you set up a custom field you put in the NAME of the field… in this case, Job Number (this might be what HR or the recruiter refers to).

Every time you add a new job record you can choose Job Number from the custom field drop down (since you already added it).

The value of the custom field for that job is “123124″.  The next job you put in might have a different value, like “EMC097345″

When would you use Tags, and when would you use Custom Fields?

I would use Tags when I wanted to GROUP or CATEGORIZE people… for example: hiring_manager, recruiter, high_tech, friend, family, etc.

I would use Custom Fields when I wanted to have a new FIELD on the Detail Page (of Contacts, Jobs or Companies), and each record could have a different value.  Think of this the same way that you have Last Name as a field, and different last names for each record.

So, two great ways to add more information to each record.

NOTE: For more information on Tags, check out this post: How I use Tags to organize my Contacts, Companies, Jobs

I got an email yesterday from a power user in Pennsylvania.  He asked how to avoid posting an entire email thread (which can get very long) into a Log Entry.

To put this into context, my favorite feature in JibberJobber is the Email2Log feature, where you can send an email to someone, and BCC the JibberJobber server, and the message becomes a Log Entry in JibberJobber.

This is profound.  It can mean that you never need to go to JibberJobber….. simply BCC the server anytime you send a message you want to log and associate to a Contact… and we do the rest.

BUT, what if you go back and forth and back and forth in email, and the email gets longer and longer… you don’t want the very long emails to be logged each time, do you?  I know I don’t.

In June of 2011 we remedied this…. here’s the post explaining how it works: Email to Log Entry Just Got BETTER!!

Basically, you put in a string of characters for your Log End line in the email.  I have put this at the beginning of my email signature, like this:

Here’s a great tip from my power user: if you want, make the Log End line in your email WHITE TEXT.  In the image below, the Log End Line is in white text, but you can see it only when I select all the text around it (that is why the background is blue):

That way, no one will see it, but the server sees it.

I love ideas like this… thanks Jonathan, for the tip

NOTE: You want the end line to be a series of characters that someone won’t put in their email … If they do, THEY will truncate what goes into your Log Entry.

If you’ve been on a user webinar lately you’ll know I like Tags more than Categories.  I’ve said “if I could go back 6.5 years in time I would take out Categories and only have Tags.”

Every once in a while I get emails asking me how I use Tags, or is there a list of Tags that I recommend.

I’ve never spent the time to figure out what “the list” might look like, mostly because people use JibberJobber in different ways.  But let me share some thoughts that might help you figure out what your Tags should could be.

Before I go on, I should say, you can’t really mess this up.  If you create a Tag that is spelled wrong you can easily fix it later (in at least two different places).  If you create a Tag that you don’t use, you can move all of the records you’ve tagged to a better, more useful Tag, easily.

My list of Tags simply grew to what they are now.  I didn’t sit down and think “what are the 20 Tags I’ll want in the future?”  I just started tagging people based on certain groupings that made sense.  For example, my top 10 tags on my Contacts (you can see your top 10 Tags by clicking on Tags, under the Network menu item):

The second column shows the number of Contacts I’ve tagged with that Tag.  I have 328 bloggers, or people tagged as “blogger,” in my system. Why? Because I did massive outreach to bloggers a few years ago.

I have 267 people tagged as coach and 222 people tagged as resume. Why? Because I have products and services for coaches and resume writers and I email them to let them know.  Tagging them allows me to easily find their information so I can reach out to them.

I have 234 people tagged as “university_career. Why? Because career centers license my videos, and I’ve been keeping tabs on the 234 people I’ve reached out to, or had conversations with.

Here’s the WHY on the others:

mbacwp: this is an association. As I’ve met members of this association (has to do with MBA career services) I’ve put them into my system.

recruiter: in the early days of JibberJobber I thought recruiters would be great evangelists for JibberJobber to candidates.  That turned out to be false, since most recruiters are “up to their eyeballs in alligators,” and don’t seem to have an interest in helping candidates in their job search.

main_prospect: this is kind of funny… I’m not sure what they were a main prospect FOR.  I’ve changed my tagging system to be more specific… if I continued to use this tag I would add another section, like main_prospect_dvd, or main_prospect_videos, or main_prospect_somethingMoreSpecific.

usaf_tap: I went to two conferences where every Air Force base had a transition person there.  I put them into the system hoping to communicate my free offering for veterans and future veterans.  Unfortunately I have found that going directly to these people is futile. I’ve not done anything with them for a while because it was like banging my head against the wall. So there they sit… not taking up room, but ready when I figure this out better.

twitter: these are the people I have imported from Twitter (one-by-one, not the bulk import).

military: these are individuals I’ve talked with to help get the word out about my military/veteran offering.

This list of Top 10 gives you an idea of where I’m spending my time (kind of).

The bottom list shows 10 “good ideas”… these went nowhere (see that I have zero or one connection for any of them):

I’m not worried about the ones I don’t use.  I had good intentions at one time, but that doesn’t mess up my database.  Sometimes I clean them out, but I’m not too worried about it.

Brainstorming, here are some tags I would have if I were to start a job search today:

• hiring_manager: this might be someone I want to have a long-term professional relationship with, and could introduce me to peers in my industry/profession.
• newsletter: someone I want to keep informed of what I’m doing.  See Brandon Uttley’s awesome and effective job search newsletter campaign.
• [company_size] ie, fortune100, fortune 1000, startup, enterprise, etc.: if you want to segment your targets by company size.  Some of you are looking for a massive company but are also interested in funded startups.
• [industry] ie, high_tech, phara, retail, logistics, etc.:  since I’m in Information Technology I wasn’t married to any particular industry…. tagging by industry grouping would be useful.

I’m sure you’ll come up with others.   Again, it’s hard for me to tell you what 5 or 10 tags to have, but I hope this post has been helpful as you create your own.  Remember, you can’t really mess this up… it’s easy to backtrack or fix later.

Note that using the underscore allows me to break my tags down when I search.  See this post for more on searching based on tags.