This really is one of the MOST exciting features in JibberJobber because, well, it helps keep you out of JibberJobber.

Doesn’t make sense?

Look, I’m not trying to get eyeballs to JibberJobber, like many of the other websites. I just want to provide a useful tool that helps you get the job done. I use JibberJobber all day long (it is my personal relationship manager), and I want to use it in a smart, effective, efficient way.

That’s why we came up with this new feature… in short, you can send an email to the JibberJobber system and have it become a log entry on one of your contacts.

How does it work?  Watch the video below.  Note: this is a premium feature.  Premium is as expensive as $9.95/month and as inexpensive as about $5/month (see the bundle options here).  This feature is worth a lot more than that in the time it saves you.  Check it out:

There is a little icon on the bottom right that will allow you to view this in FULL SCREEN  (ALSO, you only need to watch to about 8:04… after that it repeats a bit… we’re cleaning this up now)

Updated on Saturday morning…. I had to turn comments off on this post – in the last 12 hours it has attracted a lot of spam comments!

We regularly have bad email addresses entered when people sign up for JibberJobber.  Many times people just type the wrong thing… that’s okay – it’s common (don’t feel bad).

Here’s how you can fix it… if you haven’t verified your email address yet you can do it by (1) clicking on My Account, (2) clicking on the verification email tab (red arrow), (3) editing the email addy in the box, and (4) click on the verify email button.  It’s as simple as that.

If you HAVE verified an email but you want to change it, simply go to (1) My Account, (2) click on the email addy tab, (3) put in the new email and your JJ password, and you’re good (you’ll have to verify the new addy – so try to spell it right ).

If you have problems you can use the Contact Us link, but 99% of the time the instructions above will take care of ya!

We have been toying around with the ability to add “events” to JibberJobber so you can learn about networking opportunities, web-based learning opportunities, etc.  You can see a list of events in a couple of places now and as this feature matures you should see it more.

An example is a personal branding teleseminar put on this Friday by JibberJobber Partner Beverly Harvey.  You can see the event details here.  This teleseminar is an introduction to personal branding and helps you understand that having a strong personal brand can help you attract the right opportunities to you.  The call is an hour long and I wouldn’t miss it – Beverly is well regarded in the career space.

If you log into JibberJobber you’ll see the Action Item panel also includes a link to the event, like this:

Eventually this Event feature will mature… I have a list of things I’d like to see added, and the dev team is working on some of it… if you have any suggestions just let me know.

If you want to add your own event you can do that in the Tools drop down – just click on Add a Network Event.

For more information on Beverly’s Personal Branding call, click here.

Preorder the LinkedIn for Job Seekers DVD here.

We take great pride in our little software system that has provided hope and power to thousands of job seekers. Sometimes we have great big releases and add significant features for you, other times they are very small features that further polish the software and enhance your experience.

We strive to give YOU a tool to empower you, put you in more control of your job search (face it, in a job search you feel quite out of control), and make you feel like a first class citizen even when everyone treats you as a third class citizen.

Today I’ll share one of the polish-features we just introduced.  It’s an enhancement to what I announced in December… now you can easily search for an image of a contact or company with Google Image Search.  Here’s how:

On a Company or Contact detail page, find the image place (it’s right under the name, like in this picture – we’ll replace this picture of Miss Piggy with a new one):

Mouse over the image (whether you have an image or not, there is a place where the image goes)to see the add/edit/delete buttons.  Simply click on the “G” icon to open a Google Image Search.

*note: the images are: (1) upload from your computer, (2) upload from a URL, (3) NEW: search and upload from Google Images, (4) delete image.

In the shadow box, look for the image that you want and click on it.

Once you click on the image it automatically sends that image to JibberJobber and puts it on that record.

Simple enhancement?  Yes… it’s a little simple something to empower you even more.

We’ve been working on this first major enhancement for a while – designing, tweaking, testing, fixing… and finally last night it was released so it’s available to you. This is a simple thing but will really make your JibberJobber experience more pleasant as you work with your information.

Announcing, the ability to edit record on the Detail Pages.

Try this out… login to JibberJobber and go to a Contact Detail Page.  Then, mouse over the fields – whether you have information in each field or not.  When you mouse over a field that becomes gray (like this picture below) you can double click the gray area to edit or update that field.

Once you double click you can update the data (like in the picture below).  Just hit the “save” button and you are done… no longer to you have to click on the “edit record” icon and go to another screen.

Like I said – simple, although it took a while to get it just right.  This is something I know you’ll enjoy as it really makes using JibberJobber easier.

Here are two more updates we snuck in:

Enhanced Twitter Interface

When you add a new Contact you can put the Twitter handle in as a “Service,” which is basically a “user defined field.”

We just added two new icons on the Detail Page so you can (2) open Twitter, with one click, and send an @reply message to them, and (3) open Twitter, with one click, and send them a Direct Message (DM).  The (1) was already in place, allowing you to go to their Twitter page.

Record Not Found… Now What?

Here’s a simple thing we thought of … if you search your database for a Contact or Company and the search comes up with nothing, how about a super easy way to add it as a Contact or Company?

You can easily do that now… when the search result page  show’s no results you’ll see these two links which allow you to add either a (1) new Contact, or (2) a new Company.

Again, these are pretty simple enhancements just to help you have a more pleasant experience.

More is on the way!

I didn’t do it earlier because I had simply run out of creativity.  But recently I started doing video recordings again and I thought “I CAN DO THIS.”

And so I did.

Thanks to Julie Walraven, resume writer and career coach, for being the first person to put this on a website (even before I put it up!).

Enjoy!

Man, just typing the title of this post makes me cringe with boredom.

However, I have used this technique many times over my career, and just recently the issue came up from a JibberJobber user who imported his Contacts.

His problem was that the first name and last name were in the same column, but we want that broken out when you do the import.

Fixing this is actually really simple. In my user webinars I talk about opening a csv file in Excel, so you can see the pretty columns and rows… but for this little exercise I recommend you open it up in Notepad.

I know, I know: opening it in Notepad will make it really, really ugly.  Almost unreadable.  Especially files that have a lot of “columns.”  Just remember, csv stands for “comma separated values,” which means that each “field” is separated by a comma.  The comma tells Excel to put the next thing in a new column.  For example, this csv content:

First Name, Last Name, Email Address, Phone Number
Jason, Alba, Jason@Jason.com, 801.800.8123

Will look like this when opened in Excel:

What if your file is formatted like this, instead? Notice the name is ONE column (not broken out)?

Name, Email Address, Phone Number
Jason Alba, Jason@Jason.com, 801.800.8123
John Doe, John@Doe.com, 555.555.1234
Sally Jesse, Sally@Jesse.com, 800.123.4567

Right now we aren’t parsing this for you – the best and easiest thing to do is to fix it in the file.  Again, go to Notepad, open the CSV file, and then make these very simple changes:

1. In the first row, which is the header row, change Name to First Name, Last Name.  This will make TWO columns instead of ONE (make sure to put the comma between the column names).
2. In all the other rows, simply put a comma between the first and last name.

That’s it – it is very simple. I’m guessing if I had a file with 100 records (names) I could put the comma inbetween the first and last name in about 4 or 5 minutes, or less…

This might seem like a pain, and when we redo the import we might accommodate for one name field, but for now this is really quite easy.  And YOU are empowered with the knowledge to manipulate your csv files!

Now when you import it will import the name values into the right fields (first, last).

We recently got feedback from our survey of user requests, and then met as a team to discuss, prioritize and assign work orders.  We were all jazzed to plan out the first part of 2010 and make JibberJobber more intuitive and more powerful.  There is a lot of great stuff coming down the pipeline, and no suggestions where ignored.

Here are some updates we released last week (did you notice any of them?):

• icalendar: you can now export your entire list of log entries and action items to a iCalendar format, which you’d then import to Google Calendar, Outlook, your Mac, or whatever you are using. You can also export things one at a time.
• Merge option for companies: we had this for contacts for a while, and somehow overlooked doing it for companies — oops!
• Title change on List Panel pages: I talk about “List Panels” but nowhere on the site could you see “list panel” in a page. So we made this very simple name change, and now when you are on a List Panel page you’ll know it. A little design consistency to help make the training more intuitive.
• “Referred by” column now on Contact List Panel: Referred By is one of the most powerful things in JibberJobber… and now you can see the column on your Network Contacts List Panel.
• Events 2.0: still needs some work (I sent 1.5 pages of changes to the developer), but this is awesome – allows you to add your own local network opportunities so all JibberJobber users can see them. I’ll talk about this more after more development is done, but you can go add your own events now (or look at what other users have added).
• New fields on contact form: preffix, suffix: I debated taking this out but after we released it I got an email from a user who works in an industry where this is critical… the email was a huge YIPPEE – so we leave it in
• Ability to print the Log Entries and Action Items Report: this is a busy report, and now it’s printer friendly.
• Ability to delete a Networking Relationship Goal: This is a cool feature, even though I hardly talk about it. Anyway, if you use it, you can now DELETE these goals

There were also some minor bug fixes, as well as some nomenclature (wording) changes around the site.

I find myself regularly pointing people to three of my most favorite features in JibberJobber.  In this post I want to share how JibberJobber interfaces with five outside tools:

1. LinkedIn – in various places in the JibberJobber experience you can tap into your LinkedIn network.  You can do a quick search on LinkedIn for companies or names, or you can see who is in your LinkedIn network by company.  I want to do LOTS MORE with LinkedIn, but their terms of service is too restrictive (sorry, talk to them about it). Need LinkedIn help?  Check out my LinkedIn DVD.
2. Twitter – I mentioned in that things I love post about how you can quickly add a contact by putting their Twitter handle in.  There is MORE coming… super cool stuff!
3. Skype – I use Skype for my business phone… when I’m in JibberJobber I can easily click an icon and initiate a phone call through my headset.  It’s one-click easy.  I can also click an icon and initiate a chat message through skype.
4. Google – just like I can do a quick search on LinkedIn, I can also do a quick search on Google. I thought this was just a cute “we did it because we could” feature, but I have used it more than I thought I would recently!
5. Anagram - people continually thank me for this feature – you can copy-and-paste contact information into a box, click a button, and then the information (names, phone #’s, etc.) is parsed into the correct boxes on the form.  It’s really quite brilliant (you can buy it for your PC, if you want, but you don’t have to have that to use the feature built into JibberJobber).

We would love to do more interfacing with other systems – send me a message and let me know what you’d like to see us interface with (and how the interface would work).

Update 1/8/09: thanks to the comment from Trevor Wilson, from Gradversity.com, we installed the patch/fix so that this is not important anymore. And it seems to have resolved at least one other thing that Marc reported… we’ll keep an eye on that!

Microsoft 8 came out a while back and they introduced a new feature bug… if you use IE 8 you’ll see something wrong on JibberJobber.  Fortunately it’s easy to fix.

When you login the Action Item panel is messed up … it looks weird… check this out:

To fix this once, simply go to the browser menu (not the JibberJobber menu), click on Tools, and then click on Compatibility View (red arrow). To fix it FOREVER, click on Compatibility View Settings (green arrow) and make sure JibberJobber is in the list of websites.

Here’s a snippet where I put JibberJobber as a website that should always show in compatibility view:

After you have done that you’ll see the top of the Action Item panel the correct way, like this:

Thanks Microsoft, for introducing another important (cough cough) feature (cough cough)