For many of us, December is a special month, and whether you celebrate Christmas, Kwanza, Hanukkah, or any variation of holiday celebration, it’s a time for us to connect. More often than not we look to build stronger relationships with co-workers, family, or neighbors, and nothing says that better than a personal message from the heart.
Online communities may use social media tools to mass message large numbers of people, but social media is not the only thing for us to consider. What about digital holiday cards? Well Crenk did a little work and found three sites you should consider for your cards and perhaps there’s something for you in one of these three.
- Shutterfly is the budget option for those of us looking to send our large numbers of cards in a very short time. They offer a variety of card and postcard cuts and folds to ensure that your message is shared the right way. Customize your cards with personal photos in packages starting as low as $9.99 for a pack of 20.
- Pear Tree is for the green enthusiast in all of us. Send a card, save the planet. Feel good yet? Well you should, these cards are made from recycled envelopes and still have an elegant appearance that your recipients can appreciate.
- Paper Style is for those of us with bigger wallets. If you’ve got the dime and time to design, then you’ll be rewarded with high quality cuts and prints. Find matching envelopes, purchase matching address labels, or include folded note cards to insert into your holiday cards.
Sure there’s a lot out there, perhaps you’ve got some of your own favorites. Drop them in the comments section and let us know what you like best about them.
Social networking is turning into a bit of a bramble patch. Whilst making loads of new contacts and keeping in touch with old ones, we’ve somehow lost the part of the networking that is the social – the sharing of information. Be it photos, music or words of wisdom, it’s not quite as easy to let those who’d like to, know.
A solution, however, is afoot. Zentact, brought to us by among others, Eric Marcoullier of MyBlogLog fame, aims to collate your contacts into one place and allow you to share bits and pieces as you browse.
After signing up and adding in a few personal details, you can simply import your contacts from Hotmail, LinkedIn, Gmail and Outlook via a CSV address book and after a few seconds, they are on your system.
Next, and I highly recommend this, download the Firefox extension, all will be revealed shortly.
Now, the genius part. Each contact is taggable with their likes and dislikes and when a web page which has tags that match your contacts, if you installed the extension, a smart little box will flash up in the top right hand corner of your screen with the list of contacts who’s interests are relevant to the site. You can then send them a link and be merrily on your way. Remember, social.
Now the one down side to this is that if you have hundreds of contacts, it takes ages to go through them all tagging away. I’d recommend doing it bit by bit, adding tags as you go – this will take longer but does two things:
It lets you see who you will really be sharing with – there’s no point in having 300 contacts if you only ever talk to six of them regularly anyway, which means you can quickly identify those defunct e-mail addresses you’ve not used in years or people who don’t share common interests.
Secondly, it makes the whole process a lot smoother – you may like a tag binge, but frankly I’d rather be spending my time actually looking at what I came to see rather than typing in long lists of keywords, especially ones that are tricky to spell.
Now, it will take a while for you and Zentact to get to know each other, but the more contacts you tag and the more sites sites you send, the better Zentact becomes at recommending what is suitable for whom. This is a great service and especially suitable for anyone who is on a lot of social networks but can’t quite keep up with what is going on with who. Now you can build your relationships easily and stay in touch better.
We are lucky enough to have a handful of guest invites so you can try the private beta version of this site and tell all your friends about, which you can get by clicking here. Incidentally, you can tell your friends about it via Zentact and you can then invite them to join in this most social of networks.
