Turn Gmail (or any E-mail Account) Into a Social Network Hub

There's been a lot of chatter about the entire concept of social graphing. I have no idea if there is validity here or not. And certainly people smarter than I am are talking about the potential viability of the entire concept.

However, what I do know is that a lot of us are increasingly participating in social networks and we need a way to track it all. Also, most of us are hooked on email too. So, the good news is you can easily combine these addictions (um I mean "tools") to your advantage.

Thanks to gobs of storage, a pretty strong reason to stay locked-in (three and a half years of heavy email use), my Gmail account is the nerve center that runs my life. Yes, just as Gmail remains my personal nerve center, it now also tracks my social graph. I use Gmail as a Grand Central Station-sized hub that helps me track every social network I participate in and my friends' activity there - as well as my own.

Here are four tips that have helped me. Many of these tips will work on most social networks that provide RSS, SMS or email alerts as well as on all big webmail sites - e.g. Windows Live Hotmail, AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail or even Exchange.  What I love about it is that it also works great with Treos, Blackberries and iPhones. This series has several parts...

• How to use Gmail to post to social networks
• How to track your friends and their replies using Gmail
• How to build a "lifebase" inside Gmail that maintains a record of your various friends/connections
• How to use Gmail to prioritize the right friends and weed out the ones you want to un-friend

Use Gmail to post to Social Nets

Let's face it, life is busy. Who has time to go to a site, log in and post something new. SInce I already spend a tremendous amount of time inside Gmail, I have rigged it so I can easily post directly to the social nets where I choose participate. In my case, this consists of Twitter and Facebook. It's simple.

In Twitter's case I use Twittermail. I have a super secret address that I send mail to and it automatically posts to Twitter, edits me down to 160 characters and formats my links. 

Facebook doesn't have email in functionality for status updates, but you can use Teleflip  or another email to SMS gateway to get around this. Configure it so that any mail you send it auto forwards to FBOOK (32665). Use the @ symbol to update your status. Other commands are posted here and listed below.

Track Your Friends and their Responses with Gmail

So now that we covered how to get stuff posted to social networks from Gmail, let's start using it to get updates so you can track your peeps - and their replies back at 'ya.

In the case of Twitter, it's simple again thanks to their API. Twittermail can automatically email you any replies to your Tweets. In addition, I use Twitter Digest to generate  a feed of all of the friends I want to follow the most. I then stick this feed in my Gmail clips, which rotates whenever I am using the account. Even better, you can run a Twitter Digest feed through R-Mail (now owned by NBC and soon to be called SendMeRSS) and have it land in your inbox as an email message once daily.

How about Facebook? Easy. Log into your account, find the status update page, grab the RSS feed and run it through Feedburner. Why Feebdurner? Because you can keep it the feed and your friends updates safe from search engines, yet still subscribe to it via email. This doesn't just apply to Facebook but any site that lets you track friends via RSS.

Use Gmail (or other Webmail Service) to Build "a Lifebase" of Friends

Now, I don't know about you, but in my business relationships are everything. Increasingly social networks are becoming a theater of operations for PR. So we need ways to track our interactions over time. Enter email.

Using any of the methods described above, start subscribing to feeds via email for the friends you want to follow closely. If a feed doesn't exist in the social net you want to track and there's only text message capes (like Facebook), use an SMS to email gateway.

With the emails set up, then build some very smart filters in Gmail. For example - "from:R-mail subject:Scoble." This will find all messages that come in from R-mail from Scoble's Twitter stream. I have this search automatically filtered and archived to a special "Friends" label as Lifehacker describes here. Using this method, you now have a nice way to track a friend's entire stream - should you wish.

Use Gmail to Prioritize Friends You Care About Most and Weed Out Duds

If you follow the steps above you will start to amass a lifebase of all your friends and their social networking activities. This works especially well on services that offer unlimited storage, like AOL and Yahoo. Over time, you will open certain messages and ignore others. This will reveal just how valuable a particular friend's update is to you.

Using Gmail you can find these all instantly with a command like this - from:R-mail subject:Twitter is:unread. Then you know which friends you should toss - at least from Gmail.

These are just a handful of tips and this concept is evolving but even before someone builds the big social graph in the sky, I am just getting along fine using Gmail, thanks to a bit of hackery.

Comments

[Dario Salvelli]

Great Post Steve: i think that Gmail is a piece of the future Google social networking service (that isn't Orkut... ).

[Anne Z.]

Wow, Steve, this is really cool! Over the summer I was thinking about Gmail as a "PRM" (personal relationship manager kind of like CRM) but I didn't actually figure out how to make it into one like you are doing.

I especially like your idea of updating Facebook via email to SMS. On super busy days I don't always get to Facebook, but I'm in email regularly. That's a great way to keep in better touch with those friends.

[Jackie]

Thanks for all the tips -- I loved my gmail account to begin with, now I love it even more since I can orgainze my online life :)

[Dan Schawbel]

Steve thats a great way of thinking. Your gmail address can be configurable to your personal brand and help you channel your brand through a variety of networks using the strategies your describe.

[Stephan Miller]

Thanks for the tips. I have been gradually switching everything over to Gmail. This post will turn gradually into quickly.

[Bryan Kennedy]

As Om mentioned in an article you linked to, you can use http://xobni.com and achieve much of this and more. And Stephan, it really makes the switch to gmail less tempting.

[Alex K]

Great post! You can also use my company product, OutTwit, to interface with Twitter directly from Outlook. A nice side-effect is that you do not need to provide your Twitter login info to a 3rd party service.

http://www.TechHit.com/OutTwit/

[sull]

i'm in the -gmail as hub- camp too.
way its been for about 3 years, mostly driven by rss feeds (using rssfwd.com), mailing lists and alerts organized with filters and labels. i havent touched a traditional rss reader and i avoid having to use any other web UI for content consumption at all costs. it's been great.

as far as outputting content, besides mailing lists, i havent used email too much to post onto other services. i tend to like visiting the sites i have chosen to post/comment on. but email to post is definately convenient.

[Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten]

Thanks for mentioning TwitterMail. I think a lot of people could benefit from this service as it really enhances Twitter.

[Dave Fleet]

Thanks for all these great tips!

I've used iGoogle as my hub for a while now - looks like now I can simplify it even more!

[Edward Vielmetti]

you refer to email as "grand central station" - just a note that Google's "Grand Central" can be a good addition to the mix re using your inbox as a social network hub since it can send your voice mail into your inbox too

[Stuart]

Great practical post Steve. I still have reservations about dumping everything into and through Google.... although I now do. There are real merits to your hubbing strategy. Do you gmail to blog? Do you autosend your blog updates to gmail?

[Andreas Lienemann]

Really interesting post Steve!

I, for one, seem to have problems feeding Twitter Digest's ouput (RSS or Webpage) into FeedBurner or RMail.

They all come back claiming that this is no valid feed url.

Only Google Reader seems to accept the Twitter Digest feed without complaints.

I was wondering how you made this work for yourself; getting the feed into RMail that is?

Regards

Andreas

[Nick]

Great article.
For me though, it's not the best solution cause I like to keep my email for emails. I hate the social networks spam.
My hub is 8hands which aggregates my friends from all networks and provides notifications to the desktop so my email is bacn free.
I think there should be a clear separation between mail and social msgs.

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[Peter TT]

Thanks for the great article...
I noticed a typo around the 12th paragraph "Feedburner. Why Feebdurner?"

[June Choi]

i have been using Gmail without knowing all these features.
i just like Gmail gives us so much memory space and its
search function.

[bala]

great post. there are better ways to send updates to twitter.
its a 3 way work-around - which you need to setup once. it will automatically pick your blog/twiter (or any rss feed source) and post/forward to your site/blog. More of auto-blogging concept.

for more insights write to me at bala@vmarketics.com

[Clay]

So I'm trying, and trying and trying, to get the trick w/ Teleflip to work...

...but I don't see anything about auto-forwarding on their site at all. Well, except for sending a text message to my phone.

I'm pretty confused about this particular piece of your advice. What am I not getting here?

[jobin]

is it really true...how can v do tat.....