For all the popularity of blogging, social networking, Twitter, etc., email is still the killer app (or at least the workhorse app) for building and maintaining relationships virtually.

And yet, so many people use it so ineffectively, or at least so much less effectively than they could.

I was recently interviewed, along with with several other experts on email communications, for Newsday for an article on email etiquette. The consensus of the experts:

1. Pay attention to the subject line.
2. Get to the point.
3. Check spelling and grammar.
4. Answer emails promptly (although I have to admit I have a hard time with this just due to sheer volume).
5. Be careful about forwards.
6. Treat every e-mail as if it’s for public consumption.
7. Personalize your e-mails.
8. Account for tone.
9. Don’t let e-mail replace the human touch.

For more details, see Email Etiquette Tips at Newsday.

On a related but slightly different note, have you ever had this experience:  you send someone an email with two or three questions in it, but they only reply to one of them?  And then you have to email them back, restate the question, so on and so on, and the whole thing takes three times longer than if they had just answered all your questions in the first place?

I have a solution, which I just wrote about over at GTD Times:

There’s a Time and Place for Long Prose - Email Is Rarely It

In it, I share and explain one of the top email communication tips I use myself and with clients, and it’s the first time I’ve shared it publicly. Check it out, and I’d love to hear your feedback if you try it.

For more tips on email etiquette and productivity, see chapters 13 and 14 of The Virtual Handshake, which you can download for free or buy at Amazon or the usual outlets.

…this one does. This is from the opening ceremony of the Dallas ISD kickoff meeting for teachers, staff and administrators.

All I can say is "Amen!"

I have hope for the future of America.

My notes from Jason Fried of 37Signals at the NY Web 2.0 Expo:

Software business is a great place to be . You can build anything you want. Don’t have to worry about physics, raw materials, regulation, cost of change, geographic locale

You do have to worry about some issues most people don’t worry about:
- lack of feedback loop. Water bottle is immediately apparent as a quality design. Software is too nebulous. Doesn’t have edges or weight. Can expand infinitely.
- If software were physical, what would it feel like?

Versions 3 or 5 of software tend to be the best. If you say yes to too many customers, you look like MS Office.

You should think of yourself as a curator. Curator’s job is to say ‘no’.

Listen to customers, but innovate on behalf of entire customer base

Tend to bloat over time. Hard to go back over time from bloat.

Customers only represent what they know is possible, not what is ultimately possible.

When you get a request, attach a cost to it (dollars, time, etc.).

Q: How would you redesign Microsoft Office?
A: Make it much more social. It’s fine.

Q: Who should be the curator?
A: Steve Jobs is the ultimate curator in business.

Following are my notes on the Friday keynotes from the NY Web 2.0 Expo

Jay Adelson, founder, Digg

We’re about to add 90m Facebook users as registered Digg users.
Collaborative filters are key to monetizing of social networks

Ben Huh, icanhazcheezburger.com
LOLcats started out in primordial soup of the internet.
Every piece of web 2.0 content came from a user.
In 4/07, 8m page views/month. Had grown from blog to web 2.0 component, because it allowed people to build LOLcats.
100% user-generated content
8,000 submissions/day.

9/07: 15m page views/month
Huh and some other investors bought the site.
Our goal: make users happy for 5min/day
6 posts a day
9am ET start, when people come to work
Strict promotional guidelines
We normalize the system

Rules: we don’t allow photos of cat on a stove with the flame on, but it can be next to the stove
3/08: 37m page views/day
3/08: launched a network: ROFLrazzi.com . Just acquired failblog.com, which is growing faster than icanhazcheezburger
Now 100m page views/month.
8 sites.
5 FTEs who moderate comments, pictures.
We lower the bar for content creation. The lower it is, the better content you’ll have.

Shawn Fisher, head of strategy/M&A for IAC
Future of video games.
Instant Action is defining the $2b online core games market.
Overall video games market is $34b

2 types of video games:
-$7b in console based: $400 for hardware, $60/game. Add an extra $50/year for cost of ownership
PC is $150/year for online connectivity, and $60/game. Much cheaper because you don’t have console cost.

Only 8% of console titles reached 650K units (breakeven on avg. investment)
It’s an expensive product, takes a long time to produce, expsnvie for users…but high engagement.
We see room for breakthrough in this market. See see new category of games: hardcore games moving to the web. Most publishers won’t focus on this — too disruptive and cannibalistic.
Altenative: full and engaging video games that function 100% in browser.
Advantages: low cost, rapid development, entirely online distrution, high engagement, free for basic access
That’s what we’re building.

New brand :instantaction. First web-based videogame platform. Multi-player game. Console quality delivered in the browser.

We fund and develop original IP.
700K registered users. 30mins./day avg. time on site.
Over 127 countries
50% users in US, 50% outside. Core demographic male 13-34.

Dan Lyons, Fake Steve Jobs

Just joined Newsweek as a columnist.
As an old media guy, attending this conference is like attending your funeral in advance.
Started this in June 06
He put Fake Steve Jobs on hiatus when he saw Steve looking so sick.
Wrote book, “options”, on his secret life.
Started blog, RealDan, which everyone says sucks.
He started the blog because:
1) had free time
2) fear. I saw what was happening to the news business. I tried to get a job on the dot-com side of Forbes, but was rejected. I was 48, grey hair.

I wanted to parody both Steve and also blogging as a form. This was mostly fiction. This was a comic strip that evolved into news.

Some people thought I was steve and wrote to me asking for features.
In a few months, I had 90,000 people reading this. That’s more readers than I had at the first newspaper that hired me. Soon I had 1.5m readers.

Rich Karlgard (Dan’s boss) launches search for who fake steve jobs is. Dan told him who he was.

Brad Stone of the NY Times broke the story. At this point, at least 100 people knew about it, so it’s not surprising I was outed.

Why does it work?

Once I was outed, this still worked. The community really liked his stuff.
- Consume & create
- Fake Vladimir Putin: a character who lived entirely on my blog, who argued with fake Noam Chomsky.
- It’s a performance space

One of the best speakers at the NY Web 2.0 Expo was Josh Schachter of delicious, who spoke on Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems:

BACKGROUND

Built delicious in 2003, sold to Yahoo in 2005. I just left Yahoo a few months ago.
Billions of page views/month.
4m users at time of sale

3 kinds of scale: technological, personal, and software.

Technological scale
- partition users into multiple sets (sharding, clustering). I built delicious into one big database.
- caching. Avoid going into the database.
- replicas. Must have multiple copies of the data.
- mysql issue: we got a 60x performance speedup by making some changes
- autoincrement: will hurt you later. Don’t do this.
- put proxy in front. Don’t let the dialup user take up your whole server
- sloppiness. Use an offline process to decouple interactive processes from the rest of the system.

Social Scale
- different features at different scales
- at beginning, make it easy for users to find one another. Don’t let them say ‘hi’ and see no one respond. Minimize barriers to entry and minimize transaction costs.
- as you grow, you have to design features to mitigate traffic. E.g., on delicious, the ability to follow your friends.

3 reasons a social app has value:
- utility, network effect, revenue
- Delicious initially focused on utility.
- have to provide value to the user *before* there are a lot of users online
- you have to provide these motivations in this order: 1) provide utility, 2) get a network effect, 3) monetize

For a long time, biggest apps on Facebook were Superpoke, etc. They have very little functionality, but a lot of users, because they are simple enough to spread rapidly.

App must be self-marketing without requiring sign-in.

Compare initial marketing vs. actual functionality. Initial marketing of delicious was: bookmarks for people with multiple PCs. But really, we became a search engine for bookmarks.

Half our traffic came from RSS.

Figure out drivers for infection. Firefox Extension was our biggest driver.
Choice of language matters: key to say ‘do not share’ instead of ‘private’, to discourage not sharing. ‘Not sharing’ sounds like something your mom would criticize you for.

Kids change their social network partly because it allows them to update the network to reflect their current status

Delicious doesn’t have a chat feature because I didn’t want the flame wars you see on wikipedia admin pages

Must prepare to deal with spam and abuse

Lengthen or destroy feedback loops.

If you kick off a spammer, you’ve taught them what they did wrong. But they’ll be back. So on delicious we let them use the system but didn’t let anyone see them.

When xdrive had problems with spammers, they just inserted a 20sec delay on downloading files. That frustrated them and they moved to a different system.

Make pretty URL’s; they’re easier to remember & forward.

We were one of the first sites with a public API. I used this as a tool to recruit people who might have built competitors otherwise

Scaling yourself. The first thing you do will be wrong. Iterate quickly.

Write down all your ideas. It’s good for future patent work.

If people in engineering have to read support tickets they’ll build around problems

Figure out user motivations

put the whole staff in the listening session. Measure and record everything.

Average user has 60 tags.
8% of users will use 12345 as password
Another few % will use 123456
And about 15% will use your domain plus their ID

His best observation: SMS is the next command line. The next 1b people online will only have SMS.

Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibrary.tv was a *very* passionate speaker about entrepreneurship at the NY Web 2.0 Expo, although his style is definitely not one that everyone can emulate. My notes:

PP = patience and passion
“Please stop doing stuff you hate. You can lose just as much money being happy as hell.”
I took my parents’ wine business, grew it to $50m from a few million.
I beaome 1% not happy selling wine, and launched winelibrary.tv in February.
I promise you can make a living doing what you love.
Legacy is greater than currency.
It is not fun answering ‘What wine goes with fish?’ 74 x/day.
The only thing I fear in the world is internet on planes. I will retire from email when that happens.
Now repped by Creative Artists Agency. He got in Time, etc., based on quality product.
I answer all my mails personally.
I turned down 40 TV deals, because I’m waiting for bigger opportunity
The people that controlled it no longer do.
I leveraged my brand equity to publicize ‘pleasedressme.com‘.
Use all the tools – twitter, pownce.
We like reality TV because it’s somewhat real.
We’re going thru gold rush of branding.

I recently saw Ron Senator, CEO, Sphera Funds Management, speak at the Israeli Business Forum. My brief notes (distributed with permission) follow:

$250m assets under management. Approximately 18% net return since 2001.

Currently low net exposure to markets. We think some of the problems here are not behind us. Israel economy strong, well-developed, no major weaknesses.

However, all major Israeli indices have performed poorly since Dec 07.

A lot of Israeli corporates have gotten into real estate.

Israeli real estate market quite healthy

Defense is a strong sector

Relatively few big Israeli tech success stories. They mainly exit thru M&A. Tend to be conservatively managed, i.e., not much debt. Many are now trading at book value/cash. It’s like 2002 over again.

Dollar is likely to gain against shekel

A lot of crowded trades in the US ; we’re at a very early stage in Israel .

About 1 dozen hedge funds in Israel. Second-largest is <$100m. Others are $30-50m .

Several large international hedge funds are active in the Israeli market on an opportunistic basis

18 professionals

Fees: 1.5% and 20%. One-year lockup. Typical minimum: $ 500k.

Always demand for US-trained people.

Annual reports in Israel in some cases give more detail than US 10Ks.

It’s an old cliche, but it still holds true, even in the virtual world.

One of the things we discovered in the process of researching The Virtual Handshake is that one of the best ways to build strong relationships with other people is to help them actually get something done. Small talk is cheap. Actually stepping up to do something that makes a difference in someone else’s business or life costs some effort, but pays much higher dividends in the long run.

I would even go so far as to say that much of the reason that it’s easier to build close relationships face-to-face than online is because of the fact that we work with other people towards common goals more in person than online. Much of our online interaction is "just talk" — bouncing ideas around, sharing opinions, etc.

But there are all kinds of opportunities to have more helpful, valuable and meaningful interactions through virtual interaction. Personally, I choose these interactions over light conversation as much as I can. Sometimes that may mean I spend an hour helping one person actually accomplish something rather than doing courtesy replies to 10-15 other people. In fact, those people may never get replied to — there are so many demands on my time and only so much of me to go around.

Case in point…

Next Monday, I’m conducting a teleclass with Diane Darling entitled Maximizing LinkedIn and Other Online Networks. Diane and I have been virtual acquaintances since early 2003, when David I reached out to several established networking experts as we started working on our book. While we haven’t actually collaborated on a project until now, our history has been one of small, truly helpful actions, not just conversations.  She introduced us to her literary agent (we didn’t end up with her, but still…). And a couple of months ago, I spent a couple of hours helping her set up an Excel spreadsheet in response to a question she asked on LinkedIn about limiting a mailing geographically by distance from a given point.

So when Diane decided she wanted to do a teleclass about online networking, who did she call first?

While a couple of years ago I was "THE guy" about online networking, these days, a Google for "social media expert" turns up 51,000 results, and "social networking expert" turns up 11,000. A few of them actually even know what they’re talking about.  ;-)

Now certainly it wasn’t that one act of extra effort that put me at top of mind, but I asked Diane about it, and here’s what she had to say:

Your help with the spreadsheet was part of it, you wrote about my business…and you’ve been a generally good guy. You get reciprocity. Not everyone does.

This is why I still contend that for most people, focusing on a smaller number of stronger relationships is more valuable in the long run than chasing numbers and building a list with no substance to support it. There are dozens of other qualified social networking experts who Diane could have found via LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. But when it came down to it, it was the one who she actually had a substantive relationship with — the one she had actually exchanged favors with — who she picked.

In our article for FastCompany.com entitled Who Knows Who You Know: Leverage and Focus, David and I explained the concept of the "action threshold":

Crossing the Action Threshold

Many people will respond if you ask them for a favor. But it’s far better if they proactively market you and seek out clients for you. It takes a certain degree of trust and relationship strength for them to act proactively — that’s when you have leverage. If your relationships aren’t above that "action threshold", they’re not really serving you at full capacity. To achieve this goal, you first and most obviously need a high credibility level in what you’re selling. Assuming you have that, you can also motivate that proactive behavior in others by being proactive yourself in your service to them. A finder’s fee is another way to motivate more people to look out for your interests.

For more ideas on how to build strong relationships virtually, check out Chapter 20 of The Virtual Handshake, which you can download for free, get a paperback copy of for free, or buy at Amazon.

Image: Megan Soh via Flickr

I know there are quite a few people reading this blog who, like me, have several different virtual points of presence. The challenge I’m having is that no single one of them really feels like “me” – all just “a part of me”.

This site (TheVirtualHandshake.com) and my consulting site (LinkToYourWorld.com) are both shared with other people and subject to the constraints of supporting the brands and purposes of those sites. LinkedIntelligence.com is focused solely on LinkedIn. At Entrepreneurs.About.com, I’m subject to their editorial policies – it’s not really just “my” site. While all of these may have a bio and links to the other sites, each of them is slanted towards the purpose of that site.

Then of course there’s Twitter conversations, articles I write for various other sites (e.g., our column at FastCompany.com), my networks at Ryze, the Sales & Marketing channel at Work.com, interviews, media coverage, yada, yada, yada.

I could perhaps use my LinkedIn or Facebook profile as “home base”, but again, so much of the space is eaten up with stuff that ‘s not “me”. Also, they don’t really let you bring in all your various other content and media very well.

I’ve also thought about using something like WetPaint, HubPages, Squidoo, etc., but I’m not sure I want it to be on a third-party site – again, much of what’s on the page is about them, not me. Plus, you’re subject to the whims and vagaries of whatever they decide to do with the service.

I could set up yet another blog, but that’s really not what I’m looking for – I want something for the first-time visitor (or long-time-no-see friend) to be able to visit and navigate in a useful way.

So I’m in the process of building a personal web hub that incorporates all the many things I do. One site I can link to in my signatures. One site I can put on my business card. One site that doesn’t just link to all the other sites, but actually incorporates dynamic content from them all in one place.

I’d like to know if anyone else has done something like this. If so, please provide the link and any other comments you feel might be helpful. If you’ve done this with one of those hosted sites, I’d love to see that too.

I’ll also be happy to share the site once its done for those who might be interested in doing something similar.

If you’re reading this blog, odds are that you’re already familiar with LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. But what I constantly get asked, even from people who have been participating in these sites for a while, is, “How do I use these to generate real business?”

It’s easy enough to set up a profile, make a few connections, join a couple of groups, etc. — the basic mechanics. But actually finding customers, business partners, media opportunities, employees and so on via online networking is as much art as science. It’s not a mechanical activity — you’re still dealing with real people with real feelings, and good virtual interpersonal skills can mean the difference between fantastic success and frustration.

Next Monday, September 22, at 12:00 pm EST, (9 am PST, 10 am MST, 11 am Central, 5 pm London, 6 pm Cairo, 8 pm Dubai, 11 pm Bangkok), I’ll be doing a teleclass with networking expert Diane Darling, author of The Networking Survival Guide and Networking for Career Success, entitled “Maximizing LinkedIn and Other Online Networks”. During the call, Diane and I will discuss:

• How to best use social networking sites - e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Meetup
• How NOT to use them
• Ways to make your invitation stand out
• What if I get asked to help someone I don’t know
• Why go online - I just call people
• How do you get real business
• Why an online presence is important
• Mistakes that are easily avoidable
• Ways to expand your network without compromising friendships
• Best ways to give referrals
• How to tactfully reject people
• Due diligence to do before forwarding a request

This isn’t a how-to on the basic mechanics of using these sites — this is focused on the hard part: the “soft skills” that will actually make you productive, not just busy.

The cost of the class is $20 for the first 10 people that sign up through this link ($25 after that).  [NOTE: Sorry for the earlier problems with the link. It’s fixed now, and we’re keeping the price at $20, even though there are over 100 registered.] A recording will be available for your review, or for those who can’t attend at the scheduled time.

By the way, for a valuable online networking lesson, watch my blog later today for the story of how Diane and I ended up doing this class together.