Saturdays at CPA Success are sometimes spent reviewing online tools that can help increase our productivity. Keep in mind that we do not endorse any of these services. We simply offer them up for your consideration. Do your own homework and find the service that best meets your needs.
Social media gets all the press these days, but e-mail — that ol' office workhorse — keeps things humming.
So-called experts have been sounding e-mail's death knell for a while now, but we all still use it, don't we? E-mail is as relevant as ever. In fact, I'm not sure we could function without it. Not yet, anyway.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge social media fan. Its power is undeniable.
But it has a flaw. Managing all of your various social accounts can get … well, unwieldy at times. There's just so much to follow, so many tools to try, so much information to juggle.
The search is on for the definitive social media dashboard — the tool that will let you manage all of your social data in one platform. The day that platform arrives will be glorious, indeed.
In the meantime, as usual, it's e-mail to the rescue.
I'm talking about something called NutshellMail.
I first read about NutshellMail in this TechCrunch post. E-ssentially, it's an e-mail newsletter that pulls in any social information you want.
Facebook? Check. It'll show your news feed, friend requests, and all of your friends' status updates, photo uploads, birthdays, links and any other information they're sharing. Best of all, it'll show you updates from all of the fan pages that you're following — and it'll do all of this in one e-mail message.
And that's not all. You can customize your NetshellMail newsletter to include updates from Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace as well. In essence, you're getting all of your social media information in one daily e-mail newsletter.
Now that's handy.
You can access NutshellMail either through its Web site or its Facebook app.
We've included a link to NutshellMail on the MACPA's Facebook fan page, offering our fans a way of receiving all MACPA Facebook updates in one convenient e-mail message. But you can do so much more with it than that.
Are e-mail's days numbered? Time will tell.
But services like NutshellMail are giving it a new lease on life.