*Inspired by my daily work and Chris Brogan’s email subscription.

Sometimes all of us get email/twitter/SN pitches from companies that would like us to buy their services or product. Do you ever feel an urge to reply to them? Do they sound appealing and human? No. In 99 cases out of 100 they don’t and you press “Delete” or flag these messages as spam.

It feels that people are stuck in the beginning of 00s’ and have no clue about personalization. With great tools like social search, people search and info available on social networks marketers and sales still fail to compose a custom introductory paragraph for their emails.

Here are several tips to grasp your reader’s attention:

1. That’s right, we still have names, and this is by far the most pleasant word to any human. Receiving an email, which starts with my correctly spelled first and/or last name, makes me read the first paragraph.
2. Here you can start pitching about your product, how great it is, and how valuable it must be for your reader. How can you know? Do you know anything about the person you are sending this email? Take 5 mins to do a quick research on a person and the company they are working for. You have pipl.com, 123people.com, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – they’ve got to be somewhere on the Internet! Now you can sprinkle a personal touch into the first paragraph and raise interest in the upcoming offer (still no words about your product).
3. Be human – write like a human. Leave corporate-styled emails for your financial department – they enjoy these type of correspondence!
4. Now, you’ve got your 5 seconds to talk about your project, so be quick and don’t offer to read an essay in 2000 words, or, even worse, one of your company’s press-releases. Be informative, brief and stick to the point. Provide a link for further information and ways a person can contact you.

Seems to be simple, but people are lazy and still think that massive email campaigns with plain similar text will be successful. You know they won’t. Time to learn new tricks and write emails like a pro. Try it today or tomorrow and see the results yourself.

RSS readers: please see the presentation directly on site or on SlideShare.

This is a brief set of actions I perform weekly to follow new people. I do this for simple reasons:

• I value my time;
• I like to learn and help;
• I like to meet new people.

What are your regular rules? Do you auto-follow everyone? What is the ultimate thing that will make you follow a person right away? Please share your tips and experience!

Yes, we (insert social media related profession here) all have several inboxes to manage. Yes, we receive hundred of subscriptions, Facebook updates, direct messages from Twitter, invitations from your networks, offers and deals into our inbox – this isn’t actually spam. But we hate it! (Well, if you don’t, I envy you).

Inbox 0 is bliss, those who can achieve the Zen of email management know how fresh and calming a clean inbox feels. On the other hand, those who have 1736+ unread email just don’t want to open it anymore. Here is a quick set of actions that will help you to get to Inbox 0 and keep the noise volume as low as you can.

1. Initial cleaning up

Make a cup of coffee or tea, plan 10 minutes to 1 hour for the initial cleaning. Be ruthless and merciful with the subscriptions, offers, social networks emails, etc: Select All –> Delete should be your current mantra. When you see a valuable message, star it and achieve, so it won’t stand in the way of our ultimate path to a clean inbox. If you feel tired, slap yourself several times and get back to work until you see real Inbox 0 and can’t believe your eyes.

2. Monitor and unsubscribe

For the next several weeks you have to be a careful observer and open every email you get. The course of actions is simple:

• Unsubscribe from a subscription or a newsletter if not longer interested;
• Tune the settings on social networks, trying to keep email notifications at minimum;
• Star important conversations and archive it or place to an action folder to keep inbox clean;
• Do yourself a favor, do not subscribe to all the services there are on the internet – you are not reading it anyways.

In 2-4 weeks, you should unsubscribe from anything that bothered you and get only high-priority social networks notifications. Sounds easy but go give it a try, and then tell me how hard it is to keep up.

3. Repeat steps 1-2 if you have been slacking off

You can reward yourself with a new shiny gadget, or a piece of jewelry, or whatever you fancy if you get to the end. I swear your productivity will rise, you will love your email inbox again, and you will answer in time to all those important emails.

Try it now (for your own good) and share your experience and other tips in comments!