Marketing Mind Taffy: Unstuck

First of all, I would like to thank all the wonderful bloggers and readers who wrote inspiring comments on my “Marketing Mind Taffy” post. I have begun taking a new approach to marketing myself as an actor! This is probably going to be a never-ending journey. This business is always evolving. My goal for this year is to improve my social networking skills. I recently made an account on LinkedIn, and I spent a good part of the day organizing my Business Contacts list. I’m sure everyone has their own way of organizing their information. This is how I stay organized-

An actor friend of mine turned me onto Google Drive. I used to love using the old Mac program, Appleworks. However, the program has since been discontinued, and I haven’t been able to find a Mac program that I like as much… or that is as easy on my bank account ;). Google Drive is a FREE online program. It enables you to create documents, presentations, spreadsheets, forms, drawings, etc. I also really like that it is online, because I can log-in and access it from any computer. I have created and stored anything from my acting resume and business contacts to fliers and marketing materials for band gigs. Of course, I always have that crazy, unlikely scenario in my head- where a very important casting person “happens” to bump into me and asks me for my resume, in which I run to the nearest internet café just in time to log-on and print out my resume! Haha, okay back to reality… I created a template that works well for me to keep track of my business contacts. It looks something like this-

As you can see, I log the contact’s first/last name, company, occupation, when/where I first met them, website, e-mail, street address, phone, last time I contacted them, and anything else that may help me down the road. I recently found it helpful to color code my contacts.

Green= I contact them at least twice a year.
Yellow= I contact them occasionally. (Usually these are people I see often, and don’t feel the need to update as much.)
Red= I never contact them/I have lost contact with them. 

I will continue to contact the green and yellow personnel as I did before, however I am now working on finding a better way to contact the red personnel. This will be my next challenge. I have taken a step already in creating a LinkedIn account, but now I need to work on Facebook and Twitter. I think one issue I struggle with is not having internet on my phone.

I would love to hear everyone else’s tactics! Good luck to everyone working on their New Year’s Resolutions!