You can use AwayFind + HARO to ensure that (A) you’ll never miss a relevant press lead and (B) you can always be the first to respond.

After using HARO for a few weeks, you’ll begin to see the types of queries you would like to monitor in your inbox.  Start building a list of common keywords that are relevant to your business (for our company, we’re interested in “productivity”, “email overload,” etc.), then set up their respective filters in AwayFind.  You’ll be immediately notified (via SMS, IM, or phone call) whenever a query that’s related to your business arrives in your inbox, so you don’t have to search through each newsletter right when it arrives, hoping to be the first to respond.  AwayFind does the heavy lifting for you.

Here’s how you can search for HARO keywords with AwayFind:

Note: HARO only comes during the week, but you can see in other cases when you might want to get notifications during off-hours.

You can also use AwayFind to receive alerts when you get emails from specific newspapers and media outlets. One of our users, Blake Jennelle, recently shared how he uses AwayFind’s filters to get more press for his company.  Blake sets his filters so that he’s alerted immediately whenever a journalist he personally knows contacts him:

We hope AwayFind will help ensure your timely response to reporters who are on a tight deadline.  Try out AwayFind’s filters today, and increase your company’s publicity like Blake did!

Want to increase your chances of getting press through HARO’s newsletter?  Try AwayFind for free here.

This is news for Google, too—since they just made these “contextual gadgets” available a couple minutes ago.   See their writeup on the Google Enterprise Blog and on the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Install it for your domain here:

Here’s a quick overview of how it works:

There’s actually a lot of things that we’ve launched with today’s updates, and many that we’ll be finishing up in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned for another post on those soon.

And, since we actually were one of just a handful of companies to launch Contextual Gadgets, we put together a fancy professional press release, check it:

AwayFind App and Contextual Gadget Now Available on the Google Apps Marketplace
May 18, 2010 — AwayFind.com announced today that it has launched its Gmail^TM contextual gadget on the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s online storefront for web apps that integrate with Google Apps™. AwayFind is the a service designed to address email interruptions, which cost employees as much as 3 hours per day (according to Basex, 2007). AwayFind notifies you of urgent email messages when they arrive via SMS, IM, Twitter, or even a phone call. With its new Gmail contextual gadget, users can configure AwayFind alerts directly within a Gmail message.

“Even if your inbox is closed, there are a few messages you need to receive right away.  AwayFind automatically notifies you when there’s an urgent message, so if you have a meeting with an important partner and they email you at the last minute, AwayFind will immediately send you a text message,” says Jared Goralnick, Founder and CEO of AwayFind.
With AwayFind you can close your inbox much of the day to eliminate its constant stream of interruptions. With the Gmail contextual gadget, it takes just a few seconds to configure notifications for urgent messages without having to leave your inbox.  As part of the Google Apps Marketplace, millions of IT administrators can install AwayFind throughout their organizations in just a few clicks.

To install the AwayFind app and Gmail contextual gadget for your Google Apps^TM domain, visit https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=4925+9424300573372110328

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy for more than 2 million Google Apps customers to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services. By integrating with user account and application data stored in Google Apps, these cloud applications provide a simpler user experience, increase business efficiency, and reduce administrative overhead. To learn more, visit google.com/appsmarketplace.

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Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps and Gmail are trademarks of Google Inc.

While we’ve received a lot of press lately and announced quite a few features, today we want to let more people in to try it.  We’ve spent a lot of time listening to our users, and we have a ways to go, but we want to give more people an opportunity to escape their inbox.

As a bit of context to how we got here, here’s a slide from today’s event:

As you can see, AwayFind spun out of a consulting business, and was in fact a side project in response to the needs of both our team and our customers. In 2008, we released a small product (AwayFind 1.0) that got a bit of attention and made us some money.  But then we spent some time listening and starting working on a completely new version of AwayFind, which we placed into private beta in November 2009.

In the process of all this, AwayFind went from being a “small thing on the side” from the consulting business to the sole focus of our team.

If you’ve been waiting to try AwayFind, you can signup today.

We’d love your feedback and would be happy to answer any questions—you can email jared at awayfind or Tweet us @awayfind.

AwayFind  ♥ Gmail

Our goal is to help everyone escape their inboxes, but rather than provide basic support to a lot of providers, we want to provide a phenomenal experience for the platforms we support.  And in the last few weeks we’ve made that clear with our deep support for Gmail (and we’ve got more coming, too).

Check out our AwayFind for Gmail plug-in, which is available as either a Firefox Add-on or Chrome Extension:

Existing AwayFind Users – Install It From Here

The other big Gmail improvement is that we now support Gmail (IMAP) via oAuth—which is a fancy way of saying we can connect to your Gmail account without storing your email password.  It makes for a faster setup process, more security (we won’t request or store your Gmail password), and no need for you to update AwayFind if you change your password in Gmail.

Upgrade your Gmail Account or Add Another Here

Press ♥ AwayFind

Perhaps it’s the new features…but whatever it is, we’re thrilled that people are talking about AwayFind.  We’ve had over 130 articles about us, but in the last couple weeks we had some coverage we’re particularly proud of.

At ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez wrote a thorough AwayFind review.  As Sarah’s been a long time user of AwayFind (thanks!!), she did a great job examining what’s changed with AwayFind Orchant.  (Also cool: the article was syndicated in the New York Times)

While we’ve also been on some popular sites in the last couple weeks (like DownloadSquad and wwwhat’s new, a South American site which sent us hundreds of signups), our most exciting coverage was a 2-minute segment by CM&’s technology correspondent.  This story aired on a major prime time television station in Columbia, and sent us more users than any other to date.  Check it out:

We really hope these new features make a huge impact.  Thanks so much for entrusting us to keep you away from your inbox! ]]> http://www.awayfind.com/blog/2010/04/gmail-updates-and-fun-press/feed/ 1 http://www.awayfind.com/blog/2010/03/the-core-of-whats-new-in-awayfind-orchant/ http://www.awayfind.com/blog/2010/03/the-core-of-whats-new-in-awayfind-orchant/#comments Fri, 12 Mar 2010 18:00:00 +0000 admin http://www.awayfind.com/blog/2010/03/the-core-of-whats-new-in-awayfind-orchant/ AwayFind Orchant is a completely different product than AwayFind 1.0.  I wanted to take a moment to ensure you were familiar with what’s changed and why.

We’re solving the same problem–keeping people away from email without worrying about missing anything–but our approach is completely different.  Then again, it’s exactly the approach our users asked for.  There were two things our users requested most:

• The ability to get certain people’s messages automatically turned into alerts (SMS or otherwise)
• More control over who received auto response messages, and how often they went out

We’ve got both of these features now, in the form of:

1. Filters

Filters monitor your email accounts for whatever or whomever you’re looking for…and then can alert you when those messages arrive.  Here’s a quick demo:

2. Intelligent Auto Responders

Intelligent Auto Responders allow you to send an auto response once every 180 days (or however often you’d like), rather than in response to every message you receive.  Better yet, you can set custom messages to go to specific people, and prevent some people from ever receiving an auto responder at all.  Here’s more:

Those are our biggest changes, and they required us to grow from a small contact form that sent you SMS’s, into an intelligent application that directly interacts with your email accounts.  In brief:

• AwayFind 1.0 allowed others to reach you with their emergencies
• AwayFind Orchant allows you to be reached from the people or topics that you consider to be urgent

Fortunately all of the AwayFind 1.0 features still exist so you get the best of both worlds.  But now you don’t have to worry about missing a message from your boss, family, or an important client—you get to choose what’s urgent!

Along with this, AwayFind got a redesign and a bunch of new contact methods—we can now notify people anywhere in the world through SMS, Voice, IM, or Twitter DM.

We’ve seen that these changes have made a huge impact on our thousands of customers.  But many more helpful features will be coming soon!

You can catch up with me (Jared Goralnick) in a few places:

• I’m moderating a panel with Jay Cuthrell of Cuthrell Consulting, Daniel Raffel of Yahoo!, and Casey Whitelaw of Google Wave.  It’s Friday at 5pm in Ballroom C, and called “Wave and Communication’s (R)evolution: Better Than Being There?”
• I’m going running with SXSW Runners at 8am every day
• You can track me down at http://awayfind.com/jared – which will send me a text message so we can try and find each other

Hope to see you there!

AwayFind helps people to close their inbox so they can time-shift their responsibilities to when it’s most appropriate.  And using AwayFind’s contact form can help to set expectations on responsiveness.  But a product alone won’t enable one to time-shift their work or set the appropriate norms.  So I’m going to go through a few of Chris’s points, and add some suggestions for making them happen.

The items quoted below come straight from Chris’s Anywhen Manifesto.  I’ve grouped several of his points together for the purpose of this post.

We will push back on the unintentional urgency people put on us.  We will create in ways that promote time-shifting-friendly consumption.  We will attempt to respond in a timely fashion, but as it meets our other duties and obligations.  We will do our damnedest, but forgive our occasional drowning spells.

In essence, the best way to combat others’ growing demand for your immediate attention is to set their expectations through your actions:

• Practice what you preach—don’t reply to people’s messages right away.  If you do, delay the sending of the message (this is possible with desktop email clients but not on the web).  It’s important to be responsive; but you don’t want people to expect that you’re always available
• Be honest about your habits.  Whether you decide to use a service like AwayFind or if you just let people know your habits on your website, contact form, or voicemail…it’s helpful to set expectations
• Even with the best of systems, things will slip through the cracks.  We shouldn’t be hard on others for this (sending a gentle reminder a week or so later is reasonable), and we should also accept this in ourselves (there are things we simply must do now, and sometimes they get in the way of promptness with others.)  It’s okay to say no, be told no, or for the occasional delay

We will seek out time-shifting-friendly means of interacting (like Google Wave).

Investing in a little technology and thinking seriously about one’s workflow can make a huge impact on how long basic activities take.  Coordinating appointments through products like TimeBridge, TimeDriver and Tungle, utilizing Wave when working through a problem with a group, or managing a project through Basecamp or ActionMethod rather than email—these have huge benefits in both clarity and time-saving.

At my SXSW panel we’ll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of new communications methods.  One of the discussions will be how today’s work expectations have made it necessary to use collaboration tools that go beyond email…and that it’s probably worth it to invest time in learning tools that might not seem intuitive out of the box.  Keeping things simple may be good for some tools, but sometimes it’s worthwhile for us users to struggle past the learning curve.

We believe that time-shifting is every bit as important as work-shifting.  It’s not all about realtime.

Don’t ever forget that the meaning is what comes out, not what goes in.  Sometimes a breakthrough comes from 3 weeks at your desk.  Other times it comes from 2 hours at the beach.  Some projects merit a 30 minute brainstorming session.  Some projects do better from independent brainstorming and email discussion.

It’s not about how you get to your destination, it’s that you get there at all.  It’s not that we shouldn’t take part in the process, but we should keep our eye on the goal and not worry so much that there are different ways to get there.  Real time is possible, but it’s often not preferable or practical.

Here at AwayFind we’re not just trying to sell a product, we’re trying to promote a way of working.  Thanks, Chris, for helping to give clarity to something we believe in so strongly.

Don’t expect a lot of posts.  Our customers are overloaded and we respect their time (gosh, we could use more of it!), but we want you to know things like:

• The basis behind our decision for a completely new product
• The features we’re continuing to develop
• The details around what we support and what we intend to support in the future
• Who are the people behind AwayFind

Even more, we want to hear from you:

• Who are you?
• When can we meet you?
• What do you want in the product?
• Are you all really as mature, successful, and beautiful as we think you are?
• What are mature, successful, and beautiful people willing to pay for a web product : )

Really, we’re excited to get to know you all better.  But if we can help it, this won’t be PR speak.  We care deeply about improving the way you communicate and use your time…and will do our best to help you make the most of that.

Welcome to the AwayFind blog!