Michelle Graham Day, Contributor

Ever wondered how to keep alive the connection made when you first met the contacts behind all those names in your Rolodex or cellphone?

Adding the human touch and satisfying the human need to feel connected are often an impossible-seeming task in this world of virtual meetings, text messages, and an overload of pointless email chain letters. Stop losing opportunities to keep in touch meaningfully and really build a solid network because you didn't know what to say to keep in touch over the months and years. Here are some suggestions on steps to take and tools to help you step forward:

Make the 'bcc:' function on your email your best friend

Forget about forwarding humorous or worse, amorous chain-letter emails; everything you do in your professional career should add value and forward momentum. Emails without some true insight into what you're about or lacking relevance to the person on the receiving end are at the best, a way to look rather idle and at the worst, a way to annoy someone and be seen as wasting time.

Instead, send periodic email updates on major projects, issues or achievements in your professional (or academic) life. Season's greetings at commonly celebrated times - New Year (keeping in mind differences for international contacts such as Chinese New Year), Independence celebrations (for whatever country your contact lives in AND for whatever country they are FROM, if they are from a country that celebrates independence), Thanksgiving for American contacts, and Christmas (and these can be e-cards, by the way).

From past experiences I have noticed that when you sent out a mass email using the To: or cc: function, once a person saw that several people received the same mail he received, he has lost interest and felt treated as a commodity, and hardly responded. I have felt the same way.

Invasion of privacy

People want to feel like it's a personal email just for them even if it's not. So use just, "Hello, how are you?" instead of "Hello everyone" as the opener. Also some people do not want the invasion of privacy that can come when you put their email address on a line that shows up for strangers to see. So address the email to your own email address in the To: line, and use the third address line to enter everyone you would like to send the information to. Bcc stands for blind carbon copy, and as the name implies, means all who received copy of the email through that line cannot see who else receives it. I received around 90 per cent more responses (informal guesstimate) because people feel an urge to respond when they get the impression they are addressed directly.

Create a virtual Rolodex

Business cards get lost, damaged, and can only be in one place at a time; same thing with cellphones. Web-based emails (and company emails that you know how to access off-site) all have an address book function that allows you to store all the information found on a business card online, and additional information such as birthdays, home addresses emails, spouse information, personal web pages, etc.

Worldwide access

One of the biggest advantages is instant access from anywhere in the world you may be, whether you forgot the business card/cell-phone or misplaced it. Most are also searchable by a short name you choose for each entry, or by a particular word. So if you remember whom that guy works for, but can't remember the name, you can search for his company in your address book (if you filled it out completely and entered that information), and everyone who works for that company will show up in the search results.

The key here is that if you don't put the information in there, you won't reap the benefits of being able to retrieve it from anywhere (and being able to click a name instead of typing out the email address, especially emails with the lengthy technical domain names in some corporation, government, and education email systems).

Next week: The email as an effective communication medium.

Michelle is a former student at Vaz Prep, and is graduating with her MBA in business management in 2008. She can be reached at michellegrahamday@yahoo.com.