Every now and then (actually all the time) Mashable has a great review over a social media tool that helps business owners strengthen their online connections. Today they had a post reviewing the LinkedIN tool SocialMinder.

An excerpt from the CEO from the Mashable post:

SocialMinder is an online assistant that helps you maintain relationships with your LinkedIn network. It learns from your previous email patterns, reminds you when losing connection, and gives you relevant news items to send to people in your network to make sure that your relationships are not stale.

From the look of things (I just signed up for the beta test) it has similar features as the  LinkedIN Toolbar for Outlook. There is one really cool feature that SocialMinder has added into their application that gives you the ability to bring up different subject matters (business news) that will allow you to reignite a long lost connection.  SocialMinder gives you the opportunity (as a small business owner) to strengthen your connections and allows you to delve deeper into business productivity aspects of LinkedIN.

I believe SocialMinder has given LinkedIN another little push to be much more effective in the world of business social networking. Whether you are using LinkedIN as an address book, Q&A platform, or networking tool, the benefits of this application is extremely apparent.

For more information on the SocialMinder tool read the Mashable post or check out the SocialMinder site. I will be digging a little deeper into the application once my beta account is approved.

Until then… kick some business butt.