Hoot Suite:  Lets you manage multiple social networking site accounts by jumping between tabs–no more signing in and out.  Works with facebook, twitter, etc.  There also appears to be a post scheduling feature (“Pending Tweets”), allowing you to type out tweets that Hoot Suite will post at a future time.

SocialOomph: Does tweet scheduling and much more. Especially handy, SocialOomph provides an automatic direct message greeting to people who add you on twitter.  That’s where those “Thanks for the follow” DMs come from.

Twitterfeed: Automates posting to twitter from your blog (and from others, if you like).  The “Someone’s Blogging” posts on @wherethclientis come courtesy of twitterfeed.  The newer @psychfeed is almost completely twitterfeed based, posting updates from Psychology Today, PsychCentral, New York Times Mental Health stories…and, of course, Where the Client Is.  Uses RSS feeds–the thing you get to by clicking on that orange button (right hand sidebar here).

There are many more apps where these came from.  Try ‘em out, play around, see what you think, and let us know.

From Tamara Suttle, some Best Practices for Direct Marketing.

Casey Truffo vlogs about How to Find Speaking Engagements (“pink spooning” an upcoming teleseminar).

Lynn Grodzki suggests the Six Steps to Reduce Your Risk in an article on her site.

And so on and so on and so on…

Add @wherethclientis on twitter to get the up-to-the-second feed from these and other consultants.

Corey Quinn is founder of WTCI affliate MyTherapistMatch.com, a service that matches clients and therapists based upon results of a personality-traits survey. He talked to WTCI via email about why he started the company and how it does what it does.

MyTherapistMatch.com is offering one month free to WTCI readers. Sign up using coupon code 204.

What’s your background?

I was born and raised as an only child in an entrepreneurial family here in Los Angeles. After graduating college, I started up an Internet company in 1999, where we raised $6 million in seed funding. The company streamed live events on the web (webcasting) and unfortunately took a hit in the bubble burst of 2000/2001. After that, I went into financial services and eventually made my way back to school to get my MBA in finance and entrepreneurship from the Marshall School of Business at USC. Just before entering business school, I went back into the internet industry, where I’ve been ever since.

Currently, I am the founder and CEO of MyTherapistMatch.com. MyTherapistMatch.com is a website that matches individuals with therapists based on compatibility.

What made you start MyTherapistMatch.com?

When my parents decided to get a divorce, they put me in therapy. I was 12 years old. My first experiences with being in therapy were positive. My therapist Jackie and I played games, ate candy and just kind of hung out. Her low key approach to therapy worked for me, and as we became friends, I began to open up to her. She was my ally and helped me successfully deal with the range of emotions I was experiencing though the divorce.

Several years later, when I was in high school I wanted to speak with another therapist about typical “growing up” type issues. I began having sessions with Cathy, the school counselor. Cathy was amazing – I felt like she and I were able to talk and relate on a deep level. I felt like she could really understand me – more than anyone else ever could. The work that she and I did fundamentally transformed and improved my life in amazing ways. Looking back, I am so grateful for her and our therapy sessions.

That was the last time that therapy was amazing for me until recently (I am 35 years old). I had a series of mildly disappointing experiences while seeking therapy after high school. Each time, I would go to a website to find a therapist (such as an insurance website, therapist finder directory, etc.) and would find a couple of therapists that seemed to have the right experience, areas of focus, etc., call them and set up initial appointments.

My hope was that I would find another Jackie or Cathy, but what I found were therapists who were not quite what I had previously experienced. All were licensed, competent and well intentioned, but there wasn’t that connection, I didn’t feel that powerful chemistry that was the important ingredient in the transformational process.

Instead of continuing to shop around to find the “right” therapist, I would decide to stay with a good, but not great (for me) therapist – more out of convenience than anything else. I was not in the mood to interview a large number of therapists to find the right one. I was ready to begin the therapeutic process – to start the work. I would come to find that the outcome of these therapy sessions was positive but it was not the transformational experience I was hoping for.

At the end of one not so satisfying therapy session, I thought to myself – “there has got to be a better way to find a ‘good’ therapist.” Good meaning one that I can really feel connected to and trust at a deep level.

I spent some time thinking about different ways to solve this puzzle, and it hit me – take an eHarmony style compatibility approach and apply it to the finding a therapist process. While the client/therapist relationship is not romantic in nature, the requirement for interpersonal trust and rapport does apply. This was the genesis for MyTherapistMatch.com

What do you do now?

As the founder and CEO of MyTherapistMatch.com, I spend much of my time improving the visibility of the MyTherapistMatch.com site to individuals who are actively seeking a therapist. Finding the right therapist is the most important decision in therapy, and by using MyTherapistMatch.com, individuals looking for a therapist can dramatically reduce the amount of time and improve the probability of finding a compatible therapist. In our first month (we launched in November 2009), we had two times the number of people complete our compatibility survey than we had therapists on our site. We are growing in January and look forward to a great 2010.

How’d you come up with the criteria? Why, for instance, “preferred orientation in time”?

My co-founder and I created the matching survey and algorithm. We base the matching criteria found in our survey and algorithm on our understanding of interpersonal rapport. Dr. Robert Dee McDonald, co-founder of MyTherapistMatch.com, is a therapist who has taught interpersonal communication skills in 18 countries to thousands of students. He has been in private practice for over 35 years, has taught psychology as the University of San Francisco, and is a co-author of the best selling NLP book of all time: The New Technology of Achievement.

We know that in general, people like people who are like them. The same is true for therapists and clients. In the therapeutic realm, the client must feel a great deal of trust in the therapist for real change to happen. Without this trust, clients will not open themselves up to the therapist, making the effort futile, extending the therapeutic process for the client, running up the cost of doing therapy and more. The premise of MyTherapistMatch.com is that we help people find the right therapist by getting connected with a therapist who moves through the world in a similar way to the client, thereby increasing the probability of natural rapport and trust.

In the case of “preferred orientation in time,” which is just one of the 23 criteria with which we match therapists and clients, people tend to “live” in either the present, future or past. We match therapists and clients who prefer one of the three orientations similiarly. Contrarily, if we were to match up a client who prefers to be future oriented with a therapist who prefers to be past oriented, there will most likely be a subtle disconnect. Providing support for the preferred orientation in time concept, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, former president of the APA and Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, has recently presented his findings, called Time Perspectives. Please see the following video clip (duration 2:23): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTphlvB0xs.

Is there evidence that this kind of compatibility helps in a therapeutic relationship?

There is no hard evidence to support our ideas about this particular kind of compatibility. But we do know from clinical evidence that therapists report that when there is deep rapport, there is a higher probability of therapeutic movement. Carl Rogers, PhD., founder of Person Centered Counseling, said that compatibility is absolutely necessary to create a climate for therapeutic change. In addition, Bruce Wampold, from the University of Wisconsin, reported in 2001 that the therapeutic alliance, i.e., rapport, is a key factor in psychotherapy.

In addition, much of the criteria with which we match people are based on the works of well known psychologists, such as Carl Rogers, PhD, Virginia Satir, PhD, Fritz Perls, MD and Milton Erickson, MD.

Has My Therapist Match been working–are clients and therapists matching up and doing good work so far…?

I am grateful to say that MTM is working. We are only in our 3rd month, so the feedback is just starting to come in. The feedback that we have received so far from therapists on our site has been generally positive. In addition, the feedback we collect from our therapist members gets fed back into our matching algorithm, allowing us to better understand the core drivers of a good match for clients and therapists. In that way, our algorithm learns and improves over time.

Corey Quinn’s company is MyTherapistMatch.com. Find more information at the company’s blog, The Compatible Therapist.

Unconditional Positive Regard

from Therapy Online: A Practical Guide

Conveying the potential for the therapist to have unconditional positive regard for the client is a process that can often start before any communication actually takes place when working online, through the use of the website to explain what this means and what regard the therapist already feels for the website visitor without having met them. This sounds facile, but it is the tone that is taken via the text while writing the website content that can convey this. Many people make the mistake of writing website content for themselves and how they would like to be, rather than being congruent (which we shall come on to) and writing for their potential client, considering the likely state of mind of the potential client. One can convey to the client that one expects to hear issues and problems that the client may feel embarrassed or ashamed of, and that as their therapist, one will think no less of them for having shared those issues. The website can state up front that the visitor is held in the utmost regard, that they are accepted and that there is a space for them to explore themselves and grow from the experience while being safe from being judged or ridiculed.

It is important to remember that the client can carry the therapist’s input, literally, at all times, and therefore the text must be carefully constructed to avoid any ambiguous meaning that the client can use to fuel any self-fulfilling prophesies that she or he may have. Conveying unconditional positive regard throughout the email or IRC session can aid the interpretation of the text around it, which is often misread, unconsciously, to suit the client’s agenda (Goss and Anthony, 2003). Acknowledging the client’s worth and one’s respect for them often renders misinterpreted text as incongruent and so the client will go back and re-read the text to better understand the meaning, as the misinterpreted text does not seem to ‘fit’with their experience of the therapist thus far. In this way, the regard the practitioner holds for the client and the ability to ensure she or he understands this, underpins the whole tone of the text.

The online disinhibition effect (Suler, 2004), further defined in Chapter 2 often means that the more distressing or uncomfortable issues come up much earlier than they would in face-to-face sessions, and the practitioner may find that they are struggling with this information before they really ‘know’ the client and are able to feel that the unconditional positive regard is inherently in place.This process is crucial to the effectiveness of the therapeutic process – if one is not able to keep the reassurance of understanding and regard in place, the client will feel that they have ‘gone too far’ and they can be lost, since ‘disappearance’ on the Internet is facilitated so easily. It is important to indicate that, in the case of emails and forums, although a word count or length limit is appropriate, it does not mean that the content of the work is limited. Having unconditional positive regard for them means that you can trust that the pertinence of the work will emerge as the relationship grows, and that even where there is uncomfortable work going on at an early stage, this is not only expected, but welcomed.

Many humanistic or person-centred therapists will convey warmth and regard in a variety of physical ways, including smiling, appropriate touching, or leaning towards the client. Chapter 3 will focus on how this is done when working with text, but it is important to point out now that most of the physical tools that the person-centred therapist employs are entirely possible when working without a physical presence in cyberspace, even appropriate hugging (in fact, particularly the hugging (Anthony, 2000)). It should be noted that representation of physical contact or movement should be encouraged when online to assist the development of the relationship and convey the core conditions of humanism. The consistency of this warmth and regard will be important as the work continues, and any withdrawal of it will rebound negatively on the work. It is therefore essential that all representation of being a physical being is natural and personal, so that it occurs without thought or specific intention, unforced.

From Therapy Online: A Practical Guide by Kate Anthony and DeeAnna Merz Nagel.

What is SocialMarker.com?

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. But going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and downloading all toolbars is madness. That’s where SocialMarker.com comes in, the free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website.

Why SocialMarker.com?

It can help you spread a link on 48 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes!

• It helps you get a lot of backlinks.
• It helps you increase your traffic.
• Your link gets indexed by Google in a matter of minutes.
• Best of all, it’s free!

For a better understanding of how to use Social Marker, you can view these videos or visit our FAQ page.

Private Practice Blogs is an ever-updating, growing directory of blogs by and about psychotherapists and psychotherapy–maintained by yours truly, the WTCI ed.  Here’s a cut-and-paste from the list as this post was entered:

• ShrinkWrapped

  From Malthus to Copenhagen: Addendum

  2 hours ago
• Psychology Today Blogs

  A Love-Hate Relationship

  2 hours ago
• Therapy Worksheets

  Dealing with Depression Workbook (for Teens)

  4 hours ago
• Good Therapy

  Self-Esteem: How Much is Too Much?

  5 hours ago
• The Happiness Project

  Does Everyone Need a Theme Song? Come On, Get Happy.

  8 hours ago
• Psychjourney Podcast

  The Brain Advantage

  8 hours ago
• HealthSkills Weblog

  …unexpectedly absent

  8 hours ago
• World of Psychology

  Psych Central & MindApps Offer eCBT iPhone App

  9 hours ago
• Shrink Rap

  Unemployment Is Not Good For Your Mental Health

  9 hours ago
• Your Mind Your Body

  Generosity – Not Just For The Holidays

  9 hours ago
• PsyBlog

  When Situations Not Personality Dictate Our Behaviour

  11 hours ago
• Dr. Deb

  Tips for Dealing With Ghost Networks

  12 hours ago

It goes on from there.  Submit your blog to privatepracticeblogs@gmail.com.

First, Skype’s list of basics:

Much more where this all came from.  To be continued…