Have You Heard of Gist?

If not, it is time to take a quick listen. First, here is the definition of Gist from their home page:

“Gist is an online service that helps you build stronger relationships. By connecting your inbox to the web, you get business-critical information about key people and companies.”

To be honest, it may take more than one article to describe Gist. First, Gist will take your inbox (Gmail or Microsoft outlook) and social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter) and even data you may have in a CRM application (For example Salesforce). From there, they pull the contacts together and use an intricate algorithm to determine who is most important to you in your database of people you communicate with. After the importance of every one of your contacts has been determined, Gist then goes out to the web and searches 50,000 news sources, 20 million blogs and automatically finds you new (and pertinent) people to follow on twitter.

Upon logging on to Gist for the first time, you can go to the Account section and begin to link all of you accounts. Gmail, Outlook, Regular email (via Imap), LinkedIn, Facebook, LinkedIn, Salesforce and a few other services are options. Gist then begins to upload your contacts on all the networks to your account. Once the upload is done you will be presented with a dashboard which is where there is ample opportunity to customize your searches and prepare yourself to learn a significant amount of information in a short period of time.

I highly recommend connecting LinkedIn, Facebook and Gmail (especially if you use the calendar) or Outlook. The integration of your calendar with the contacts you have is extremely impressive. For those of us (including myself) who like to check in on friends and/or business colleagues and see what they have been up to on the web, the people view is phenomenal. You can see tweets that an individual person has done recently, articles they have shared/favored via RSS/Google Reader, email correspondence between the two of you, links to articles they have been mentioned in as well as a notes section and a list of their online profile (this is pulled from people’s respective Google Profiles). The Dashboard also gives you several tools that allow you to share different articles and links you discover from your contacts. Overall, the information from Gist can be extremely overwhelming at the beginning. Here are a few tips to get your started off on the right path.

1) Add one account a day to your Gist dashboard. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and email is a good order to begin with.
2) Immediately pick five people who are most important to you and increase their importance to 100%. Observe how the data flows into your dashboard.
3) Set the time limit in which it searches for data within your network to 24 hours to start with for each person. Adjust it based on the quantity of information they share.
4) Integrate Gist with whichever online calendar service you use. After this, select the “Contacts I am meeting with” selection on the top left part of the dashboard (instead of Recent News). This will give you a quick snapshot of their activity in the last week and will prepare you in a completely different way than before.
5) Visit Gist three times a day (morning, noon and evening). Observe how the information flows and changes during the day. There is an iphone app available to help you stay up to date.

If you are an digital professional, entrepreneur, in sales or just work in some type of business, Gist is an very powerful service that will continuously keep you updated on the activity of your contacts, friends and future business partners. Here is T.A. McCann, the CEO of Gist, speaking about his service. Stay tuned for Part 2 of my analysis of Gist.?