Getting the Gist of Social CRM
I'm in the process of finishing up a short list of "ones to watch" vendors providing small businesses with crm-ish products and services. It will go up on Paul Greenberg's ZDNet blog this week. In fact you should go there right now to check his great series of post on the companies he's watching:
As you can imagine there are a growing number of vendors creating some really good stuff that small businesses are using to build stronger relationships in the Social Age. So many that I will never be able to give a good look-over to everything. But one that has caught my attention (and a whole bunch of other folks) is Gist.
Gist is a cool service that makes it easy for you to connect contact information from a variety of sources (Outlook, Twitter, LinkedIn Facebook, Salesforce.com, etc.) into one centralized location. Gist then searches for fresh information on each contact to give you a better handle on what this contact is about. Then it uses a formula to continuously rank the importance of your relationship to each contact. And if you feel the automated ranking does not really represent the importance of a relationship you can manually override it.
I recently had the pleasure of having Gist founder T.A. McCann on Technology For Business Sake to learn more about the company and service. T.A. discusses how Gist makes it easier to learn about the people we're connected to, and to determine who we should spend our valuable time building stronger relationships with. He fills us in on when Gist can be used to enhance CRM services, or as a substitute for them. T.A. also shared how his experiences at Microsoft running the Exchange business played into creating Gist.
Use the player below to hear the conversation, or download the mp3 file by clicking here. And check over at Paul's ZDNet blog to see if Gist is on The List....
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