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Connected (technically Connected HQ) is a very cool application that was brought to my attention recently by the creators of Feedera who also own this company. Apparently, they have garnered enough interest from others (including some former Microsofties) and they have recently secured some sizable funding to move forward with this project. Connected may best be described as a social, communications, and web presence aggregator. That’s a mouthful. What Connected does is connect and sync with your email, calendar, and social networks and then provide you with a contact record that aggregates all of this information and activity along with bits of other info that is collects from searching the web.
Let’s first take a quick look at the main screen …
The main screen allows you to view your contacts via a variety of filters including: all, recent, new, or by company, location, title, etc. Clicking on “Title”, for example, calls up a screen that displays a counter of all the titles held by your various contacts. Then, if I wish to look at just “presidents”, it will call up all of the records that match that criteria. Cool! “Recent” would be reflective of the contacts that I am communicating with now. I can see who they are, where they are, when we last connected, and also what social networks we are connected on already.
Now let’s look at a contact record …
Connected does an amazing job of gathering all of the information it can find and organizing neatly into one screen that includes information found on FaceBook, LinkedIn, and wherever else it seems to find this stuff. It shows that person’s most recent updates on Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn as well as recent emails exchanged. It identifies mutual contacts. While not a CRM, connected does exhibit CRM-like qualities. You can add notes to a record. There is also a field that you can use to remind you of how you met. Honestly, that doesn’t sound like something very impressive but how often do you ask yourself “Where did we meet?” and how valuable is that information? I’d say plenty valuable! Speaking of reminders, you can also set one to remind you to get back with this person in a week, a month and a couple of other options (a specific date would be helpful). And, you can message your contact via email right from within the contact record. It’s not fancy. It is designed for simple and quick messages only but it does run directly through your email client which, in my case, is Gmail with Google Apps.
You can also add several applications to Connected including Evernote, a mobile application, and a Gmail sidebar widget. I tried the Gmail widget and it is very similar to what is available from Rapportive, Xobni, or Gist. Speaking of Gist, I would suggest that Connected would be most similar to that product for those of you who may be familiar with it. I do think that it is faster and much less cumbersome than Gist however, that being said, both Connected and Gist are both great products and both have certain exclusive features that may make one solution more valuable to you than the other.
I did want to show you one last screen shot because I think that this is way cool!
Every morning Connected is going to send you an email that highlights your calendar for the day. It tells you who you are meeting with, at what time, gives you a synopsis of recent communications, gives you their latest social network updates, and even tells you who your shared connections are. How neat is that! I even get a picture of who I am meeting just in case I have not met them before along with their phone number and email address. It gets better. I rarely actually link a contact record to a calendar event. My bad. I do put in that person’s name and Connected looks at the name and finds the matching record. Cool! BTW … Happy Birthday, Helene! (smile).
In conclusion, Connected does a great job just running on it’s own in the background and aggregating your communications and information. It was easy to set up and runs incredibly fast. It syncs with your networks and that is huge! There are a few things that would make me like it even more …
- The ability to interact with your social networks would be a big plus. Send a tweet or a reply. Leave a comment on FaceBook or “like” a post.
- I can’t put my finger on it and maybe this is just me. I like the look of Connected but think it could use a little more polish. For whatever reason, the social network icons just look way too big for eyes and I have poor eyesight (smile).
- Here’s the biggie and I have shared this directly with Connected. After your 14 day free trial, Connected is $9.95 per month to use. Now, that’s not a lot of money but, there are several tools out there like Gist that you can get for free that will give you very similar features. Nimble Social CRM is a full functioning CRM that also aggregates your email and social network activities into a contact record, allows me to interact with these networks, and Nimble’s single-user version, Contact, is 100% free. I would think that a freemium model would be the way to go but, what do I know (smile).
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Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. NetWorks! Boise Valley is a business to business networking organization for the most serious sales and marketing professionals only.
