Outlook and Gist – This Baby May Have Legs

By
Craig M. Jamieson
– March 12, 2010Posted in: Business-Social Media, CRM/SCRM, Social Media
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I have written a number of articles in the past about Gist which is a social media aggregator with some very cool features. In fact, from an information gathering standpoint, it compiles probably the most complete dossier on any of your contacts that I have yet encountered. This would include your email correspondence, social networks, news feeds, the works. However, while Gist is very good about collecting information, as a standalone product it is not so good at creating it. By that I mean, I’m not going to use it to generate emails. I don’t know that you cannot do that from within Gist but, looking at it, I don’t think that you would want to anyway. To me, email has to be an integral piece of any product that is going to pass muster as a Social CRM. In my mind, you flat cannot get away from that critical need.

I have also integrated Gist with SalesForce.com and it does make that well-recognized CRM a  much more social media friendly product. Unfortunately, I don’t much care for SalesForce’s email capabilities either, at least when you try to combine it with Gmail. This brings us to Outlook. As much as it pains me to say this, from the standpoint of a pure email client and contact manager (note that I did not say CRM), Outlook is pretty tough to beat and it may be getting tougher.

I have been using Outlook for the past several years as my email for a company that I am winding down my association with. As such, I am more inclined these days to use it experimentally. I have also had it loaded with Outlook’s Business Contact Manager add-on which supposedly turns it into a CRM. Personally, I would dispute that claim. About a year ago I did discover Xobni for Outlook and this is a superior add-on that originally just made Outlook better and now it not only makes it better, it has also added social network capabilities. Xobni has also issued a beta invite for their BlackBerry app. While I have both a BlackBerry and an invitation, I am not ready to go there quite yet. I also recently looked at the LinkedIn add-on for Outlook using Microsoft’s new “Social Connector”. Not ready for prime time and, at least for now, it connects with LinkedIn only. On top of that, it slowed down my performance fairly dramatically so that app only lasted about 3 days.

I became aware that Gist had a plug-in for Outlook some months back but decided against installing it as it apparently looks at Outlook’s “Contacts” folder vs. it’s “Business Contact’s” folder. Using Business Contact Manager (BCM), that created a problem. So yesterday. I exported all of my Business Contacts out of BCM as a .csv file and then imported them back into the Outlook “contacts” folder. I was then able to uninstall BCM completely and start fresh. Loading the Outlook plug-in from Gist was a painless affair, actually it is very well done, and it then went right to work cataloging my contacts and it did this very quickly while working entirely in the background.

Before we get into the details, if you have been to this site before you will know that I make no claims in regard to being the expert on anything. Rather, I have a robust curiosity of all things networking related. I also have the attention span of a 3-year-old, rarely find something that maintains my fascination for an extended period of time, and I have yet to find anything (at least in this field … CRM’s) that I really and truly love. Rather, I like to bring worthy products to your attention and then let you figure them out (smile).

Having installed Gist, I took a look at my screen and found that I now had two sidebars that were right next to each other, Xobni and Gist. They did not seem to conflict but the visual was killing me. So, in order to give Gist the best look, I uninstalled Xobni. During that process I completed a survey about what I thought of the product and why I mas deleting it. One of the last questions it asked was “Are you aware that you can use Xobni without the sidebar?”. Roh? I have since put it back on and will keep it in reserve (smile).

There is a lot to like about Gist and you know what? I think that I like this Outlook interface even better than going to the actual Gist site. The reason is probably pretty simple. Gist automatically identifies the contact I am working with in Outlook and the pulls up that contact profile only. What follows are some of the things that I have instantly found to be attractive (some of these may be available on Outlook 2007 only which is what I have):

  • Not only do Gist profiles pop up when I am looking at my inbox, they all pop up when looking at my contact records.
  • When I am writing an email, Gist recognizes who that is going to and conveniently pops up that person’s profile.
  • If there are multiple people mentioned in the “to” or “from” fields it pops them all up.
  • The profile is very complete including a Google map if an address is detected.
  • It seemed to work well in displaying someone’s Twitter stream and it does tell me if we are connected on Twitter, FaceBook, or LinkedIn.
  • It appears to display email conversations from both my Gmail and Outlook accounts and that is pretty sweet in itself.

What I have either not figured out or find lacking:

  • It will show me that we are connected on Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn but unless it has also identified a link, it will not allow me to go to those sites. And, it does not always find a link. How can it know that we are connected yet not know the link? Hmmm.
  • The Twitter stream works well but I have yet to see anything in anybody’s FaceBook stream. Hmmm.
  • There is no stream for LinkedIn updates.
  • You can not retweet or reply on items in their Twitter stream while you can do this with Xobni.

Some final thoughts… I have been using Gist for sometime now and I do want to comment on the people behind the product itself. They have proven themselves to be consistently outstanding in the following areas:

  1. Do you have a  customer service question or a problem? They will be right on it and they do follow through.
  2. They are very good at keeping their customer base informed of new enhancements and new uses for their product.
  3. They are very active on Twitter, monitor their brand closely, and seek to engage directly with folks who have a demonstrated interest in their application.

The bottom line is that the folks at Gist …. get it. The other bottom line is that they have been pretty upfront that they will be looking to monetize this service. I wonder how, when, and how much that will entail?

That will do it for today. Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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Craig M. Jamieson  (297 Posts)

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.


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