Know More About Who You Know

(As of September 15, 2012, Gist.com officially closed.)

Gist is a free service designed to bring information about all your contacts into one place. Agency staff interact with many types of people. With Gist you can bring information contained in e-mails, social networks, and many other sources into one dashboard.

At first blush, Gist is a dashboard for following all the people important to you. The idea is not to start a conversation, but to follow the things they are sending and posting across Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Outlook, or just information you have imported as a CSV file.

Once you have your Gist account set up, you can start following along with what your contacts are doing across the social networks and in your e-mail. This is more of a business application than a social application, and this is going to be one that I will use a lot.

Importing information from a service takes a few minutes (for under 1000 friends). The resulting dashboard is very nicely constructed to provide you with information about your contacts in an easy to use and read format.

If you download the Outlook plug-in, Gist will pull all your meetings and other information together and fully sync the two systems. So when you are planning for an upcoming meeting, you can go to Gist and see information about the people who will be attending.

This is a great tool for researching information about clients and prospects. It is easy to use and understand, importing and managing the data is also very easy, from shifting the importance of people, to dropping people who sometimes just end up in an account somewhere. Try it.