Here at Being Smarter, we like to review software which saves you time and generally makes your life easier. We’ve talked about managing knowledge before – it’s such an important part of business life. Information is power… knowledge is power.
Everyone has the capability of finding information now thanks to the power of search. What sets you apart from the crowd however is minimising the time you take to set up and monitor your information streams and of course how you use them. It’s easy to spend all day watching data. The trick is to have it done for you.
Becoming a Knowledge Jedi is about spending as little time as possible monitoring and researching data. In order to help you become as efficient at this as possible, you need the right tools. RSS is one must-have skill you need to master. We’ve found another essential data mining tool which we would argue is a must have too.
Gist has recently come out of closed beta and is available to all. It’s yet another online contact management application, except this is one with a difference. You won’t believe your eyes when you see it.
On set up, you tell the application where to find your various contact lists – Outlook on your hard drive, Linkedin, Twitter, webmail services etc. The system then goes off, brings in that data to one place, applies intelligent data to it and then displays it in a great format for you to really learn from.
If you are in sales – this is essential.
I would like to highlight three key areas – although I should add, it’s merely scratching the surface.
1) The dashboard
The dashboard view I really like – it gives you a snapshot view of everything going on within the companies and contacts in your system. You can choose to show contacts and/or companies, and also select the type of information shown. When you really sit back and think about this – if you went off to find all of this information manually – and people still do this, it would take you hours, even with the power of Google.
There’s an example shot below taken from the dashboard view.
2) Contact news
I’ve always defined Twitter as ‘legal stalking’ – simply, follow the people you want to do business with, to learn about their lives. Gist takes it a step further and provides you with ‘totally automated legal stalking’.
Imagine you’re a sales person looking to do business with an individual. That individual is already in your contact database, because you’ve researched their details. Before you head off to your meeting – all you would need to do is click on your contact in Gist…
You can then see a photo of the individual, their latest blog posts, their latest tweets and any other news items that have been picked up recently. You can then walk into that meeting feeling like you know them…
3) Company news
The same can also apply at a company level. If you manage or are looking to sell into certain companies, Gist has pulled out all of the companies from your contact lists and runs off and provides you with the latest news, blog posts and Tweets from that particular company, so if you are heading off to a meeting with your suspect – guess what – one click into Gist and you can be completely uptodate with that company’s news and comments.
Conclusions
I hope you’ve found this Gist review enlightening. It does a thousand other things too – and we think you really should go and register. It is of course totally free.
If we’re honest, it’s never going to replace Outlook, because it’s just so entrenched. However if I were Microsoft, I’d be snapping up these folks and doing everything in my power to mirror what Gist have done and turn Outlook into a real tool for managing knowledge as opposed to letting a corporate industry standard languish with a set of lame updates over the last 10 years.
For Gist, that’s the ultimate compliment.
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Would you like to read related articles?
- Gist beats Xobni at tackling email, Twitter overload (billbennett.co.nz)
- Get the Drift With Gist (gigaom.com)
- Without Free Software, Open Source Would Lose its Meaning (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
- Gist Opens to the Public, Wants to Own the Nexus of E-mail, Search, and Social Networks (xconomy.com)
- Gist (chris.pirillo.com)
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