Jamie Scheu is an interactive marketing manager at Health Dialog, and maintains a personal blog at Scheuguy.com.

I’ve recently gone in and fine-tuned my account to take advantage of the powerful relationship-building tools that Gist has to offer.

When joining a new social platform, most users build their networks gradually, adding one friend, colleague, or professional contact at a time. Gist features an impressively wide range of platforms that it can import from directly, which will be the source of the majority of your contact entries in Gist. You’ll be tempted to import your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, and Outlook contacts all at once. But my suggestion to new users is, don’t — not at first. I was totally overwhelmed by the amount of data I was seeing from several thousand new contacts.  I created three steps to improve relationships with Gist.

Step #1. Start small.

Pick 1-2 dozen of your most valuable contacts to begin with, and import their data from two different sources (e.g. LinkedIn and Gmail). This will give you a sense of how contacts merge together in Gist — this is one of the most powerful and valuable features. Pick individuals who are relatively high profile (i.e. will show up in the news), so you get a sense of how news and feeds work together in the main stream of updates.

My recommendation would be to leave this configuration for two or three days, and check back at least daily to see how content relevant to your contacts is brought together by Gist. Once you get a feel for the main feed and how to navigate it efficiently, you’re ready for Step #2:

Step #2. Add contacts in batches.

This is really a corollary to Step 1. Whether adding sources containing existing contacts, or entirely new contacts, it can get overwhelming if you suddenly have 1000 people (including maybe 100 or more duplicates and mailing lists) to sift through.

As you gradually increase the number of contacts you have loaded into Gist, and the number of sources you’ve imported from, you’ll be amazed at how much you know about your connections that you weren’t aware of before you had it all in one place.

For any given contact, I might have their birthday and a cell phone number in the Address Book application on my Mac; their personal email stored in Gmail; their work email, company, and title in Outlook; and their past positions, personal blog, and Twitter account in LinkedIn. With Gist, I now have one central place where I can find all of this information about the people I do business with.

Step #3. Don’t give up. There’s a lot of value to be found in here.

It may take a little while to get your contacts set up and your news and feed settings tweaked properly (for more advanced customization tips, visit Gist support), but it’s worth the up-front effort.

I’ll leave you with one final suggestion for using Gist:

Become a better networker.

Don’t be a passive user; take what you learn about your contacts and use the information as opportunities to reach out — whether in the form of congratulations for some recent press, or as a resource to someone in search of an answer.

Gist proved its value to me in this way within 24 hours of getting my account fully configured. I learned that one of my contacts had just been featured in the New York Times that day, and that another friend was the cover story of a local lifestyle magazine. Without Gist, I probably wouldn’t have come across either of these stories, significant as they were. Instead, I now had an opportunity to reach out and congratulate both individuals.

Whether you’re actually in sales, and are looking to stay a step ahead in getting to know your prospects, or are simply in the business of maintaining and growing relationships (and who isn’t?), I hope you’ve begun to see the potential of Gist to transform the way you manage your professional connections.