Conrad Hall discusses how Gist is more than a contact manager.
This post is a guest post by Conrad Hall from http://socialmediacheapandeasy.com talking about using Gist to save time and keep track of all of his clients. If you want more details and info on Gist, Conrad also interviewed Gist CEO T.A. McCann which can be listened to here. I’ll turn it over to Conrad now.
At first Gist seemed like an interesting bit of software. I honestly thought it was just some kind of contact manager.
As you can imagine, my opinion of Gist has changed. It’s now one of the tools I recommend to clients – especially B2B (Business to Business) clients – for listening and tracking what their contacts are doing.
Most folks know about Google Alerts, and how to use it. Well Gist gives me the same tool with the News icon. I click on that and see where a specific person is being mentioned. That’s a huge time saver when I’m doing research for my radio show, research on/for my clients, and even tracking my own mentions.
Another feature that has saved my bacon over and over again is Gist’s attachment feature.
The icon is a paperclip. You click on it, and up pops a list of every attachment someone has ever sent you.
Have you ever had someone say they sent you an attachment and you can’t find it? Me too. With Gist, I just go to the last e-mail they sent me and click on the paperclip. Then every attachment they ever sent gets listed. This is definitely my favourite feature.
And these are just things I do with the Outlook Plugin, by the way.
When you go to Gist.com, there’s a whole extended world of functionality. I could easily write a few thousand words about the site itself. But here’s one super cool feature about the site and Gist…
You can delete a contact without losing it.
What I mean is, when you “delete” a contact, Gist archives it. It lets you take the contact off the page so you don’t see it, while keeping all the information in storage. (I’ve used that little feature once or twice, let me tell you.)
Like I said, I could go on writing about Gist for pages. But that paperclip is definitely my favourite feature.
The one thing I’d like to see added is a birthday reminder function that links to a site for greeting cards. (A little birdy told me they’re working on this.)
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