The art of the thank-you note might seem to be an anachronism in the age of email, tweets, and text messages.  “I met with that person today,” you think to yourself, “why should I send a hand-written note when an email would do?”  The answer is undoubtedly: when you feel that way, you should send both.  At Gist, we are striving to lead and redefine Customer Service for the 21st century.  We use our own product to reach out to customers, reviewing news, blogs, and tweets to find a personal touch to the news of the day.  But we also take the time to say hello to important customers, contacts, and friends with a hand written note from time to time.

Roy Saunderson lists 10 ways to master the art of recognition writing. Tops on this list of writing an effective note include: writing the note yourself, making it personal, and being specific about the reason you are recognizing someone.

Sending a thank you note shows the recipient that you care about the quality of the relationship, that you took a few minutes of your time to slow down from the hectic pace of your everyday life, and that you can react outside of the confines of a computer.  And it’s gratifying to think that you are practicing a form of networking and relationship management that has been the standard for hundreds of years of communication.

It doesn’t take long to close your computer, get out a pad and paper, commit some thoughts to the page, and to make someone’s day by sending that note to them.  Try it today — you may find that your customers view you differently than their other vendors or associates — and you may find that simply by trying a new (old) form of communication, you deepen and strengthen your relationship for the better.

With our latest Gist Outlook Plugin release, you can now get rich person and company information BEFORE you send that next email or calendar invite.  Simply create a new message like you normally do and you will see profile information next to everyone you add – even if it is the first time.

Enhanced Outlook Experience (Tweet this)

Now you have all the most recent and relevant information at your fingertips as you compose, read, and respond to your emails.  Want to share something you see?  Simply highlight the news item, blog post, or tweet and drag it into the message body.

• Get updates about all your contacts and their companies inside Outlook
• Quickly find emails, links, and attachments
• Spend less time looking for information and more time acting on it

Click here to download the new Outlook Plugin now. (Make sure you’ve already activated your Gist account)

And with Outlook 2007, you can keep Gist open in the task pane so all this great information is always visible and within reach.

Are you Lotus Notes user?  The Gist Plugin for Lotus Notes is in limited release.  Sign up to join the waiting list.

We are sponsoring a series of posts over on Mashable about how people are seeing real results from using social media.  The first entry was published today and focuses on job seekers.  It is a great write up and be sure to read the comments – lots of additional great perspectives.

Social media gives you various platforms to publish your own thoughts, ideas, and observations as well as amplify the work of others.  You can demonstrate your expertise and create a more complete picture of who you are beyond a resume or a LinkedIn profile.  It also allows you to spot new opportunities and even create one where it may not have initially existed.  Pay attention to what key people are saying and the questions they are asking.  Engage intelligently and you have now separated yourself from the others (and, of course, use Gist to help you find the most important information to act on).

We have run into lots of different CTOs along the way, some as a result of corporate deployments, some who have shown direct interest in the product and a lots more at different conferences like Gartner, Glue, Defrag, LotusSphere…I have found that there are 3 main types of CTOs:

1. The Gatekeepers – these are the ones who want to make all the decisions, to make vendors “compete for the business” and form internal committees to evaluate new solutions, but rarely let the end-users drive.  They have big books of outdated corporate policies and spend tons of money on control and policy systems.  The pace of new solutions is very slow, therefore the cost to change grows higher and higher as the technology gets older and older.  Internal business process change is always gated by an outdated, tightly bound and controlled software infrastructure.  Everything is “standard” and dictated by the CTO.  They are well protected at the executive level because they know and approve everything that is happening.
2. The Followers – these are the majority of players who are looking for someone else to take the lead, who find excuses vs. answers on how to support new solutions and rely too heavily on influencers vs. end users to make their decisions.   They still discover their solutions mostly when someone else deploys it and has an analyst/vendor write a case study about it.  They are well protected because every decision is supported by the “”company XX did it or analyst YY said it was a good solution.”
3. The Enablers– these are the ones who are embracing change, facilitating and accelerating adoption of new technologies including social, mobile, communications and the cloud.  They are comfortable giving end users lots of choice and letting them make personal decisions.   They understand that great people want access to all their data, all the time on the coolest hardware and that the line between home/work, business/personal and corporate/private is blurry and getting blurrier.  They use new solutions themselves and lead the conversation.  These are CTO’s who know that “freedom with responsibility” is a key to success.  They know that data needs to be in the cloud and that people are inherently social and want to communicate across many platforms, with many different groups, all the time.   They understand that a Tweet can be important in closing a deal and that your Facebook friends are a very good place to find your next co-worker.    The most productive and engaged end users protect them and when something doesn’t work, they can make changes quickly to adopt an even better solution.

We are learning a great deal in working with CTOs in each camp.  We get better with each interaction, and I am confident that the companies who employ and support the Enablers will create very significant advantages, attract the best and brightest employees and ultimately win in their industries. How is your organization changing to support solutions like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, iPhone and the cloud?  How much control do you give people to find their own gear (Macs and iPhones), to try new solutions (open machines) and merge their personal and corporate personas? What kind of CTO are you and what kinds of solutions are you going to enable?

Our latest release went live last night and includes many of the small features you have requested, performance enhancements, and a few bug fixes.  The two most significant things you’ll see are Google Contacts integration and a full-screen dashboard option.  As always, you can read up on the latest release on the What’s New page.

Google Contacts Integration

You can now connect your Google Contacts account to Gist! We’ll import names, profile pictures, email addresses, phone numbers, websites and birthdays for your contacts and add them to your Gist Profiles. (Notes and Addresses for contacts coming soon). Gist will refresh the contacts from Google once a day and update Gist Profiles with any changes. Visit your Accounts page, click on the Google Contacts button, authorize Gist to access your Google Contacts and you’re all set.

Check out the Gist Support site for full details on how to get set up.

Full-screen Dashboard Reader

Many users spend the majority of their time on the Gist Dashboard catching up on the latest News, Blog posts, Tweets and Facebook Activity. To give you more room for reading articles, we’ve added the ability to expand the Reader to full-width. Just click the expand button in the top right corner of the Reader. To collapse the Reader to standard width, click the collapse button in the top right corner of the expanded reader. Enjoy the extra space!

Thanks for the continued support and thoughtful feedback.  If there is something you’d like to see added to Gist or are still waiting for us to deliver something you requested, please let us know.

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.

We are going to be at South by Southwest (SXSWi) in Austin, TX in March with Gist CEO T.A. McCann on a panel discussing the next frontier of email.  It will definitely be a lively discussion with a great group of others including:

• Matt Brezina from Xobni
• Mark Risher from Yahoo!
• Molly Wood of CBS Interactive
• Bassam Khan of Cisco
• Michael Cerda of Threadbox

Here is the session description:

Email is at the center of everything we do online. Even the most popular new social communications ride the back that is email. It is in fact the killer app of the Internet, and has been for some 40 years. It is however, a love-hate relationship. But there’s good news. Innovation is finally coming to email in the form of mashups, plugins and other tools, to help carve out value propositions for everyday email civilians.

Definitely let us know if you are going to be there and we will look forward to connecting!

You can even add a tag like “job search” at the account level to easily find these people and contacts.

See the entire description of this Quick Tip and download a sample .csv template on the Gist Support Site.

Analyst firm IDC released this bit of data a while ago ahead of a presentation by Lee Levitt of IDC’s Sales Advisory Practice.  The bottom line – make as little as 10 minutes per week more productive selling time and you can expect $57,000 per enterprise sales professional in additional annual revenue.

“In addition to the staggering 26% of their week spent on administrative tasks, we find that sales professionals are spending, on average, 2.3 hours a week searching for marketing collateral; 5.8 hours a week searching for customer related information; and another 6.4 hours a week creating presentations,” Levitt noted. “In short, they spend a third of their potential selling time in sales preparation activities that could be done better by automated systems and improved processes.”

“IDC research further suggests that shifting as little as 10 minutes a week from this unproductive time to productive selling time is worth $57,000 per year in increased revenues for an enterprise sales professional,” Levitt added.

Wow…”5.8 hours a week searching for customer related information!”  If you are an enterprise sales professional, you should be using Gist.  We can do more than make 10 minutes of this almost 6 hours per week more productive selling time for you allowing you to blow your numbers away every quarter.  Give it a try!