Gist.

[We sent this out this morning to all our users via email and wanted to share it here as well]

We wanted to send a short end of year note in appreciation for all you have done for us this year.  Thank you!  Over the past 12 months, we have grown from a few early adopters to a large community of business professionals getting daily value from Gist.  Our team has doubled in size and we were fortunate to close a significant investment round to expand our vision toward the future.

We launched Gist to help you build stronger professional relationships by leveraging the contacts, connections, and content in your email inbox, your social networks, and across the web.  Our goal is simple – to provide you meaningful insight about your most important contacts and their companies in less time with less effort.

Hopefully, you’ve found this to be true.  If so, and this being the giving season, we hope you’ll share the Gist story with your friends and business contacts using Twitter – tweet about Gist now or help them understand Gist in less than 2 minutes.

We continue to add new features, enhance existing ones, and improve the overall user experience.  None of this would be possible without your support, feedback, and suggestions so please keep them coming.  Send an email to feedback@gist.com or visit our support site and share your thoughts like these Gist users have.

Thanks again for helping to make 2009 such a success for us.  We have much in store for 2010 and look forward to sharing it all with you in the coming year.

Happy New Year!

T.A. McCann and the rest of the Gist team

To help you ring in the New Year, we have released an updated version of our popular iPhone application.

Updates to v1.2 include:

• Add or edit notes for people and companies so you can capture next steps or to dos for your key contacts.
• Share contact information for people and companies with other Gist users.
• Invite others to Gist to help us spread the word and to give your friends and colleagues a way to save a little time and increase their productivity in the new year.

We continue to enhance the iPhone app based on your feedback so please send it early and often.  Thanks!

Although many of our users are Twitter veterans, some of you might ask, “what is Twitter and why would I benefit from it?”  The challenges of Twitter include finding immediate value from it and the low signal to noise ratio – lots of people saying lots of things all the time.  In fact, Nielsen Wire has blogged that “Twitter Quitters” are a potential major issue for ongoing growth at Twitter.  We believe there is great value in Twitter as an information network and content feed for your most important contacts and their companies.  The challenge is sifting through all the tweets to find the one worth sharing or responding to directly.

Gist shows you the Twitter stream for a company or contact, or lets you hide it easily.

Gist brings Twitter into one, usable dashboard and treats it like any other content feed about your contact or their company.  You can both read tweets posted by your close contacts (or perhaps your loosely connected social media contacts) and to respond by retweeting or replying to those people.  If you don’t understand what a hash (#) tag means or why you would @ reply someone, it’s okay: Gist alternatively lets you share this content through email or Facebook updates.

Ultimately, it’s up to you.  Whether you are a Twitter power user or new to this source of information, Gist can help.  You don’t even have to use Twitter to benefit from it when you use Gist.  You may choose to view tweets about all of your contacts, tweets only for a short period of time, or hide the Twitter stream altogether if it’s just too much.  With Gist you can wade into the “Twitterstream” without getting swept away allowing you to get all information benefits and insight without having to be a Twitter guru.

Professional relationship development must be viewed as a process where you can set yourself apart by both your preparation and follow-up.  Waiting until the first meeting to understand your prospect’s business, needs, and wants is not ideal although you can certainly use the first interaction to fill in the blanks, ask probing questions, and establish yourself as a peer and credible partner.

This is a great video (via BNET Sales Machine) of Ian Gilbert from sales performance firm ThirdCore on how to make the most out of that first meeting including a subtle but important point around creating a peer relationship.  The amount of knowledge and expertise you demonstrate not only about your product or service but your prospect’s business and role within it determines the nature and trajectory of your professional relationship.

Gist delivers this essential information and insight in less time with less effort so you can make the most of every meeting and relationship without having to find additional time in the day.  In fact, Gist actually gives you time back by working constantly on your behalf to bring you the most important information about your most important contacts.

The “social” aspect of CRM is definitely a popular topic these days and a lot of what Gist is doing is directly related to it.  A few of the Social CRM aspects of Gist include:

• Automatically curating individual and company profiles
• Aggregating and prioritizing information across content streams like Twitter and Facebook
• Surfacing the most actionable contacts and accounts
• Providing deep and rich contact records that go beyond names and email addresses

We think Michael Fauscette of IDC lays out a nice definition of Social CRM in a blog post from earlier this year.  Read the whole post for more details but here is a good framing quote:

“Social CRM is the tools and processes that encourage better, more effective customer interaction and leverage the collective intelligence of the broader customer community with the intended result of increasing intimacy between an organization and its prospects and customers.”

We briefed Michael in the recent months about Gist and enjoyed the conversation as well as his deep knowledge about the space.  Be sure to track him down (@mfauscette) if you are interested in Social CRM or want to learn more about it.

There are over 600,000,000 Microsoft Outlook installs in the world (according to our friends on the MS Outlook product team over in Redmond) making it one of the most widely used knowledge worker applications around.  With such a huge install base, there are many different product add-ins to improve the experience, enhance search, and integrate to various different applications and information services including the recent addition of the Outlook Social Connector directly by Microsoft.  Here’s an interview with Gist CEO T.A. McCann on Techflash about how it fits with what we are doing at Gist.

We think this innovation is fantastic and are focused on further enhancing the user experience inside Outlook by bringing the profiles we create and importance we determine into the application.  Oh, and we do a pretty nice job helping you find that link, attachment, or previous email conversation with a contact.

At Gist, our goal is to put the information about your most important contacts and companies into the places where you already spend your time.  Millions live in Outlook everyday and that is why we built the Gist Outlook Plugin to bring your email, calendar, and address book to life.

Below is a quick product tour of how Gist works inside Outlook.  Download it (you’ll need to set up an account first if you don’t already have one but can login directly from Outlook once set up), and give it a try!

You can use Tags in Gist to better organize your contacts and companies.  Have a specific group of people you want to see the latest updates on?  Tag them with a “VIP” tag.  Headed to an event and you received a list of attendees in advance? Upload it as a .csv, tag them with the event name, and filter the Dashboard view to see updates only from individuals with that tag.

Here are some additional details on how to use tags or please visit our Support page on it.

You can use single or multiple tags to group lists of users; use one tag at a time to filter the display of information in the People List view; or one tag at a time to filter the display of information on the dashboard.

Steps to Tag a Contact Record
Adding tags to a single contact from the profile page

Applying a new tag to a contact is simple.  Use the following steps to tag a contact on the profile page:

1. Visit the user’s contact record/profile page;
2. Click the Tag icon below the Importance slider (if the user already has tags associated, you will need to click the control to the right of the tag icon).
3. Enter a list of tags, separated by commas (e.g. Prospect, VIP, Boston to indicate that you want to associate three tags with a user.)
4. Click Add when you are finished and the page should refresh with your changes.

We are very fortunate to have so many great Fans of Gist out there that share their experiences about our product.  We wanted to share a few of those mentions, blog posts, and articles here along with some of the great quotes they contain.  Thanks for the support!

Tim Skaggs – Harnessing your connections through the power of Gist

“If you haven’t heard of Gist you are missing out! This web application will give you a lot of power to manage all your social networks and emails under one roof.”

Office Arrow – Using CRM Tools to Manage Opportunities

“…Gist.com focuses primarily on learning more about prospective clients: when you add a new individual or company to Gist, the site searches Google and social media sites to bring together a whole profile for you to use when contacting that person or company.”

Technorati – Getting the Gist of Social Media Blogging

“I’ve installed the Outlook plugin. Now when I look at an e-mail from you, I can click on the Gist button in the top right corner and see all your contact information, online news articles that mention you, your RSS feeds, all the emails we’ve exchanged, every attachment we’ve exchanged, any links we’ve given each other, and your Twitter feed.  Just think how valuable this is when you’re talking with a client and they ask if you received an attachment. No more playing in your inbox! Just look in Gist, click on the Attachments tab, and you have a complete list of every attachment you’ve sent to, or received from, that client.”

WebWorkerDaily – Gist Profiles Help You Get Found

“The folks at Gist are now joining the social identity management space by unleashing this functionality to the masses — giving everyone the ability to create and share their own public profile. Now I can now use the data-gathering power of Gist to present a full dossier about me.”

As part of our efforts to introduce you to our users, we wanted to profile Gist user John F. Moore.  John is the CTO of Swimfish in the Boston-area and had the following to say about us:

“There are very few social tools that live up to the hype that surrounds their marketing efforts. Gist not only lives up to the hype, it beats my expectations nearly all of the time. The Gist team is doing an excellent job of constantly iterating and improving upon an already good product and I am looking forward to continuing to watch it evolve for years to come.”

Read more about John’s thoughts on Gist in his recent blog post on us:  Personal Social CRM from Gist, Time to Get Excited

Thank you John! Be sure to follow John on Twitter @johnfmoore or check out John’s personal blog at Random Thoughts of a Boston-Based CTO.

Have something you’d like to share about Gist or want to be profiled on our blog?  Let us know.

What is Gist?  Gist founder & CEO T.A. McCann tells you what it is all about in less than two minutes.  This interview took place during the recent SIIA On-Demand conference where Gist was chosen to a be a “Preview Company” and is a quick overview of what we are doing and how we do it.  Enjoy!