Gist.

We wanted to share a few tips to help you get more out of Gist and will be conducting a webcast on Wednesday, February 17th at 9am PT.

We’ll talk about:

• 3 steps to get you started in Gist (Connect an Account, Review People, and Review Company information)
• Using Gist as part of your routine — where you already spend your time (MS Outlook, iPhone, Salesforce.com)
• Engaging and amplifying contacts in your professional network using Gist

We will also be sharing some new features and look forward to receiving your feedback on what we can do to improve.

Title:  Gist Webinar: Three Steps to Getting Started with Gist

Date:  Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Time:  9:00 AM – 10:00 AM PST

Reserve your Webinar seat now!

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar.

Professionals who make their living on relationships are using Gist to gain an edge, even when the going is rough in the economy.

Gist User David Repka is life-long entrepreneur connecting people, opportunities and capital in the commercial real estate industry. He describes his experience using Gist and how it made a difference for him:

I’ve been using Gist for a few weeks now… I am a commercial mortgage broker in Florida… my market and industry have been decimated by the recession/depression and I am looking for any edge I can find. From the Gist Dashboard I noticed that a client/friend that I am connected with on Facebook recently opened a new hotel – this was from a news article in an obscure hospitality trade rag Gist automatically found. Since opening a new hotel in this economy is some feat… I dropped him a note of congratulations and mentioned that I am working with an investment bank that may have “cracked the code” on finding construction funds for hotels using Obama bonds and asked him if he wanted to talk about it… he sent me a note back in 2 minutes to call him. We are now in discussions on financing 5 hotels with over $50 million in potential loans. Thanks Gist Team!

Thanks David! We’re glad we could help provide valuable insight for you so that you could use your relationship skills to close a great deal.

Visit David’s Gist Public Profile.

If you’d like to learn more about Gist or to be featured in a future “In their own words” post, please contact the Gist team.

Here at Gist, we love to feature stories about people using Gist to get better connected with their contacts and prospects and to be more effective at gaining insight in less time. One of the areas we’ve noticed people writing about recently is Real Estate. We’d like to feature two of those posts here, and invite you to tell us how you’re using Gist to supercharge your client interactions and to improve what you know about your network.

In “The Gist of Social Media“, Gahlord Dewald writes in a technical tool survey for the Real Estate industry:

…you can get a custom display of social media published by any of your contacts at any time. You also get a dashboard view of all the content created by all of your contacts. And you can share any of that content from one network to another. See something interesting from one of your Twitter contacts that would be useful for Facebook? Pass it along. See something from a vendor that would interest your work colleague? Push it via e-mail.

The viewing and sharing of social media content is social-network agnostic. Instead of being focused on the social network you’re logged into, you’re focused on your contact. This is good.

Brokers are interested in Gist too. John Thompson of Intero Real Estate features Gist in a recent post “Cool Apps: Get the Gist” and writes:

Everyone with whom we’re connected online is searchable. Every blog comment, tweet, online profile, even reviews at places like Amazon, are searchable. But tracking down all of that information can be awfully time-consuming. Gist takes the legwork out of finding out what you need to know about your clients and business contacts before you talk to them.

An indispensable tool for anyone in sales, Gist is what Outlook wishes it could have been; not just contact management, Gist is knowledge management. Relationship management.

We’d like to hear more stories about how you’re using Gist for your Real Estate business. Let us know in the comments, or send us email at feedback@gist.com

Thanks to all of you who attended our first Gist webinar yesterday.

If you weren’t able to attend or want to review the content, we’ve posted the webinar and made it available for you.

We’ve also posted the webinar slides.

You asked some great questions and we will be adding a link in this post just as soon as we can answer the questions and post the responses out to our support site at http://support.gist.com.

Again, thanks for a great event. We plan to host these monthly and we’d like to hear any other ideas you have for webinars.

Thanks to everyone including our thousands of new beta users for making our open beta launch last week a huge success.  We’ve worked very hard over the past year to building something that you would find truly innovative and we know we have more to add so please continue to provide outstanding feedback – feedback@gist.com or support.gist.com.

We received an amazing amount of coverage and here are a few articles and blog posts that have been written about us over the past week:

Mashable – Gist Launches: Sync Social Media Data with Email Connections

CNETWebware -Gist opens up, adds noise and friends filter

Forbes – Gist.com’s Beta Data

Lifehacker – Gist Filters Your Inboxes by Contact Importance

FilltheFunnel – Gist: Virtual Windshield to Your Connections

Salesforce and Gist – CRM Gets Social

Over the course of the past year, we have been collecting survey responses from those interested in trying out Gist.  We asked a lot of questions and really appreciate all the thoughtful responses.  Now that we are on the verge of open beta, we wanted to share what we learned with everyone.  Here are the highlights:

Prep time is either rare or too burdensome

• Almost 60% of those surveyed reported spending less than 10 minutes searching the web ahead of an important meeting
• Over 40% of those surveyed reported spending an hour or more searching the web ahead of an important meeting

Favorite sources of information lean toward new sources

• All use some type of search engine (Google, etc.)
• 75% reported spending time on LinkedIn
• Almost 50% use Facebook
• 15% use Twitter
• Less than 15% of those surveyed reference their CRM system
• Other sources include Hoovers, Zoominfo, Jigsaw, & company websites

Personal email stores continue to grow

• 75% of those surveyed by Gist reported having 2,000 or more emails saved with almost 40% having over 6,000.
• Almost 30% reported receiving between 40 and 100 emails per day
• Number of inboxes multiplying (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, etc.)

We learned a lot of things about how people communicate and where they go (or don’t go) to get information to prepare for a meeting, call, or other type of interaction.  Mostly, what we learned reinforced what we are doing here at Gist.

Here are more detailed slides on the questions and responses.

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Earlier this week Facebook bought Friendfeed for about $50M.  Friendfeed and Facebook are both companies that live in/around the Gist space, or better said since we are small and they are large, Gist plays in their space.  We are all working on “dynamic aggregation” of content and using these aggregations to build stronger relationships.  Many of the posts related to the acquisition speculate that the purchase was about competing with Twitter, which Facebook is rumored to have tried to buy and/or Facebook competing with Google or even that they were just trying to acquire the super smart guys who built FriendFeed (and Gmail, Google Maps… before that).  I assume it is a little bit of all of these, like most acquisitions, but the value to the Facebook user is what I am most interested in.

Facebook already does a good job of creating a content stream from my friends, many of which are on Facebook and have discovered that I am there too.  This is rich and useful, but lacks good filtering or prioritization, requires us to know about each other (invite/accept), and is usually only content that is posted directly to Facebook vs. all the other places people are posting (unless my friends have added all the apps which connect their other streams to Facebook).

Friendfeed on the other hand allows me (and a small number of my friends) to add in all these “personal feeds” to one profile and then FF automatically aggregates this content into one stream.  In this way, all my personal stuff (photos, songs from Last.fm, blog posts…58 supported services and counting) ends up in one place and others can subscribe to “me”, comment, discuss, forward…  But, FF is also limited in a good way to just see things from “important” friends, friends in one group or another…and even if I could do this easily FF misses content “about” these people vs. by these people and also relies on the discover/subscribe model.  With the Friendfeed acquistion, Facebook now gains much broader access to these personal feeds and therefore more content about my friends, and that is a good thing and the combined discover/subscribe situation will improve the coverage across my network(s).

This is also good for Gist users as we are working with the Facebook development team to bring the Facebook activity stream (which presumably will include FF content) into Gist and, at that point, you will benefit from even broader “dynamic aggregation.”  Gist users won’t have to worry about the issues around discovering services (we do this automatically) or prioritizing who is most important (via the Gist importance algorithms).  You will get greater control and over just the content you want to see “by” people and “about” the people you care about most.  This is power and just another step toward more control over the abundance of content out there.

http://gigaom.com/2009/08/10/why-facebook-wants-friendfeed/