Gist as a Social Navigation Device

Man, Gist is good. It’s basically the tool you have been waiting for to help you get on top of noise that is social media.

I would say that noise is pretty much deafening, not deafening in the way that makes you want to lock yourself in a room (well sometimes maybe) – maybe noise is not the right word. It is more like the deafening you experience when you go to a concert or gig and everything else just seems to disappear. When you are busy networking, other goals and objectives can simply cease to be…

So how does Gist help?

Well in my opinion, Gist is the perfect social aggregator and what I’m calling a social navigation device (like a portable navigation device or PND but for social media). I’ve tried a few, some of which have been very good, but Gist is the best out there at the moment. Why do believe it is so good? Well basically for the following reasons:

• Gist has highlighted information from my social networks that would have taken me quite a while by myself.
• Gist has enabled me to prioritize my connections so that information from individuals and company that I need to build my business can viewed simply in one place, very easily.
• The implementation and feel of Gist is very, very solid. Definitely makes me rethink when we as software developers should consider calling our product a Beta release these days. My experience of Gist so far has been near on perfect.

Some Gist Features
When you login to Gist the first thing you see is the dashboard. Now this is a well thought-out and really well implemented screen.

The dashboard shows the social media activity from all of your contacts. By default the level of importance to qualify for inclusion on your dashboard view is set to 25, but that can be jacked up very simply and I would recommend pushing that up to about 60 to start getting value from Gist.

Using the people and company lists within Gist, you are able to quantify the importance of each of your contacts. Additionally, some of the importers for will automatically attribute levels of importance based on the amount of engagement you have with a contact via that channel (or a default importance level based on the channel).

The list is simple to navigate, and simple to update the details of people and companies. Merging the same contact that has been important can be achieved simply by editing the contact and selecting the merge option. My advice, spend some time here identifying those contacts that are “important” to you and assigning some appropriate importance rankings. Given that all twitter contacts are pulled in at importance 50 and twitter, I would suggest those networking contacts you need to give priority to get given a higher importance rating than 50.

As a rough guide for importance, I’m going with a scale like:

• >= 90 : Business partner or current client.
• 80 – 89: Someone I do business with regularly, or a previous client, or a close friend.
• 70 – 79: Previous business associates, and good intel sources (like those people who tweet about something new and cool).
• 60 – 69: People how generally say pretty useful things, and I like to keep in contact with.
• 50 – 59: Not sure yet…

I guess one thing I will ask the Gist guys to roadmap (and I must admit it’s possible I just haven’t found the feature yet), is for me to be able to qualify the context in which I have attributed the importance. As Gist allows me to import connections from various social networks, I have a coming together of both business and personal contacts. I don’t mind this, as certainly the lines are becoming more and more blurry as time goes on. What I would like to be able to do though, is let Gist know whether I am in the personal or business context and it could customize my dashboard to suit. This could also be used to assist those who run multiple businesses to have those as separate contexts.

In terms of features, I really have only looked at the core functionality that I believe makes Gist truly great. There are lots of other interesting things in there, including calendars, dossiers (sounds secret agent like right) and other cool things.

My recommendation – head on over to Gist, sign up for the beta and start having a play around. My expectation is that Gist will enable all of us to achieve more in the social networking space in a fraction of the time that we do now.