In today’s business world, the average working professional sends and receives about 160 e-mails a day and costs companies around $650 billion per year in wasted productivity. Needless to say, for many businesses and working professionals alike, this inbox infomania coupled with social networking and increased touchpoints can be a serious and costly problem.
How do you keep track of the e-mails, tweets, status updates of the people that matter most to you or your company?
This week’s Tech Talk (a roundtable discussion featuring new products, tools and trends during Ant’s Eye View staff meetings) focused on a tool called Gist, an intuitive personal relationship manager that helps those of us who feel inundated by incessant e-mails better manage our inbox and build stronger connections with the people we care about — whether clients, customers, friends, family or co-workers.
But what’s most compelling about the tool goes beyond the efficiency features. Listen to Gist CEO, T.A. McCann describe Gist.
While Gist is one of several e-mail management tools on the market, it sets itself apart from competitors by augmenting e-mail search with some of the following relationship-centric functions:
- Integrate contact information, calendar events, links, news, and social networking data from Outlook, Salesforce, Lotus Notes, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail into one intuitive dashboard;
- Tag contacts within a network to create an instant “influencer” list for future reference;
- Gain business-critical insights about contacts and companies within a user’s network from 50,000 news sources and 20 million blogs; and
- Rank and score information and contacts based on what the user has determined to be most relevant and important.
We’re still discovering many of the different ways Gist can be used, but one thing we’re sure of, this notion of building better relationships and maintaining connections is at the heart of Gist and the reason why it was created. In fact, if you ask T.A. for the story behind Gist, he can tell you the two people he built Gist for and why he and his company continue to innovate and make it easier for individuals to maintain and sustain their network.
At Ant’s Eye View, we’re constantly looking for new social tools we can learn about and recommend to our clients. What are some tools you’ve used and can recommend to us? We’d love to hear from you.