Xobni is banking on the fact you are with its launch today of a new product line under the brand Smartr, aiming to bring order to more inboxes. The San Francisco-based startup came out of the Y Combinator program and has been trying to improve the Outlook and Blackberry email experience for a while now (they’re also a sponsor of GigaOM’s Mobilize event going on this week). Their latest contact management apps are for Gmail and Android and are free to download.

Based on a new Smartr platform that allows the products to rank and index your contacts, the new offerings aim to be “easier and more powerful than anything we’ve ever done,” according to CEO Jeff Bonforte (who makes his pitch for the new products in this short video.) So what exactly do they do?

Smartr for Gmail is a sidebar for your email that lets you search you contacts and, once you’ve found the one you’re looking for, pulls up all your past conversations via mail, message and voice, as well as their photo, job details and Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter updates. With one click you can add them to your other social networks.

Smartr for Android smartphones makes your contacts (up to 10,000) searchable and ranks them by importance, providing a complete profile with a photo, job details, email history, common contacts and social network information for each.

A leader in the field of “social CRM,” Xobni is competing with plenty of other companies offering to bring order to your online connections, including Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. But while the Smartr Gmail offering seems to share a lot with Rapportive on the surface, Xobni is highlighting differentiators such as the ability to generate contacts from more sources like Facebook, Android and Blackberry, better search options, and the ability to view profiles for all members of a multi-party conversation simultaneously.

The Smartr launch follows the release of a collection of gadgets to integrate tools such as Yammer, Evernote and Saleforce with users’ Outlook interface earlier this year. But the company remains in a brutally competitive space. One that Bijan Marashi, the co-founder of another email-indexing service, Xoopit, which was acquired by Yahoo!, warned entrepreneurs against, saying “trying to fix consumer email platforms is like trying to fix the phone system — a startup simply can’t afford to do it.” Xobni is obviously not heeding his advice.

Image courtesy of Xobni.

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• The rise of tablets in the enterprise
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Clearvale is a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service, enterprise, social networking solution that includes interconnected internal and external social networks. It allows customers and employees to collaborate and communicate directly for customer support, idea management, and other needs. Both the internal and external interfaces have familiar components: activity streams, project management tools, communities, discussions, blogs, profiles, embedded media and links.

While there are many  tools to meet these needs individually, Clearvale’s strength is in its ease of use, and in the systems it offers to manage and integrate the internal and external communities. Businesses can create separate social networks for each of these groups, but manage them as a whole. Employees can access the networks using existing tools such as Active Directory, Google Apps, and OpenID; Clearvale has tools to let external partners and customers use various authentication systems. Clearvale can even integrate with e-commerce websites.

The company says that the Clearvale solution gives organizations greater control, with the appropriate levels of access and security, while still enabling deeper customer engagement, and providing the means to integrate with existing social networks.

When I spoke with Richard Hughes, director of product strategy at BroadVision, he told me that after 18 years of experience with developing e-commerce portals, and their recent experiences with enterprise social marketing, the company feels that there is a market for a solution that allows businesses to manage internal collaboration and CRM in one platform.

He feels such a solution will be more effective than trying to use separate social networks for each activity: “At BroadVision we don’t agree that Social CRM is about tightly controlling customer interaction or that it’s primarily about social media monitoring. It should be about integrating all of a company’s customer engagement channels to enable better communication among customers and employees.”

Clearvale is mainly aimed at medium to large businesses of 100+ employees. More information, including a video demo of a Clearvale ecosystem and a more detailed product demo, is available from the Clearvale website.

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The first crop of gadgets includes tools for web-based document sharing, lead tracking, issue reporting and monitoring, and note-taking, such as:

• An Evernote gadget that automatically displays notes containing the name or email address of a particular contact, and allows adding and editing.
• A Dropbox tool for finding files and sharing them by creating links that are entered into email messages. Drag-and-drop file sending is planned for the future.
• A JIRA bug tracker tool that allows programmers to update project status inline.
• A Google Translate tool that automatically translates entire conversations, both incoming and outgoing. Xobni says that the translations are good enough to be helpful for use in customer support.
• A WebEx tool to schedule meetings, and start them on the fly.

Other gadgets available today include:

• Productivity: GoldMail
• Collaboration: Huddle and Microsoft SharePoint
• Content: Facebook, Flickr, Hoover’s, Klout, LinkedIn, Twitter, Xing, YouTube, Yelp
• CRM: Salesforce CRM

Xobni was one of the first companies to bring “social CRM” services to the inbox, but has more recently seen significant competition from the likes of Rapportive, Gist and Liaise. By hooking into third-party services, the gadgets can offer offer additional capabilities not offered by Xobni’s competitors.

When I spoke with Xobni representatives recently, they said that the rationale for developing this platform was simple: research shows that in the enterprise, people spend 38 percent of their screen time in Outlook, so it makes sense to make Outlook as capable as possible.

Xobni says that its system relies on open APIs, and it is based on OpenSocial. Developers can create their own gadgets; they can be created with straightforward web development tools. The infrastructure can even be hosted on intranets to take advantage of corporate LDAP servers. Gadgets are not yet part of Xobni for Gmail beta, but they are on the way.

The new Xobni gadgets are available from the company’s website. Most of the Xobni Gadgets are free, but the JIRA and Saleforce gadgets are priced at $9.99 per user per year. Xobni handles billing and payment for developers.

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Today’s acquisition is the latest in a series of acquisitions in the collaboration and web communications arenas, including Salesforce’s acquisition of the email contact management company Etacts, and Skype’s announcement that they are buying mobile video provider Qik.

Salesforce says that it plans to follow “the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service.” With consumer sites like Facebook and Twitter creating expectations of real-time social sharing, it is important to incorporate such capabilities into the enterprise. A Dimdim acquisition seems to fit logically into that vision.

It appears likely that Salesforce will use the acquisition to add Dimdim’s presence and on-demand meeting and collaboration tools into Salesforce’s internal systems. At the recent GigaOM Net:Work Conference, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff discussed how they are using their Chatter tools internally to flatten the structure of their own organization, and to allow collaboration and communication across all parts of the company.

We’ve been fans of Dimdim as an easy-to-use and affordable screen-sharing and meeting service, and we’re sorry to see it being lost as an option. New account creation has already been disabled, and it appears that existing monthly accounts will only be available until March 15. Annual accounts will remain active until the current subscription period ends.

Have you used Dimdim? How will the acquisition affect you?

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Gist has added some new enhancements that are increasing the usefulness of this turbocharged relationship management tool:

• Signature block extraction. Many people put valuable information into their emails signatures, but until now, if you wanted to extract someone’s phone number, title or any other nugget of information embedded in the bottom of their email to you, you’d have to copy and paste it into your contact database. Because Gist can be integrated into an email client such as Outlook or Gmail via Google Apps, the system now has the intelligence to pick out signature content, parse the information, and add it to a widget that suggests additional information you can add to your contacts’ profiles.
• Public Social Business Profiles. Gist creates profiles for the contacts that are imported into its system — over 100 million profiles at press time, making it a larger contacts database than LinkedIn. You can claim your Gist profile to manage what is displayed publicly.

When you claim and modify your profile, you can proactively weed out some of the superfluous content that the system may have culled from the web pertaining to you, such as out-of-date or little-used email addresses. You can showcase your websites, work history and publish dynamic news feed updates. With your control and Gist’s intelligent data gathering, you can compile a rich, well-organized personal profile that provides others with the highlights of your digital life and work.

The system brings more information into each profile automatically and can be augmented based on what others using Gist add to it. As long as the information is publicly available, as more people access, augment and claim profile data in the system, the relevance of the information you see in your own contacts dashboard keeps getting better and better.

Practical Uses of Gist

In my role as co-founder of a social media marketing agency, Conversify, I am constantly making contacts at conferences and events and struggle to keep up with them, particularly for sales leads. In the “old days,” I was taught methods for cultivating our networks such as scanning magazines and newspapers for articles that might be of interest to someone I met. I’d cut out the article, put it into an envelope with a note, and mail it to them with the intention of keeping the contact warm — or at least that was what I was supposed to do, but never really did. With the Internet, I was finally able to share an article with a contact with the click of a button. But I had to be actively thinking of someone to take action at the moment I was reading an article.

With Gist, I can enhance my Gmail account by integrating Gist and seeing news feeds and information related to people with whom I’m corresponding. I can access that information via the Gist Google Apps gadget and enhance my correspondence with someone or prepare for a phone call or meeting with someone by getting the skinny on my contact beyond what I currently know. I can use Gist to easily share what I find so I could tweet out something about someone with whom I’m networking as a nice way of giving public kudos and recognition.

As I also continue to expand my freelance writing, blogging and podcasting work, I need to ramp up my outreach to prospective clients and media outlets. Gist can feed me recent published works for an editor’s publication so I can reference them in my query. Gist can help me quickly identify other people, such as someone’s assistant or colleague, to help me find the gatekeeper of freelance jobs.

I can organize my contacts by tag or keyword. So the “editor” tag brings up the editors, the “producer” tags the producers, etc. And similar to Workstreamer, an app that I wrote about recently, Gist also provides a company view in addition to the individual view.

And since I’m an iPhone addict, having the Gist mobile app puts additional features at my fingertips. I can highlight my most important contacts or view my contacts by recent news where they’ve been mentioned or where they’ve published and then share it on my Twitterstream, all in one compact app.

The more I dig into Gist, the more I get the feeling that it is like having a virtual assistant feeding me key information to help me make stronger connections with my network. I’m feeling more informed, more connected and less overwhelmed because the information is filtered so smartly. I know I’m still barely scratching the surface of Gist, but I can see it will fast become an indispensable tool for me, particularly because I value my network so much as well as my relationships with others. I may even put my Gist profile on my next batch of business cards because I like the way it resents a combination of both static and dynamic information about me that I can control and display in a compact format. For me, business is first about relationships. Everything else follows. Gist helps me lead with those relationships and make those relationships richer.

What tools are you using to nurture your network?

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Workstreamer claims over 5 million companies in its database, and it’s adding more every day. You can also add companies you’d like to monitor that aren’t in Workstreamer’s database, and augment or modify details about other companies, including your own.

Information in Workstreamer comes not only from blogs, microblogs, social networks like LinkedIn and news articles, but also from the Jigsaw business contact directory, the SEC and other data sources.

The company is trying to take a holistic view of monitoring, while trying to reduce the impact of what it calls “Attention Abundance Disorder;” it adheres to the theory that “less is more.” The monitoring results you get in your email or on your Workstreamer account page have gone through an algorithmic vetting process to attempt to deliver highly relevant results.

Uses for Workstreamer include:

• Strengthening relationships with companies in your network
• Finding relevant inroads for making better researched contacts with prospects
• Identifying business opportunities with companies you’re monitoring
• Aggregating mentions of your own company in social media

If you’re looking to have additional support as you build and grow your business network, identify business opportunities or monitor competitors, both Gist and Workstreamer seem to be complementary; Gist can also monitor companies using keywords.

For now, Workstreamer is offering its monitoring tool for free, but will eventually become a premium product. Current beta users will be grandfathered in and will continue to receive a free version.

How are you listening to the social and news streams of other companies? How has listening to companies proved fruitful for your business?

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• Collaboratively author content, such as proposals and agreements
• Share key documents and files, such as contracts and collateral
• Set meeting agenda, take real-time notes, and capture and assign action items
• Manage critical processes like RFPs with project management tools
• Communicate in real-time with built-in chat, instant messaging and teleconferencing

The new product includes “customer engagement monitoring,” an interesting feature that alerts sales reps or account managers whenever a customer logs in, and also allows a company to see exactly what its customers are viewing or downloading from its workspaces to get a better idea of their interests.

Here’s a (fairly lengthy) “sneak peek” webinar, recorded for existing PBworks customers, that shows off the Customer Relationship edition’s additional features:

PBworks Customer Relationship Edition has a starting price of $30/user/month. Unlimited customer/prospect workspaces and licenses are included at no additional cost. The product will integrate with other CRM tools via its API; a Salesforce.com connector that allows one-click extranet creation from within Salesforce.com, as well as the ability to view those extranets from within Salesforce.com itself, is available at a cost of $1,000 per year.

The Customer Relationship Edition of PBworks joins other special editions of the software tailored for specific verticals, such as project management, the legal profession and education.

Let us know what you think of the new PBworks Customer Realtionship edition in the comments.

Soho OS has some similarities to 5050biz, which I talked about a while back. Soho’s navigation system is more cohesive than I found 5050biz.com’s to be, although it still has its quirks. The main menu consists of three enormous buttons (“Business,” “Networking,” and “Services”) on the left, which then display section submenus at the top. The home page includes widgets that can be moved around, but can’t be edited or removed.

Soho’s business management and development functions include:

• A calendar and to-do system that allows one to share and assign items.
• A CRM system.
• A section for tracking marketing campaigns. Integration with AdWords is lacking, and is definitely needed.
• Fairly sophisticated invoicing and inventory systems, although several of their functions weren’t yet operational as of this writing. There are apparently plans for a full-fledged financial management system.
• Systems for creating and managing trouble tickets and FAQs.
• Tools to create and manage access to Soho. Internal and external users can be assigned to groups, and given different levels of access.

Soho’s contact management and networking tools include:

• A “Social Stream” reminiscent of private microblogging solutions like Flowr.
• An IM function, controlled from a bar that looks very much like Facebook Chat.
• An address book, in which contacts can be shared among group members, and which allows imports and exports of CSV files.

Soho also offers services (free during the beta period, but premium options later):

• Tools for making outgoing VoIP calls; sending SMS, faxes, and mass emailings; processing credit card transactions; and creating voice messaging campaigns.

Soho’s strength is its integration, so those who only need certain of its tools will probably be better off using stand-alone apps. Having one customer list that all of its services can access is potentially its most useful feature. But while it has a lot of useful tools, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. And it assumes that business owners are going to be willing and able to entrust a huge amount of business data to single system. Until it offers ways of interacting with the tools that business owners are already using, its usefulness is probably limited to the smallest of companies and those that don’t have a lot of information already stored elsewhere. Soho is still in invite-only beta, and it’s definitely rough around the edges; many features aren’t yet working or are incomplete.

Editor’s note: If you’re interested in working in the cloud, check out our Structure conference in June.

5050biz calls itself a “virtual office,” and includes the following components.

• A social network, with features similar to LinkedIn and other networks.
• 1 GB of redundant, multi-hosted cloud storage for documents, with systems for sharing files. There are no online editing options, though, as Google Docs and Zoho Docs have.
• Online text chat with members you have connected to, rather like Facebook Chat. This is web-only, not Jabber-based, so it can only be accessed at the 5050biz.com web site, not through any third-party chat client.
• User-created networks, similar to LinkedIn Groups.
• A system for managing shared and personal contacts. It only has a few editable fields, though, so its usefulness is limited.
• A GoToMeeting-style screen-sharing and conference room system.
• Business consulting services from 5050biz, like a calendar of workshops and a ‘Pro Team’ page, where professionals selected by 5050biz are available for consultation.

5050biz contends that its site can be used as an intranet, project management and/or CRM system. According to the folks I talked to at the site, it was designed for businesspeople who are perhaps less computer-savvy than most web workers. They think that such people will be willing to spend money for the convenience of an integrated experience.

This would be a stronger argument if the site was better organized. 5050biz suffers from an inconsistent interface between its various sections, and some parts of the site didn’t display correctly in certain browsers. Granted, the navigation in sites like LinkedIn could use some work, too, but its free version is much more feature-rich, and it has the major advantage of a huge user base.

I didn’t find any of the 5050biz site’s tools that compelling. Like a lot of “all-in-one” services, it tries to do many things, and ends up doing none of them very well. We’ve covered many of the types of tools 5050biz provides, a lot of them at little or no charge. Most web workers are already using tools in these categories, so most of us can easily assemble a suite of tools we like. 5050biz.com charges individuals $24.95 per month or $249 per year. Business groups of 5-100 people can join for $49.95 per month or $499 per year. There is a free version of the service, but its features are very limited. There is a 30-day free trial to anyone who wishes to try the service.

To be honest, I don’t know many web workers who would benefit from 5050biz. It’s possible that it might be of interest to some of our less technically-sophisticated clients. Yes, it’s nice to have several tools in one place, but for us, I don’t think that the minimal convenience is worth the cost.

What do you think of 5050biz?

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Almost on a daily basis, I come across opportunities to refer business to someone. Sometimes I’m asked for a resource, like if I know someone who can design business cards. Sometimes a possible connection just pops in my head, like if a person I come in contact with mentions something that reminds me of someone else or of an opportunity that might interest him or her. Other times, though, I miss the opportunity to make a referral simply because no one comes to mind right away. Yet, if I gave it some thought or asked some of my existing contacts, I’m sure I could easily find a resource to fill the need.

As a business owner, maximizing these opportunities is really important for several reasons:

1. It solidifies your place in the customer’s mind as a go-to resource, as someone who can always help solve problems and find solutions,
2. It reinforces relationships you’re building by showing your willingness to help those around you, and
3. It opens the door for reciprocal referrals between you and other service providers to which you regularly send business.

But how do you make sure you’re ready to act the minute an opportunity presents itself (or at least not very long afterward)?

Step 1: Have Tools in Place to Support You

There are tons of CRM and contact management applications available to help you manage an ever-growing database of connections. Highrise is my favorite; I like the simplicity and ease-of-use of 37Signals tools.

Of course, even the best tool won’t help you if you don’t populate it with data, and this can be the most intimidating part of starting to use contact management software. My recommendation is to ease into it. Start from today and add new contacts you come in contact with. To get existing contacts into the program, try adding a few each day until you have everyone set up. There are ways to import contacts from other programs, too. Just be sure to go through all applications and places where you currently keep information about contacts, including your email and social networking accounts, past blog entries (for example, if you interviewed someone for your site or they provided a guest post), and anywhere else you might find a long-lost resource.

The most important thing, though, is to be sure and tag each person in every way you might search for him or her. For example, you might tag a virtual assistant as VA, virtual assistant, web designer, website designer, etc., depending on that particular virtual assistant’s expertise and skill set.

Step 2: Get to Know the People in Your Network

Learn what your network does. Learn what they need. Recently, someone asked if I knew of anyone who did a particular type of web design. At the time, no one came to mind, but then just a week later, I met another person who fitted the bill. I did an email introduction, which will hopefully lead to shared referrals between the two of them.

Pay attention to the little details about people, even things like hobbies and past work experience. If someone is an avid reader, for instance, you might need a book recommendation one day, or maybe you’ll read a great book that you can pass along to that person. As you discover these little tidbits, enter them (again, as tags) in the person’s contact record.

Not only does paying attention to the “little things” help you along the way as a business owner, but it also deepens your relationships and builds your credibility.

Step 3: Keep Your Network Top of Mind.

Always be thinking of the people around you. How can you help them? How can you help not just your clients and followers, but also fellow business owners? Every connection, every referral and every introduction strengthens your network and your business. People will come to trust and depend on you for quality recommendations and resources to help them in their lives and businesses.

Step 4: Show Initiative

Show people you can help them. When someone asks for a web designer and that’s out of your area of expertise, go to your contact management software and search for “web designer” and see who shows up. Nothing will impress a customer more than you going the extra mile for him or her and sending over a list of quality web designers.

By developing a strong and comprehensive list of resources, it becomes even easier to take better care of your customers and clients, as well as all the relationships in your network, and of course, there’s something to be said for good karma and paying it forward.

What tips do you have for maintaining a better “little black book”?

Photo by Flickr user vince42, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

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Zoho CRM, Zoho Mail and Zoho Docs all get new abilities to interact with and use documents from Google Docs, which should be welcome news for anyone wanting to try out the Zoho alternative without either starting from scratch or going through an arduous migration process with their existing library of docs.

Zoho CRM

Attach files directly from your associated Google Docs account to Leads, Accounts, and Cases within Zoho CRM. All you have to do is authenticate using your Google credentials when prompted, and voila, your Docs should appear for you to choose from, in addition to your Zoho Docs and files on your desktop.

Zoho Mail

Adding an attachment when you’re composing an email is as easy as clicking on the little arrow next to the “Attach” link, and selecting Google Docs from the list of sources. If you haven’t done so already, Zoho will send you to Google to authenticate, and then your files will appear in a list with checkboxes next to them so you can select multiple attachments at a time. Zoho also allows you to filter your Docs, so that you can view only text, spreadsheet, or presentation files.

Zoho Docs and Projects

The same interface is used to get documents directly from your Google Docs account to both Zoho Docs and Projects, although you might want to note that with Zoho Docs, uploading directly from Google is supported only in the dashboard view. Trying to do so from the dedicated Docs window only allows you to import from Google Docs files you’ve downloaded to your desktop.

I’ve always been a Google user myself, but upon revisiting Zoho’s offerings for the purposes of this piece, I find myself wondering why. I’m not a Gmail or Google Calendar guy, and short of forthcoming integration with Google Wave, which I’m not crazy about anyway, there’s really no reason I should stick with Google when the competition is clearly much more obliging. For now, I’m going to test the Zoho waters and see how things turn out.

Does Google Docs integration give you a reason to give Zoho a try?

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I haven’t used Bento since it was first released, so a lot is new to me. For the purposes of this review, I won’t be detailing what’s changed so much as what strikes me as most useful about the program from a web working angle, since I imagine many of you will be new to the software as well.

The Basics

By default, Bento looks somewhat unassuming. It lists databases that already exist on your computer, whether you were thinking of them as such or not. That includes your Address Book contacts, your iCal events and tasks and your iPhoto library. It also lists a category called “Projects,” which starts out with dummy content for demo purposes. So, out of the box (pardon the pun), Bento is a convenient, all-in-one storage spot for all of your existing work and play-related Mac data that looks great to boot. But it can be more than that, too.

You’ll notice that in addition to the nicely-designed interface, the entry screens associated with items in your databases provide more customizability than their counterparts in the apps themselves. Address book entries, for example, can be browsed in an Excel-like list view, or in a grid-style view that’s reminiscent of one of the ways of browsing your albums in iTunes. Each entry has all the data that your Address Book card includes, but you can customize them further, adding photos, objects, text fields, or many other things.

Bento for CRM

That comes in handy when you want to use Bento as a CRM application. You can include details like known family members, business partners, and associates, all through your own custom fields. Add a preferred meeting place, best time of day to contact, corporate gifting schedule, or whatever else you may need to keep track off. Attach meeting notes or agenda files to keep a record of your interaction with said customer. It truly can be as powerful as you need it to be.

Bento for PM

As project management software, Bento is equally versatile. You can attach the same sort of custom fields to your projects here, and tie them to your address book and other collections for easy, single location access. If you need to open iCal or another app to check or change something directly, Bento can do that for you, too.

Keeping track of complex, multi-staged projects can be difficult, but Bento has a Smart Collections feature which should allow you to navigate even the most treacherous of prolonged endeavors. Set filters to catch all entries under a specific budget, for example, or by end or start date, or by the PM assigned to the task in question. It’s a great way to make sure nothing falls through the cracks without having to manually comb through every entry.

Bento for Everything

There’s countless uses of Bento for those working from home, so I won’t go into much more detail here, but it does feature handy, pre-made templates for time-tracking, inventory management, expense monitoring and issue tracking. It might take a little more setting up than tools designed specifically for those purposes, since it is made to be a jack-of-all-trades, rather than a master of one, but that also means it could become an end-t0-end solution for all of your business needs if you put in the time and effort to make it so.

Bento 3 is available as a free trial from Filemaker. The full version will run you $49.99 U.S. for a single user license, or $99.99 for a five-user family copy. Those who already own previous versions of Bento (either 1 or 2) are eligible for a $20 rebate. The way I see it, $50 is not a very high asking price for something that could easily do the job of three or four other programs, but try it out first to see if it fits your working style.

What programs do you currently use to manage your work-related databases on Mac or PC? Do you think pleasing aesthetics affect your database-related work one way or another?

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But are there any problems that can arise from conducting business conversations through social media?

There are practical concerns that go along with communicating through a variety of different tools. If you need to refer back to those discussions, whether you’re pulling out a quote that you got on a project or you need to double-check on a deadline, having multiple places to look for that information can make things a little harder. Some telecommuters follow company policies on how to communicate with the rest of the company, but many of us have messages spread out over half a dozen different sites.

It can be useful to communicate with your clients and co-workers through social media tools: after all, if you want to point them to a particular link or introduce them to another member of your network, most sites have built-in tools to do exactly that. The timing and format can also play a key role — after all, the ability to IM with a co-worker can make it much easier to complete your work while still staying out of the office. But with these tools, there aren’t always the reliable records that a freelancer, an employee or another web worker may need to easily access. Just because a client tells you to go ahead on a project over Twitter doesn’t mean that you don’t need a little more documentation to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

There are ways to consolidate your social media communications: most sites send you a notification via email whenever you receive a new message through the network. Some include the text of the message, making it at least a little easier to search for information. Those options typically do not forward the messages you send to your email account, however, so you’ll still be left searching across multiple sites for any messages you sent.

Another alternative is to use some sort of customer relationship management solution to bring all of your messages from different clients and co-workers together in one place. A tool like Gist could be helpful. In order to be efficient in your communications, it’s worth bringing all your messages together in one place if you can, especially if that place allows you to search easily.

It may also be worth making a personal policy about what tools you’ll use: if you send most of your messages via email, your clients and co-workers are more likely to send their responses through the same system. While it’s tempting to use newer, more fashionable communication tools, it’s also worth making sure that you can easily access and search your own communications.

Do you communicate with clients and co-workers through social media? How do you make sure that you can find messages when you need them?

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As Jennifer reports over on GigaOM, after approximately a year of limited closed beta they’ve decided to open up the gates and make the Gist beta public. The folks at Gist had taken a bit of a different take for their beta. A carefully vetted group of participants were given access over an extended period of time, along with direct access to support and incredibly responsive feedback channels. As a result, Gist has improved substantially since our last look and is a highly recommended tool to add to your business arsenal.

In a nutshell, Gist leverages your inbox to determine the importance of people in your network, and then scours the web to gather information about those people. Pulling data from news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, Gist automatically creates a personal dossier using this information.

With the proliferation of news sources and the volume of data now available, it’s impossible to keep up and attempt to do this type of research manually. In a survey prepared by Gist, it was determined that 60 percent of respondents spend less than 10 minutes before an important meeting searching for information abut the participants.

By making research easy and doing the heavy lifting for you, those who have limited time can gain more useful information in the time they do have, while those who like to do extensive research can cut that time considerably.

I’ve always liked the fact that Gist doesn’t require you to abandon the communication tools that you are already using. The full web interface pulls data in from external sources and while that offers the most comprehensive views of your data, useful integration with Outlook and Salesforce (announced today) make Gist data available while you are working in your familiar tools.

The integration of Gist with CRM tools is a terribly exciting development. In the Gist survey, only 15 percent of folks said that they looked to their CRM before a meeting for information on participants. Clearly, the bulk of existing tools are lacking in providing useful, timely and relevant information. The shift to Social CRM shift acknowledges the importance of what is happening on the social web. The movement of CRM to be more social, and to recognize that conversations are happening outside of traditional channels is a trend that we’ve been talking about for a while, and one I’m happy to see catching on.

Tools like Salesforce and Batchbook already recognize the value of the social web and are on the leading edge of allowing varying degrees of social media integration right from within their interfaces. Gist’s Salesforce integration is slick and I look forward to more services offering Gist hooks, as the tool is really the most comprehensive that I’ve seen. Even just a quick glance at recent Twitter updates can be a great conversation starter, and with Gist I can see that information while I’m looking up a phone number.

With a nice thoughtful feature set, useful interface and a developing network of integration with other tools, I find Gist to be a radically useful tool. It occasionally overloads me with data but given the alternative, that’s a problem I’m willing to deal with.

Sign up for your spot in the Gist public beta starting today.

How do you keep up to date with your business contacts?

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Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a crucial component of Bantam Live’s dashboard, and for good reason. Whether you’re building a web site or selling a product, you never do it in a vacuum. Instead, there are a wide variety of people that must be contacted at various points. Bantam Live does far more than just keep a central file of phone numbers and email addresses, though: for every given contact, you can track their social media presence on sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. At a glance, you can see what your contacts have been up to and communicate more effectively with them.

Bantam Live takes other cues from social media, too. The first opportunity to interact that you see is a field for status updates. Those updates show up in a real-time activity stream, along with newly created and completed tasks, notes, events and updates to contacts. You can easily interact with each item that appears in the stream, accepting event invitations, commenting on status updates, and so forth.

The learning curve for using Bantam Live is very shallow, making it a practical system to use for short-lived teams. Bringing together a team to put up a major web site but not really planning on working together after it’s complete? Bantam Live can provide a simple way to bring together your team for a few months. You can import an address book’s worth of contacts, add in your tasks and get to work quickly. Even bringing in new team members should take only a matter of minutes, including training them to use Bantam Live: the interface is simple to use and fairly intuitive.

Bantam Live is currently in beta — although its slick interface can lead you to believe otherwise. During the beta period, even large teams can use it for free, and Bantam Live’s creators encourage you to use it with a team: the system is set up to focus on interactions, leading it to be less useful for solo users. However, there are plans to roll out a version for single users, complete with appropriate features, this fall.

Considering how important this sort of information is to everyone working on your project (as well as how interesting your competitors might find it), the fact that Bantam Live uses SSL security on its application at each level is reassuring.

If you’ve tried Bantam Live, tell us what you think of the service in the comments.

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Even across great distances, we can still schmooze and butter up with the best of ‘em. The key is good CRM, which applies regardless of distance. Here are some examples of how you might go about bridging that geographic gap to form a solid client-contractor bond.

A Little Friendship Goes a Long Way

It’s hard to gauge the degree of formality a client expects from you, especially if you only correspond via email or other digital means. If possible, however, and if you aren’t getting any red flags, you should try to let yourself be a little more human in correspondence with at least one of your client’s staff. This might mean exchanging emails beyond the professional minimum, or connecting on Twitter or Facebook, or whatever you think might result in a more chummy relationship.

It’s a far cry from a wild night out on the town, but it will still go a long way toward making your professional connections more than just an email address you send correspondence and work product to. Make sure you’re not overstepping any boundaries here, though, or you’ll end up doing more damage than good.

Dinner’s On Me, Even If I’m Not There

Just because you aren’t physically able to take clients to dinner doesn’t mean you can’t do that remotely, too. Try to find out your client’s taste when it comes to food and restaurant choices, and then, if possible, get gift certificates to send them on special occasions. While gift certificates may not always be available, especially for independent restaurants, contact the restaurant directly, and I’m sure most of the time you’ll be able to work something out.

The key to success with this kind of gifting is making sure it’s timed appropriately. Just giving a client dinner for no apparent reason could actually backfire and arouse suspicion that something isn’t going well with the project. If you’re familiar enough with your client to know personal details like anniversaries and birthdays, than that’s the time to choose to do something like this, but if not, stick to major project successes.

Quirky Gifts

I’ve actually only been on the receiving end of this, but it worked a treat. In passing, I mentioned on Twitter my dismay that Apple Jacks (the cereal) wasn’t available for purchase in Canada. Within the week, I’d received two boxes of the coveted breakfast item in the mail. A colleague had spotted the mention and quickly rushed to my aid, at his own expense, expecting nothing in return.

This small act of kindness did more to solidify my good feelings toward him than probably a year’s worth of email or Twitter correspondence could have. This kind of opportunity may not just fall in your lap like my Apple Jacks comment, but if you keep your eyes and ears open when dealing with your client, a similar situation might arise in which you’re in a unique position to scratch a quirky itch in a fun way. Best of all, in most cases this kind of relationship-building won’t cost you nearly as much as dinner or other gifts, and it comes with a significantly higher rater of return compared to other methods, in my opinion.

It may not be quite the same as traditional face-to-face business outings, but there’s a lot of relationship-building you can do as a remote worker, too. It helps keep clients happy, yes, but it also helps you put a human face on your contacts and professional associates, which is far more valuable in the long run.

Photo courtesy Rifu Senka on Flickr

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