Like most other “social CRM” products, for it to work you’ll need to grant it access to the various accounts that you’d like it to pull your contact data from. Connected doesn’t ask you for your usernames and passwords, you’re just asked to authorize access and can revoke it any time, and also has a strongly-worded privacy policy, but that could still be a concern for some.

Once you’ve granted access, it will likely take some time for the initial sync to take place and for the contacts to be processed. Once that initial sync has been processed, any subsequent changes will be updated in Connected seamlessly.

On the account homepage, you have two main tabs: “Contacts” and “Companies.” “Contacts” is an alphabetical listing of all of your contacts. Each entry shows the contact’s name and profile photo (if available), together with their company, job title, the source of the contact and when you last conversed with them. Clicking on a contact brings up a more detailed view, including recent updates (if available), mutual contacts and “Notes” and “How we met” fields. The “Companies” tab allows you to filter contacts by company. It’s a nicely-designed interface that’s easy to use.

There’s a Gmail sidebar to access Connected contacts from with Gmail, while there’s also a mobile-optimized version of the site to use on smartphones. Connected can also send you a daily email with useful info to help you to stay connected to your network, and such as updates from you contacts, job changes and birthday reminders.

With Etacts being shut down, Connected’s main competitor is probably Gist, a social CRM startup that’s been in beta for some time (see our past coverage of Gist here). Connected is nicely designed and has a cleaner interface than Gist, so it will probably be easier to get to grips with. However, after a 14-day free trial period, Connected is pretty pricey for an online address book at $9.99 per month, while Gist is currently free. And although Gist will likely introduce a paid premium offering when the product moves out of beta, it hasn’t been announced yet. Additionally, Gist can connect to Lotus and Outlook email accounts, while Connected can only connect to Gmail accounts. I’d recommend Gist over Connected, even though the latter is a nicely designed app.

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• Gist is an online service that “connects your inbox to the web,” automatically building a profile for each of your contacts from the data that’s available in your inbox and via their social networking profiles. Like Etacts, it will also remind users if they haven’t been in touch with an important contact for a while. It’s available as a Chrome extension, Firefox add-on, and also as iPhone and Android apps, and can work with Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The service is currently free. See Scott’s review of Gist here.
• Rapportive uses social data (pulled from the controversial Rapleaf service) to provide additional information about your contacts. It replaces the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc) and works via a Firefox add-on or Chrome extension. As the information is taken from the Rapleaf database, the results are sometimes hit-and-miss, depending on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie a particular contact’s email address to various social media accounts. Rapportive is free. See my review of Rapportive here.
• Plaxo is an online address book that can store contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Like Etacts, it’s “socially aware,” tracking social feeds from Twitter and Facebook to keep users up-to-date on their contacts. The basic Plaxo service is free; Plaxo Premium adds sync with Outlook Contacts, Google Contacts and Windows Mobile and some additional features and costs $36.95 per year. See Judi’s review of Plaxo v.3 here.
• MailBrowser. Webyog’s MailBrowser is another CRM app that works with Gmail to provide additional data about your contacts, and can automatically keep contact information up-to-date by pulling data from emails. However, it doesn’t provide easy access to social network profiles or updates. Unlike some of the other services here, MailBrowser is a locally installed app, so it may be a better choice for users with privacy concerns. MailBrowser is free, and is available as an IE plugin, Firefox add-on and Chrome extension. See my review of MailBrowser here.
• Xobni is a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that provides a sidebar offering additional information about your contacts culled from their social network profiles and emails. It can automatically extract information like phone numbers from email messages, and also provides a threaded conversation view and easier ways to find attachments. The basic Xobni product is free, while Xobni Plus costs $30 and adds advanced search features, auto suggest, support for more than one PST file and more. See Scott’s hands-on review of Xobni here.

What are your favorite social CRM tools?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user GretheB

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Today, the company announced an extension for Firefox that brings its intelligent data about your contacts to your Gmail account, , and it plans to roll out an extension for Chrome very soon. Gist already has a web app, iPhone app, Android app, a plug-in for Outlook and Lotus Notes and a gadget for Google Apps.

With Gist for Firefox, you get a pervasive widget in Gmail that brings up information about all the individuals mentioned in the “To:” or “Cc:” fields of an opened email. You can choose to view their various social media feeds, their profile, stats that include data on your level of interactions with that person, and notes that you can make about the person at any time.

Gist is constantly measuring the importance of the people you’re interacting with at any given time, based on the frequency of emails between you, mentions in your calendar, and how else you are connected with them such as on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or their listings in your CRM program such as Salesforce or SugarCRM.

Let’s face it: networking is hard. Remembering details about the many people with whom you network is even harder. Having information about the people with whom you are interacting for business is invaluable. Gist is like having a personal assistant whispering key information about someone as they are walking up to you or call you or email — just in case you’ve forgotten a few details. It is also like having that same personal assistant inform you of any important news about that person, or provide you with details of something interesting they said in the social mediasphere, so you can dash off a quick note to them. With Gist, wherever you go, or wherever you are, you can tap into the professional and social profiles of people with whom you want to network.

I think we’re going to see several other savvy companies slowly taking over their market sector by creating a ubiquity of functionality like Gist. See my recent piece on WatchDox’s iPhone app as another example. These companies realize we don’t want to be locked into one platform for accessing useful tools; they understand the value of being pervasive and always at our fingertips.

To take advantage of Gist for Firefox, you must first sign up for a free Gist account then download the Firefox browser extension. You can also read my previous article on the company Gist Adds Public Business Profiles for more about Gist features.

How do you keep up with your contacts?

image by stock xchng user salingpusa

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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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It joins the existing iPhone app in providing on-the-go access to information about your professional network. It narrows down the potentially confusing amount of data it could display about your contacts by concentrating on providing information based on your upcoming meetings or your contacts’ recent status updates.

Here’s a (slightly out-of-focus) short demo video showing the app in action:

You can download the Android app for free from the Android Market.

Let us know what you think of the new Gist Android app in the comments.

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The new Gist Gadget is contextual, which means that when you open an email in Gmail, it searches the web for information about anyone in the “From:” and “CC:” fields of that email in order to provide context about them. It then automatically generates a profile of them at the bottom of the page, containing social networking details, contact information, company profile, news and more. Here’s a video showing it in action:

Contextual gadgets, which intelligently display relevant information from other systems as you read your email, have been available in Gmail for some time (there are gadgets for YouTube, Google Docs and Picasa, for example) but up until recently, they’ve only been available for Google products. That’s changing, as Google has opened up contextual gadgets to third-party developers. In addition to Gist, there are already gadgets available for many useful services, including AwayFind, Xobni, Manymoon and Rapportive, among others.

You can get the Gist gadget from the Google Apps marketplace (it’s free, but you’ll need to be a domain administrator in order to install it).

Let us know what you think of the Gist Gadget in the comments.

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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.

Social identity management is a crowded market but Gist is entering it with a strong initial offering. Its public profiles are customizable and can contain a virtually unlimited amount of contact information and links to the various places that one exists on the social web, all accessible via a customized URL (here’s mine).

Each item from your personal record can be made visible or kept private in your public profile on an individual basis, while the news that Gist gathers can be filtered or limited based on keywords or other criteria to better present what’s displayed.

The news-gathering feature is what makes the Gist profile so compelling. Using the same technology that populates the contacts within your Gist account, your public profile can automatically show the most relevant information about you, your company and your presence on the web.

If you’re a Gist user, the public profiles of others can be easily integrated into your account as a means to add new contacts or to pull information into an existing contact.

I’d eventually like to see the data I present with a Gist profile be made available to other services via an API — this is the feature that I think makes DandyID the most compelling choice for identity management. However, the presentation is nice and I really like the privacy options for controlling just what information gets displayed. If you’re using the Internet as a promotional tool, and want to be found, setting up a complete Gist profile just makes sense.

Sign up for your Gist account, which is free during the public beta.

How do you control your social identity?

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But why not buy an iPhone, or a Palm Pre, which I’d had my eye on for several months? The Pre seems to be a good phone, but it doesn’t yet have the apps that the iPhone does. And the monthly fees for Pre service are considerably higher than what I’m paying now. The iPhone’s monthly fees are even higher, and many folks I’ve talked to don’t find it to be a very good phone.

So, keeping my current phone and buying an iPod touch seemed like a good compromise. I can get good Wi-Fi coverage in most areas where I live, so I’ll be able to go online, even without the phone function.

Many of my WWD colleagues already have iPhones. Aliza has recently written about good apps for web workers. Dawn’s shared her favorites, too. But with the holidays coming up, here are some of my ideas for apps to put on that brand-new iPhone or iPod touch:

Communication

• eBuddy. A multi-service instant message client for MSN/Windows Live, AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, Facebook Chat and MySpace Chat. Supports multiple accounts on the same service. Versions for web, Android and other platforms also available. Free.
• Facebook. A well-designed way for Facebook users to keep up with their friends while on the road. The app has had its issues, but they are apparently fixed now. Free.
• Gist. Scott and I have both found Gist useful, and the Gist iPhone app does a pretty good job of presenting a lot of information in a small space. Free.
• LinkedIn. This app keeps LinkedIn users, er, “linked in” from their iPhones and iPod touches. The latest upgrade adds some nice features, including an inbox for LinkedIn messages. Free.
• Nimbuzz. You can use this app to make inexpensive international calls over Wi-Fi. The app also includes a chat function, but it’s pretty rudimentary compared to eBuddy. Free app; rates for calls vary.
• RingCentral. If you’re a RingCentral user, you can use this app to manage your phone messages and more. Free for RingCentral users.
• Tweetie. There are lots of Twitter apps, but so far, I like Tweetie the best. It has a clean interface, and supports multiple Twitter accounts. Thanks for the tip, Darrell! $2.99.
• Waveboard. Mobile access to Google Wave. Will hopes for better access soon; I imagine that this app will become more sophisticated as Wave does. $0.99.

File and Idea Management

• Dropbox. This app is another reason to love Dropbox, which many of us at WWD do. As one would expect from Dropbox, it just works. Free.
• Evernote. My colleagues at WWD like Evernote, too, and I’ve finally seen the light. It’s a great replacement for PhatNotes, which I used to use with various Palm products. (The Palm versions are apparently no longer available.) Free.

News

• Reeder. A very nice and elegant RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. $0.99.

Just about every news source also has its own iPhone/iPod touch app these days. So far, I’ve been impressed with the ones from NPR and from some news outlets that have used the PodCurry platform.

Password Management

• 1Password. Manage and sync passwords. I’ve been playing with the brand-new version 3, and it’s good enough that I’ve moved from SplashID after many years. Use Dropbox with 1Password to make your password data available on multiple machines. $7.99.
• LastPass. Manage and sync passwords across multiple machines. The Firefox add-on for this service was included in WWD’s Add-Ons Collection. Apps for iPhones and other mobile devices available with premium membership, $12/year.

I’ve barely begun finding fun stuff, but I think I’m off to a good start with the Google Earth app, and TriPeaks Lite. I’m sure that I’ll find more, but I really need to get back to work now. Happy holidays!

What iPhone or iPod touch apps would you recommend for new users?

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The other new feature that most people might have missed in a previous update (I know I did) is the ability to access each contact’s Twitter account information. This was also a very popular request from Xobni’s userbase who’ve previously been able to access their contacts’ Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Adding Twitter and SalesForce connectivity to your address book makes a great deal of sense.

Here’s an example of what the Xobni panel displays next to your email message. Not only will you see the usual information such as phone numbers, email addresses and threaded email conversations, but now you can actually view that contact’s Twitter stream (once you connect the right Twitter account, based on the email address used). Notice how you can actually send a tweet right from Xobni as well as unfollow the contact and view their Twitter profile for even more information.

Personally, I love this hot trend of infusing intelligence into our otherwise under-utilized address books. Services such as Xobni, Gist and the one that started it all, Plaxo, are providing tremendous value by allowing us to get more from our contacts. It’s baffling to me that Google has not done much with contacts in Gmail. Things will become even more interesting when (not if) Google finally adds social networking power to its address book.

Do you use Xobni?

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By its very nature, Gist compiles a sometimes overwhelming amount of information about your contacts so I was a bit skeptical about it being possible to reduce it down for the mobile interface. Gist combats this by really focusing on your most important people: those who you are meeting with next.

The Initial views on the app work on the assumption that you are either on your way to your meeting or taking a few minutes prior to prepare. Gist displays the meeting attendees and provides quick links to zip off an update email or pull up a map. It also provides easy access to the dossiers of your meeting attendees so you can grab some quick info prior to your event.

Beyond that, you do have the same views to your data as on the web app, your dashboard, events, people and companies — all distilled into consumable pieces that fit into the time that you have.

The Gist iPhone app is being released for no charge as part of the open beta program and is available through the Apple iTunes App Store. UPDATE: According to Robert Pease, VP Marketing, Gist, the App will now be launched next week.

How will mobile access to your Gist data help you keep in tune with your contacts?

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