Applying The 80/20 Rule To Social CRM – Final Chapter

I’m beginning to think that I should convert this into an e-book or something (smile). When we left off on the last post we had successfully loaded all of our email and social media contacts into Gist in order to create a centralized CRM database. If we have not already done so, our next step would be to create a tag or tags for each contact that we have. Doing this from scratch could be challenging based on the number of contact records that we have but, it is necessary. Doing this as new contacts are added should painless.

Adding tags to Gist is pretty self-explanatory. You will, however, want to make sure that your tags are consistent. Let’s say we create tags for “A Client”, “B Client” and “C Client” (these tags are created on the fly and are free-typed). I have good news and I have bad news (smile). In order for you to make a decision regarding how you are going to classify a contact, you will probably want to go to each contacts record and evaluate the information found there in order to make an informed decision. Mind you, you do not have to do this as you can open up your “People” tab in Gist and go down the list and check boxes and then do a bulk tagging for all those who you have selected.

Why then, would I want to look at these records individually?

1. Maybe you would like to get to know these people better? LOL
2. You will be able to properly discern just how important they are as it pertains to your efforts.
3. Gist does give you the ability to add notes to each record and that can become invaluable.
4. Your record review will also allow you, through Gist, to request missing or additional contact information.  While Gist is great at mining most information, there will be occasions where you will want to manually add things like links, addresses, personal information, etc.

Once we have everyone classified, the magic can begin. Now when we open our “People” tab on Gist you will see each of your tags listed up top and you will now be able to click on any tag and see just those people who are associated with this designation. Sweet!

Finally, if it were me, I would want to establish some sort of reminder system that could be as simple as setting a reoccurring task in my calendar. Something like a monthly reminder to contact your “A” clients, bi-monthly for “B”, and quarterly for “C”. You will need to decide what that schedule needs to be and what is appropriate. Through the use of the Gist “note” field, you can keep track of what methods of contact you have used with that particular contact although Gist will automatically register emails etc. However, Gist does only hold these email records for 90 days (they will still remain within your actual email client after that as long as they have not been deleted).

Retaining good clients and developing them into better clients is largely based on showing them some love. Moving second tier contacts to first tier is based on the same principle. I would strongly suggest you view this slide show from one of our NetWorks! Boise members, Tom Gay with The Alternative Board – Boise, on this subject.

Happy hunting and thanks for staying tuned!!

Craig

Related articles by Zemanta

• Do You Have a Gist of Social Media? (shankrila.com)
• Gist’s New Outlook Plugin Delivers More Insights (on10.net)
• Social media and CRM (e1evation.com)

Applying The 80/20 Rule To Social CRM – Part III

Please note:  We are going to suggest a workable solution to the quandary posed by having multiple lists generated from your social media & email accounts. It’s not particularly pretty but it is the best that I can offer based on the applications that I have found and have worked with. If you have a better solution, please share!

When we left off at the end of Part II, we had created lists of our “A”, “B”, and “C” accounts from each of our major social media networks (Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn) as well as from our email accounts. The question we were left with was .. “How can we aggregate these lists into a central database?”. If you have read Part II, and I suggest you do, you will recognize this as being an extremely complex task.

I posed this question on LinkedIn Answers and did receive some replies although that number was less than I had expected. I do believe that this is reflective of the fact that, right now, there is no great answer. At this stage, everything is so fragmented that nobody has yet figured a cost-effective way to pull all of this together (at least that I am aware of). There is only one tool that I have in my arsenal that is at least partially up to the task and that tool is Gist.

Why Gist? While Gist may not be a true CRM, it is very Social. It becomes the basis for our social media and email aggregation. Nothing that I have encountered is as powerful at mining contact data and social media information as is Gist. What this means is …

1. Gist connects to your Twitter and FaceBook accounts and automatically pulls followers and friends into the Gist database and establishes an account record for that individual. It also automatically updates changes to those contact records.
2. It does the same for your Gmail, Google Contacts, Yahoo, and AOL accounts
3. New followers and friends are automatically added to Gist as a new contact record.
4. You will need to do a manual upload of your Outlook and LinkedIn accounts however, we will also discuss a way that you can have Gist do this for you automatically.
5. Once Gist has some information on a contact, it voraciously scours the internet for more. Things like news feeds, blogs, websites, addresses, whatever it can find on that individual.
6. Providing the contact name is consistent, it is incredibly adept at merging data into one contact record and avoiding duplicates. Where you will create duplicates is when you have names like “Craig Jamieson” and “Craig M. Jamieson”. Still, there is a record merge utility that works very well.
7. Your new combined contact record will include a listing of emails, files and links exchanged with this contact in addition to streams from Twitter, FaceBook, and other “news” feeds. You can even reply, retweet, and comment within these streams allowing you to interact with others directly through Gist.
8. Gist will also rank your contacts by their importance to you based on your interaction with that individual and tells you when that last interaction occurred. Hello! Can you say “A”, “B”, “C”?

I think it is critical that I make sure that one key element is clearly understood. I am not entering links etc. into Gist in order to establish my contact’s social media profiles. Gist is doing all of this for me without any need for my interaction. None! That’s powerful.

As was stated, Gist will require you to manually export files from Outlook and LinkedIn and then import them into Gist. When doing so, Gist does a great job of merging that data into existing records if they are present. However, there is a way to circumvent manual imports for both. You will need to install two add-ons for your Outlook: The LinkedIn Toolbar for Outlook and the Gist Plug-In for Outlook (this link is an actual file upload of that utility). You are going to love this!

1. The Gist plug-in, among other things, will connect Gist directly to your Outlook contact records and that will allow Gist to pull those records directly into Gist. Sweet!
2. The LinkedIn Toolbar for Outlook works bi-directionally. It looks at your Outlook contact list and watches for when any of those contacts sign up for a LinkedIn account and, when they do, it notifies you of the new opportunity to connect. It also takes your LinkedIn connections and creates contact records for them in Outlook.
3. Since my LinkedIn connections are now also contact records in Outlook, and since the Gist plug-in for Outlook grabs contact records from Outlook …  Voila! My LinkedIn contacts are also auto-loaded to Gist. Double sweet!
4. If you do not use Outlook, you will need to perform regular manual export/imports from LinkedIn.
5. Technically, providing I have exported files from Twitter and FaceBook, I could import these into Outlook but there is really little or no benefit that I can derive from that primarily as there would be no direct connection to keep these Outlook records updated without regularly doing a re-import with the latest data.
6. For those of you who may be familiar with Xobni for Outlook, which is a great tool, and are thinking that it will do the same thing …..you would be incorrect. We are speaking of apples and oranges in this application. Xobni does not create or maintain records of its own.

In this scenario, Gist now becomes my central CRM database. I can also classify each contact as “A”. “B”, or “C” through the use of tags which eliminates the need to do that at the individual social media network level. Still, I have bad news people. I am afraid that there is going to need to be a Part IV where we can recap this and talk about practical application (smile). In this next post I would also like to bring some tools to your attention that may be of interest dependent upon your specific needs.

Thanks for visiting and please stay tuned!

Craig

Related articles by Zemanta

• Outlook and Gist – This Baby May Have Legs (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• Xobni – Social CRM For Outlook – You May Be Surprised (networksboise.wordpress.com)

Outlook and Gist – This Baby May Have Legs

I have written a number of articles in the past about Gist which is a social media aggregator with some very cool features. In fact, from an information gathering standpoint, it compiles probably the most complete dossier on any of your contacts that I have yet encountered. This would include your email correspondence, social networks, news feeds, the works. However, while Gist is very good about collecting information, as a standalone product it is not so good at creating it. By that I mean, I’m not going to use it to generate emails. I don’t know that you cannot do that from within Gist but, looking at it, I don’t think that you would want to anyway. To me, email has to be an integral piece of any product that is going to pass muster as a Social CRM. In my mind, you flat cannot get away from that critical need.

I have also integrated Gist with SalesForce.com and it does make that well-recognized CRM a  much more social media friendly product. Unfortunately, I don’t much care for SalesForce’s email capabilities either, at least when you try to combine it with Gmail. This brings us to Outlook. As much as it pains me to say this, from the standpoint of a pure email client and contact manager (note that I did not say CRM), Outlook is pretty tough to beat and it may be getting tougher.

I have been using Outlook for the past several years as my email for a company that I am winding down my association with. As such, I am more inclined these days to use it experimentally. I have also had it loaded with Outlook’s Business Contact Manager add-on which supposedly turns it into a CRM. Personally, I would dispute that claim. About a year ago I did discover Xobni for Outlook and this is a superior add-on that originally just made Outlook better and now it not only makes it better, it has also added social network capabilities. Xobni has also issued a beta invite for their BlackBerry app. While I have both a BlackBerry and an invitation, I am not ready to go there quite yet. I also recently looked at the LinkedIn add-on for Outlook using Microsoft’s new “Social Connector”. Not ready for prime time and, at least for now, it connects with LinkedIn only. On top of that, it slowed down my performance fairly dramatically so that app only lasted about 3 days.

I became aware that Gist had a plug-in for Outlook some months back but decided against installing it as it apparently looks at Outlook’s “Contacts” folder vs. it’s “Business Contact’s” folder. Using Business Contact Manager (BCM), that created a problem. So yesterday. I exported all of my Business Contacts out of BCM as a .csv file and then imported them back into the Outlook “contacts” folder. I was then able to uninstall BCM completely and start fresh. Loading the Outlook plug-in from Gist was a painless affair, actually it is very well done, and it then went right to work cataloging my contacts and it did this very quickly while working entirely in the background.

Before we get into the details, if you have been to this site before you will know that I make no claims in regard to being the expert on anything. Rather, I have a robust curiosity of all things networking related. I also have the attention span of a 3-year-old, rarely find something that maintains my fascination for an extended period of time, and I have yet to find anything (at least in this field … CRM’s) that I really and truly love. Rather, I like to bring worthy products to your attention and then let you figure them out (smile).

Having installed Gist, I took a look at my screen and found that I now had two sidebars that were right next to each other, Xobni and Gist. They did not seem to conflict but the visual was killing me. So, in order to give Gist the best look, I uninstalled Xobni. During that process I completed a survey about what I thought of the product and why I mas deleting it. One of the last questions it asked was “Are you aware that you can use Xobni without the sidebar?”. Roh? I have since put it back on and will keep it in reserve (smile).

There is a lot to like about Gist and you know what? I think that I like this Outlook interface even better than going to the actual Gist site. The reason is probably pretty simple. Gist automatically identifies the contact I am working with in Outlook and the pulls up that contact profile only. What follows are some of the things that I have instantly found to be attractive (some of these may be available on Outlook 2007 only which is what I have):

• Not only do Gist profiles pop up when I am looking at my inbox, they all pop up when looking at my contact records.
• When I am writing an email, Gist recognizes who that is going to and conveniently pops up that person’s profile.
• If there are multiple people mentioned in the “to” or “from” fields it pops them all up.
• The profile is very complete including a Google map if an address is detected.
• It seemed to work well in displaying someone’s Twitter stream and it does tell me if we are connected on Twitter, FaceBook, or LinkedIn.
• It appears to display email conversations from both my Gmail and Outlook accounts and that is pretty sweet in itself.

What I have either not figured out or find lacking:

• It will show me that we are connected on Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn but unless it has also identified a link, it will not allow me to go to those sites. And, it does not always find a link. How can it know that we are connected yet not know the link? Hmmm.
• The Twitter stream works well but I have yet to see anything in anybody’s FaceBook stream. Hmmm.
• There is no stream for LinkedIn updates.
• You can not retweet or reply on items in their Twitter stream while you can do this with Xobni.

Some final thoughts… I have been using Gist for sometime now and I do want to comment on the people behind the product itself. They have proven themselves to be consistently outstanding in the following areas:

1. Do you have a  customer service question or a problem? They will be right on it and they do follow through.
2. They are very good at keeping their customer base informed of new enhancements and new uses for their product.
3. They are very active on Twitter, monitor their brand closely, and seek to engage directly with folks who have a demonstrated interest in their application.

The bottom line is that the folks at Gist …. get it. The other bottom line is that they have been pretty upfront that they will be looking to monetize this service. I wonder how, when, and how much that will entail?

That will do it for today. Thanks for visiting!

Craig

Related articles by Zemanta

• Gist’s New Outlook Plugin Delivers More Insights (on10.net)
• Microsoft Outlook Is Starting To Look Like A Poor Man’s Xobni (techcrunch.com)
• Xobni – Social Media Improves Your Outlook (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• Xobni – Social CRM For Outlook – You May Be Surprised (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• A Round-Up of the Latest Outlook Add-ons (on10.net)

Xobni – Social CRM For Outlook – You May Be Surprised

I’ve been pretty vocal about my search for the “holy grail” of CRM‘s. There are a number of solutions out there and all are doing some pretty nice things in the way of integrating social media into a CRM platform but, nobody that I am aware of, at least not at an investment level that is affordable for the little guy, has come out with a package that I feel has yet reached that pinnacle of achievement. Let’s talk briefly about a few….

Salesforce.com is likely the defacto leader in this application field. And, they have introduced Twitter to their product but in what I would consider to be a limited fashion. It looks, feels, and acts like an add-on. What it is well designed for is scanning and identifying sales and service opportunities based on product mentions found within the Twitterverse stream. Furthermore, it can automatically create contacts from those discoveries. Pretty cool. FaceBook or LinkedIn integration? Not yet that I am aware of.

Gist is a way cool product that acts like a social media aggregator and it does gather a ton of information on every contact it encounters. Gist also boasts very tight integration with both Twitter and email. No LinkedIn or FaceBook integration yet as it pertains to updates. I know this will be coming soon particularly since LinkedIn recently opened up its API to developers and so you are now seeing those updates via clients like TweetDeck and Hootsuite. Where Gist is weak today, in my opinion, is in the creation of emails and tweets. It is great at gathering them and allowing you to go back to the original source, but not generating them.

Salesforce and Gist Integration: This is something that is very interesting and very nicely done. Put the two of them together and they do form a very very nice Social CRM with Gist doing the gathering and Salesforce doing the creating of things like standard email. I am personally convinced that these two products, and that may mean having them work in conjunction, may be the best solution in the near future for a SAAS solution to Social CRM. Because of this, I am going to be devoting a great deal of time and effort toward learning each better.

Threadsy is another very cool product and if I could splice Threadsy and Gist together, I would do it in a heartbeat. Up to three email accounts, Twitter, and FaceBook and a gorgeous interface to manage all three. No LinkedIn integration yet but from the standpoint of creating and monitoring traffic from these sites and email, it’s a thing of beauty. Honestly, I would kill to see them take this to the Social CRM level and I don’t feel that it would be that difficult to do. Listen to “Mr. Armchair Code Cutter” (smile).

This brings us to Xobni. Get ready but Xobni may be the one of the closest and simplest solutions out there and if you use Outlook, you can have it today and you can have it for free. Please take a look at the image below ….

So, what does Outlook do? A pretty fine job with email. Keeps your contact and calendar. Some people consider it to be a CRM and maybe it is. Combine it with Business Contact Manager and you do have a CRM. A “piss poor” one, mind you, but a CRM nonetheless (smile). Add Xobni and you get the column to the right that gives you at least some information about your contact in terms of whether or not they are even on LinkedIn, their Twitter stream that you can at least reply and retweet, and if they are on FaceBook. Xobni also gathers information on their network and also links you have shared as well as messages associated with this contact. Worth a look? I think so. This package gets even better with the addition of the LinkedIn Toolbar for Outlook. If you do a search within this blog site, you will find several articles mentioning this tool. Suffice to say that it brings much of the power of LinkedIn directly into Outlook and actually quite a bit more.

Well, there you have it. Something more to think about. I also wanted to add that I believe it was today that Zemanta introduced the latest version of their tool for blogging and Gmail. I am using it now as I type. Sweet. Very sweet.

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

Related articles by Zemanta

• Threadsy Does A Very Nice Job Of Sewing Social Media Together (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• Salesforce and Gist – CRM Gets Social (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• Social Media CRM – Gist Inside Salesforce (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• LinkedIn is opening up for Business (thenextweb.com)
• Xobni – Social Media Improves Your Outlook (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• Social CRM: is about the intention & methods and not only the tools (socialmediatoday.com)
• Social Media Is Changing The Rules For CRM (networksboise.wordpress.com)

Social Media CRM – Gist Inside Salesforce

savethetigerfund.org

I’ve been a fairly frequent writer about CRM packages and my expectations regarding seeing them integrated closely with Social Media in the not too distant future. Well, over the past couple of weeks, this expectation has been rapidly inching closer to reality. Of course, the holy grail continues to be total integration that will include not only gathering and sharing data from a variety of sources but will also have the ability to create new data from within that CRM vehicle. Posting updates to Twitter, for example. I don’t think that we are quite there yet but, here is a recent development that is definitely worthy of your attention.

Salesforce.com and Gist: Recently, Salesforce came out with Twitter integration into their basic package. Sweet. A couple of months ago Gist made a big splash with its social media aggregation capabilities and this package is very powerful. Please check this blog for recent posts regarding these introductions. Now, I knew that Gist had the ability to gather data from several sources including: email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and news feeds. I also knew that it could gather your contact information from Salesforce. What I did not realize was that Gist could not only gather this data, it could at the same time reside completely inside of Salesforce itself. Hmmm. Yum (smile). This link explains the process.

Here is what you will end up with (smile):

Exporting data from Salesforce, importing it to Gist, and then integrating Gist into Salesforce itself is a little bit tricky so here are some tips:

Export from Salesforce:

1. In order to export from Salesforce to a .csv file you will need to download the “data loader” app from Salesforce and you can find that on their site.
2. In order to log in to Salesforce and use that app you are going to need both your Salesforce password and your Salesforce security token. Well, I never wrote my security token down if I ever even saw it. Go to your setup screen on Salesforce and tell it to reset your security token and you will then receive an email with your new token.
3. When you log in to the data loader the format is “passwordxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” with “x’s” being your security token and with no space between your password and that token.
4. You will then be presented with a series of options. The first selection you will be making is what file you want to export. The natural selection for use with Gist is “contacts”.
5. Be sure to select all of the pertinent contact info you wish to export including name, phone, email, etc. Hell, you can probably just select “all” to be safe (smile).
6. Previously, you should have selected a destination for the file to be saved that you can find after it all is done …. for me that would be my desktop.

Import to Gist:

1. Pretty cut and dry. Go to accounts on your Gist page and select Salesforce.
2. You are asked to identify the location of the file to upload but it is also going to ask you for a “Salesforce instance” url. What in the hell is that (smile)? I’m still not sure but it won’t work without it. The example shows “na6″. By pure dumb luck I looked at the url on the address bar when I was logged into my Salesforce account and saw “nax”. So, I went with that and it went with me (smile).
3. FYI, Gist is very good about not creating duplicate accounts but rather merging them. Putting this into perspective, I imported data into Gist from a number of sources with duplicate information and had no issues with duplicate records.

Integrate Gist into Salesforce:

1. There are a fair amount of steps involved but do not be intimidated. I’m pretty tech stupid and if I could make it work, there is no question that but that you can.
2. I did have one huge problem and have brought this to Gist’s attention. The link in the support forum that tells you to copy and paste the code into Salesforce’s “s control” that you will create for Gist, was incorrect and/or damaged. There is also a .txt file at the bottom of the forum page (actually there are two) and you want the one for “contacts”. Open that file and copy that code. It works. Update: this link has been since corrected by Gist.

That will do it for me for now. Watch this weekend for a post about Outlook with Xobni now featuring Twitter integration. Thanks for visiting! By the way, this post should be sent immediately and automatically to Twitter using WordPress.com’s new “Publicize” app. We will see. We will see (smile)

Craig

Related articles by Zemanta

• Salesforce and Gist – CRM Gets Social (networksboise.wordpress.com)
• Gist beats Xobni at tackling email, Twitter overload (billbennett.co.nz)
• Personal Relationship Manager Gist Launches to Public (readwriteweb.com)
• Salesforce for Twitter Launches (mashable.com)