Relationship-Tech Roundup

Posted on June 17th, 2011 by Sara Grace

The last few weeks I’ve tried out a number of new(ish) apps in the social media/contact management space.

Klout.com: free online service provides a useful read on your influence via social media, and helps match products to their influencers to spread the word. My score is 47 out of 100, not great (yet!) – but for some reason their system has identified me as an expert in “development” and “Drupal.” Huh? Craig Leinoff, who built RMA on Drupal, would definitely not agree.  In any case, seems like a great tool to track your own growth and activity level in social media.

Branchout.com: This launched last year, but this week it popped up in quite a few FB friends’ status updates. It's the first major play to meld in LinkedIn-style professional networking to FB where you can better leverage your personal network AND the more dynamic FB environment. At the moment I still feel ambivalent about making FB more than what it is for me today: A place to talk about all the stuff that interests me that isn’t my work. But we’ll see how the rest of the world reacts. I’m willing to be open-minded.

Connectedhq.com: $10/month direct competitor to Gist, which is still free. Connected (which launches you with a free 2-week trial) and Gist are equally easy to set up. Gist’s dashboard overwhelms me, and I don’t necessarily want to aggregate my FB feeds with my Twitter feeds. What’s most important to me is to identify and retrieve all the feeds of an individual contact, along with our history of exchanges. Gist does that with its email plugins; Connected does it on its web site (which has a mobile optimized version) and with a gmail sidebar. Connected’s edge seems to be a whole bunch of cool-seeming apps – for example, the Interaction Summary “tracks your weekly interactions in terms of total contacts added, emailed, called, and met.” Good way to get a snapshot of whether you’re keeping up with your networking efforts. So at the moment, Connected seems to have a slight lead over Gist on functionality – but am I ready to pay $10/month for it? Not yet.

Job Seekers: Finally, I haven’t tried it, but LinkedIn just launched a Job Seeker premium service. [UPDATE: Apparently the service has been around for a while - but I was only just recently targeted with advertising for it.] The major benefit over their standard paid service comes when you apply to a job through LinkedIn - you jump to the top of the list of applicants (although with all the other paid Job Seekers!). Also you get a “Job Seeker” badge on your profile – but is that really a good thing?

If you’ve got opinions on or have tried any of these services, please weigh in! Since no one person has time to explore every service's last bell and whistle, we really need crowd wisdom to sort it out.

Send a trackback!
18 comments // In Relationship Mapping, Social Media, Technology
Bookmark and Share
« Previous Post Next Post »

18 Responses so far | Have Your Say!

  1. Gist seems to be exactly what I was looking for. This morning I wrote down all the possible ways to organize my network and I was a bit overwhelmed, because there were so many separate sources (Facebook, Outlook, cell phone, excel sheets,...). Gist sounds like a solution to this chaos. ;-)

    Thanks for the ideas!

  2. Sara Grace says:
    June 17, 2011 at 9:34 am
    Reply

    You're welcome! Gist and Connected are both in the business of the solving exactly that problem - we all need it!

  3. Mark Frietch says:
    June 17, 2011 at 10:08 am
    Reply

    In regards to the Linkedin Job Seeker service. As a recruiter and talent acquisition consultant, I would recommend using the paid or free service. Putting a strong networking plan in place (and executing it)are more important. I would invest in that type of program like the RMA.

    • Sara Grace says:
      June 17, 2011 at 11:45 am
      Reply

      If I were on a job search, I would definitely upgrade to the regular paid version of the product. Not sure about the Job Seeker version, however ... do you have an opinion on that?

  4. Sara,
    Thanks for the post. I'm always noodling over these kinds of tools and their place in relationship management online. While I like Gist as a one stop aggregation of your contact and social platform data it lacks connectivity to any kind of CRM or sharing features. Also, keep in mind that any updates or changes to Linkedin need to be manually exported out of Linkedin and then re-uploaded to Gist. If Gist is a tool that suits you then you can apply Keith's 0-5 Intimacy rating scale to the 0-100 sliders on Gist.

    Should you be a gmail user or a company that has made to move to Google Apps, than you will finda new tool called Rapportiveimpressive. All social data and one click connect on most platforms right in the margin of your email.

    Klout has an interesting model. I just don't think their mysterious algorithm gets me. :) I talk to many in the social media and social business space and it's a house divided regarding Klout and the value of it's score and related reports. It's fun to look at though.

    We're an Acquia/Drupal partner, Sara. hopefully we can call you with questions. :)

    Questions I ask when considering if software and online tools become part of our "suite" are:

    1. How easily and well does it integrate with the rest of what we're using? (another reason I love Google as a platform and why we don't use Outlook)
    2. Is it fully mobile? Got an App for that?
    3. Is it easy to learn and use?
    4. Does it save time and make it easier to communicate and connect or is it just fun to play around with (awesome if it's both!)?
    5. Who is the provider and what are they doing with my data once I give them access to all of my data (security)?

  5. I have been messing around with Gist, but it has not completely stole my attention. If someone could figure out how to integrate all the social networks together and my gmail while making it fun and easy, I think it would be the only platform I would use.

    • Sara Grace says:
      June 17, 2011 at 11:41 am
      Reply

      Ian, where's Gist falling short for you? I'd like to know because I feel like I haven't found the perfect way to use it yet - I need to "hack" it more than I have so far. I feel like it's a user failure not a product failure. :)

  6. Sara Grace says:
    June 17, 2011 at 11:36 am
    Reply

    Hi Jeff, long time no talk! - I have to check out that feature on Gist - I've never really understood how the sliders work. I was really surprised that Gist doesn't have the autoconnect with LinkedIn - I wonder why that is? Connected does.

    We use Acquia too, btw. And I wish we were using Google rather than Microsoft exchange....

    Thanks for the useful list!

  7. Have you tried http://www.fellowup.com/ ?
    It seems to be a Gist competitor though it is only available on a standalone basis right now (no gmail plugin).

    It merges gmail, FB and Linked-In. It's still in beta. I like it but they still have a lot to work out.

  8. Now everyone is trying to get into social media and the new products coming out are really not the new. How many people have really got a job through Linkedin? How many new friends have you made through Facebook? Considering the time we spent on such websites, I don't think it is worth at the end. It was recession and Linkedin and Facebook were new products and people got the impression that these websites may help them get a job etc but the problem was much bigger. I don't think we will need Facebook/ Linkedin friends in some time from now; we will need real friends!

    • Danish- I have to disagree. Your Facebook and LinkedIn friends *should* be your new friends, and a reflection of your personal network. It's not about making new friends, but more about leveraging the value of the relationships you already have. Social networks just help us keep track of and manage them better. If you're trying to get a new job, who better to help you than past coworkers or friends of friends?

  9. Hey everyone,

    I'm working with the team at flup.me to develop a new product that aims to take the hassle out of personal networking. Like you guys I'd tried lots of tools like Gist, Bump, QR codes, LinkedIn etc.. to acquire and manage contacts but they all seemed to miss something. As a new business guy I knew the value of building 'genuine' relationships rather than just treating people as sales targets. I couldn't find anything to make my life simple and help me grow and nurture my network the way I wanted. (You can read more about my problem here... http://flup.me/blog/post150611 )

    This year we started to work on flup as a way to easily share with, and acquire the contact details of, people you meet whilst you're out networking. The system makes it easy to decide exactly which elements of your personal and/or business details that you're happy to share. It also reminds you to follow-up with people in your network and helps build real relationships rather than just a contact database. It has neat features such as people tagging to easily sort and group your network and uncover shared interests. We're also integrating with Google apps so your existing contacts and calendar are kept up to date.

    Keith's books have given us some great pieces of inspiration! We're currently in beta and refining flup so that's it's a really valuable, simple and integrated personal networking tool. We'd absolutely love to get your feedback as we bring this to market. If you're interested just visit http://flup.me to get an invite.

    All the best and keep up the awesome work on the blog :)
    Michael

  10. Linkedin Job Seeker premium accounts are not new. I've had mine since August 2010. I'm not sure I'm getting a good ROI.

    I find it curious that you said Klout.com seems like a good tool right after you explained how it was inaccurate.

    • I said that, based on my first-timer results, it may not be a good tool for determining your expertise, and therefore potentially inaccurate at evaluating *real* influence, compared to others. But as a bar to show how your own activity is going up or down, it's useful. Does that make sense?

  11. Just this week, Mashable reported on Monster's launch of BeKnown, with a few additional features yet similar to Branchout, in that they both leverage Facebook infrastructure. I haven't used these, but supposedly your BeKnown network is managed separately from your Facebook friends, but one thing to know is that BeKnown apparently expects lots of permissions upfront and posts a "just installed" message to your wall.

  12. Klout and Connectedhq are solid resources for relationship management. I do agree with the comment above regarding the use of LinkedIn for more than just commenting and 'liking' but rather building meaningful relationships. Here we round up a list of top web resources for job search: http://www.moomkin.com/best-websites-for-job-search/

  13. Leona Wilson says:
    July 19, 2011 at 7:11 am
    Reply

    I have been using LinkedIn Job Seeker for the past 2 months. I have now cancelled it as I am finding that most people viewing my profile are opting to do so anonymously. Job Seeker also allows for Inmail and to be bumped up the list when applying but my primary interest was in who was viewing my profile. LinkedIn is about networking so I don't quite understand why someone would feel the need to protect their privacy while viewing my information.

Leave a Reply