What’s Next Now

One of my greatest frustrations today is that I can see most of the pieces that will become part of our business communication future;  I just can’t quite access them conveniently yet.  Knowing what I know makes me very impatient. But I’m also very hopeful, especially when I have the opportunity to see more clearly down the road a bit. There’s a good chance I’m about to be given such an opportunity. I’m waiting patiently to be sent my invitation to become a beta tester for Gist, a web application that looks very promising.

Before I get into that, and before you view the video below, I want to explain a few things about what I currently do to manage business relationships and stay informed about what is happening with my friends, prospects, and clients:

1.)  I have a Google Alert set up for each of my most important key contacts. Every day I get a summary e-mail for each alert that has shown activity that details what has been said or written in the news, blogs and social media sites. It’s helpful information, but it is a very inelegant solution. Also, it isn’t practical to have alerts set up for all of the 500+ people in my Outlook address books.

2.) On LinkedIn, I have several key word searches set up to scan for activity within the groups I follow and participate in.  It is a quick way for me to identify trends and learn new stuff without a lot of effort beyond setting it all up.

3.) I use Xobni,  my favorite Outlook add-in, to check all of my incoming e-mail, paying particular attention to new contacts, and matching it all up with both Facebook and LinkedIn.  It also helps me find hidden relationships that I don’t think I’d find any other way.

4.) I use TweetBeep to scan and report on the full Twitter stream, using keyword and phrase searches to identify contacts that I might be interested in following and establishing relationships.

As a result of my desire to be plugged in, my passion for finding the holy grail to fully-leverage social media for business, I have  so much information coming at me  that I routinely dial it back — killing or altering streams of information that are too rich — so that I don’t spend too much time with it.  I also end up deleting a lot of incoming information without ever reading it.

Why do I do all this? Well, I have known for a couple of years now that all of these things that I want to do, all of the things that I want to help others learn to do because I can help them bring business relationships to a new level, will soon be made routine… which brings me back to Gist.

Watch this video.  It is genuinely amazing.

Not to beg, or plead, or grovel… but I hope the folks at Gist see this and bump me higher in their beta testing queue.  I wrote this post while on my knees bowing in the direction of Seattle!

In closing I got to give a shout out to Robert Scoble for doing such a good job on this video.

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