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.

Xobni helps me focus.  I have a lot going on, including disparate projects that often sit for days and weeks with no activity. With Xobni, when a dormant project suddenly requires me to re-engage in conversations that paused long ago, I can quickly get back up to speed.  Xobni has dramatically reduced the time it takes me to reply to messages when the original context of the conversation has been forgotten.

With Xobni I can:

1. Search less and find more; basic information I need about an email and its sender is always right there in the Xobni sidebar.
2. Leverage my inbox as a socially-aware tool that builds automatic profiles of the people I work with.
3. Discover hidden relationships between people with whom I exchange email.
4. Instantly view my email conversations in threads.
5. Check on the status of my contacts at LinkedIn (the next version will offer Facebook status too).
6. Always see the profile pictures of my senders from these sources, if available, simply by highlighting a message from them in my inbox.
7. Perform in-context key word searches to quickly find the right messages I seek.
8. Instantly access all of the attachments related to my searches.
9. Analyze the sending and response patterns of my contacts to determine the best times to send and not to send messages.
10. Increase the response rates on the messages and replies I send.

For me, Xobni is a big deal because I use the past sending and response habits of my contacts to improve the statistical probability of getting them to take the actions I desire.

Here’s a great little video review of my favorite plug-in ever!

Click here to view the embedded video.