Nimble and Gist are the two top-rated products in the Comparz assessment of social media CRM tools. These tools help you aggregate, organize, and manage social media, e-mail contacts, news, and other information sources for business purposes. Both are innovative, leading-edge tools aimed at small businesses, and both are free.
Nimble was created by Jon Ferrara, a CRM pioneer who co-founded and sold Goldmine Software, which has a user base of more than 1.2 million users, according to Wikipedia. Updating his original CRM vision, Ferrarra created a next-generation social CRM application and named it Nimble. The positive user and reviewer feedback shows it lives up to its name.
Nimble’s winning formula is merging social media management with collaboration, marketing, sales, and communications within a nicely designed and easy-to-use interface.
Nimble is a SaaS offering accessed through a browser, so there is no installation on in-house servers. You simply register and Nimble imports your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, and Outlook contacts and merges all duplicate records.
Nimble converges and presents all your contacts on a single screen and allows you to manage them as a whole—eliminating the need to jump from window to window and cut and paste among them.
Nimble also automatically identifies each contact’s social profile on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, the aim being to allow you to connect, listen, and engage with your most important business associates.
For social media listening, you can see all social streams combined in one view or see Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn streams separately. To help manage contacts, Nimble allows you to tag them and group them in categories, according to type of service, etc.
Nimble says it aims to be the WordPress of social CRM, a free web-based tool that is widely deployed. To further this mission, the company aims to release a public API that will include code for building widgets that can be integrated into Nimble and offered through an app store accessed from within Nimble.
Nimble says its API will enable advanced administrators and developers to build and share custom applications and features that extend Nimble.
Nimble’s base offering is free, but it has said it expects to begin charging for Nimble Team ($10 per user per month) and to roll out other fee-based offerings, including Nimble Sales ($19 per user per month) and CRM ($29 per user per month).
The Gist on Gist
Gist is the brainchild of T. A. McCann, who believes his tool will “change the way you are going to communicate and connect in business.” McCann’s vision is that the future of work is professionals moving from project to project by creating relationships and opportunities around shared goals and interests, It is now possible to discover and connect with people in ways not previously possible via social media, says McCAnn, and his social CRM tool is aimed at managing that process.
Gist’s forte is managing all contacts centrally. You install Gist using a series of browser plug-ins for different services. Gist goes out and collects and then aggregates all your social media and communications sources, then scours news sources and blogs to give you a consolidated view. As one customer reported, Gist’s interface gives you a “complete picture of your contacts.”
Gist uses a formula to continuously rank the importance of your relationship to each contact. You have the option of overriding the automated ranking if you feel its findings do not accurately represent the importance of a relationship.
According to McCann, Gist is all about aggregation, prioritization, and contextual filtering to save you time and help you gain insight in your business relationships. “Never again will you have to show up for a meeting not understanding what someone looks like, or be unprepared, or miss a key partner announcement,” says McCann. Nor will you have to comb through 10 different information sources to find information you’re seeking, he adds.
Among those McCann thanks for supporting his project is Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Bottom Line: Both Nimble and Gist are elegantly designed, work well, and are easy to use. The good news for small businesses is that powerful tools like these are coming into the market for free, and because they are free, you can try them and assess which tool you prefer. Perhaps there is a place for both in your business arsenal.
Comparz provides user reviews and rankings of Social CRM software and tools for small and mid-sized businesses. Click here to view Comparz' business software reviews and rankings.
Leave your comment