Gamification of your business network: Gist helps you learn that name.

Gist is a smart contact manager, recently acquired by BlackBerry, that helps you keep in touch with your contacts on different platforms. Or, as Gist puts it: “Our contacts are everywhere. In email, social networks, and many other sources. Gist brings your contacts into one place to give you the only full view of your network making it easy to find anyone, anytime.”

The Gist website stimulates you via smart nudges to complete your contact profiles, invite others to complete their own and reconnect with your most valuable contacts on a regular basis. One of the features I like best is a traffic light to indicate whether you interact with your contacts enough across the different channels: email, Facebook and Twitter.

And their mobile app goes even a step further: it features a ‘learn that name’ section, where Gist challenges you to pair the right name, photo and function. Not to collect badges, but actually to make a business difference. A great way to make sure you don’t forget that business contact’s name or profession the next time you meet him or her.

Gamification to actually make a difference. Not to earn a badge.

Written in 2011, left as it was.

Original: Gamification of your business network: Gist helps you learn that name, 5 September 2011. Historical links may no longer work.