Nimble

23.09.2011
If social networking is important for your business, you might consider using Web-based application Nimble to manage your presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. (Nimble says that they'll be adding Google+ within 60 days). Unlike or , Nimble assumes that the most important part of social networking isn't the ubiquitous stream of postings, but how the ongoing communications relate to your business relationships and building your professional network.

Setting up Nimble involves bringing together your contacts database with your social networks. Importing your contacts from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Contacts, Outlook or other (CSV) contacts applications is intuitive and hassle-free. Nimble even merges duplicate contacts from the different sources into a single record. Once that is done, whenever you open a Contact's page, if you are connected to him/her on only some of the networks (such as Twitter and Facebook, but not LinkedIn), Nimble will search the other network(s) for their ID and suggest possible matches. However, at present, you need to set up the import periodically, to include new contacts you've made. Nimble says that eventually it will automatically check for new contacts on your social networks.

Nimble's easy-to-navigate tabbed interface has four major sections: Contacts, Messages, Activities and Social. As you would expect, the Contacts tab lists the people you're connected to, sorted by name, company, recently viewed, or recently added. Each individual Contact page shows traditional information (photo, company, email, title, address, etc.), as well as on what social networks you're connected with him or her.

Below this contact information is a tabbed window. The first tab lists all the conversations you've had with him/her, or in which you are mentioned, filtered by method (All, email, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn). The other tabs list tasks, events and activities related to that contact. A sidebar box displays their Social Stream from all their networks. Without leaving the Nimble interface, you can respond to or "like" their postings, as well as create a task based on a posting. In addition, you can send a message to the individual directly through any of the social media or emails listed, plan tasks or events, or log an activity.

The Message tab is an inbox for all email, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn messages you've received or sent. You can view your entire inbox together, or separated by network.

The Activities tab functions as a calendar and task list, with two views: list or calendar. While Nimble doesn't sync with Microsoft Outlook (other than to import and not export Contacts), it does work seamlessly with Google Calendar (which, in turn, can be set up to sync--via a Google app--with Outlook). In our tests, any changes we made to the Nimble calendar showed up immediately in Google; however, changes made to the Google calendar took several minutes to refresh in Nimble.