MUST HAVE Social CRM Nimble Brings All Your Contacts and Major Social Media Activities Together

When you want to find a communication you had with someone important to you, where do you look first?

Can you remember whether it was in an email you exchanged, or on Twitter, or was it on LinkedIn? Can you click on someone in your contact manager and see all the tweets, LinkedIn messages and email you’ve exchanged with that person?

“Traditional CRM systems fail at relationship management
and that’s why people don’t use them for engagement”
~ Jon Ferrara, Nimble CEO and previous founder of CRM pioneer GoldMine ~

If you can’t, you will want to check out Nimble. One of the many benefits using the Nimble Social Media CRM provides is the ability to instantly see the exchanges you’ve had with your important contacts across social networks.

Nimble is FREE for up to 3,000 contacts for individual users
and the paid version is currently only $15 per user per month.

WHAT NIMBLE SOCIAL CRM DOES

Today Nimble has these capabilities:

1. Integrates your contacts, calendars, Facebook including support for Facebook business pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, Skype and Google.
2. Nimble’s new unified social notifications consolidates all the likes, comments, friend invites and other social interactions from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
3. Alerts you to birthdays, promotions and job changes in a daily email notification.
4. Allows multiple people across a company or collaboration to share the same information.
5. Identify influencers by Klout score and basic stats such as number of Twitter followers.
6. See who is talking about you and your business.
7. Ability to add custom fields

Nimble is the closest thing to what I’ve been trying to find for years.
YES I am using it and STRONGLY recommending it
to all my collaborators, clients and readers.

This is the best of many videos about Nimble: their CEO Jon Ferrara explaining Nimble to Robert Scoble:

How I Use Nimble

Nimble is designed to let you import all your contacts from Outlook, Google, and elsewhere and pull in all your Twitter followers and other social media connections.

I don’t want to do that because the challenge I need to fix is ensuring
I don’t miss communications from collaborators and clients.

While I would like to have all my 24,517 and growing Twitter followers in Nimble, until there is a way to hone in on my collaborators and clients that would be a bad idea.

The Primary Problem

The primary problem I’m seeking to solve is in email which could be resolved in at least one of these two ways:

1. Ensure email from key relationships don’t get missed by filtering all the automatic communications from blog subscribe to comments and mailing lists out of the inbox.
2. Or better: be able to flag important contacts as clients, collaborators, so some other specific designation and in one click see all the new email from those groups collectively and individually the way Nimble today lets you click on the Social link to hone in on all social media activity or at a click see Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Facebook page activities separately. (Better because you don’t have to continually add new filters – you put the focus on the important people.)

Using Tags to Organize Contacts

I have found a way to group my key contacts on Nimble by using tags. I would love to have them give us a larger field to use more tags because connectors like me need to be able to instantly see all the participants in a particular project and I already have too many projects to use tags to separate them.

The reason I need Nimble is because I plan to grow to hundreds of projects and must find a way to organize all the contacts and instantly see all the people involved in each one because it is impossible for me to remember them all to search for them by name.

My Wish List for Nimble

We must all realize that awesome solutions take time to develop. We can’t expect them to have everything we dream of having right from the start and Nimble is already working on many suggestions from their 30,000+ Nimble users and growing.

That said, here are some enhancements I would love to see in Nimble.

• While having ALL of my contacts flowing in the Social streams, what I really need is to see only the social activities of my key relationships. That would give them a much higher chance of my seeing them.
• Skype hangs so much that it would be great if we could also add Yahoo! Messenger – that is the IM collaborators use most because we can leave messages when others are not online and it has been the most reliable.
• Under Messages for each contact, add a tab for Skype (and Yahoo! IM if they add that) the way they already have tabs for  email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.
• Make the tags field longer because some contacts are involved in more than one collaboration or project or have significance in many contexts.

How to Add Contacts to Nimble Manually

I need my most important contact information to be accurate and to focus on my key relationships. Nimble has a cool way to do this that works pretty darn well.

I’ll show you. For this example I’ll add Vernessa Taylor as one of my most important collaborators.

When I add a new contact I can enter just their name and Nimble will go find Social accounts it believes may be them.

To add a contact to Nimble manually, Click Contact, Add Person, and fill in their name. Title, company and email are optional. Click Save. CLICK IMAGES TO SEE FULL SIZE.

Nimble then gives me one social network account for each service:

Social Profile Matches found by Nimble for Vernessa Taylor

When the Social Network account is the correct one, simply click Add. If it isn’t – as in the first Twitter account Nimble offered for Vernessa, click the trash can icon and Nimble will suggest another. You can do this repeatedly until the appropriate account is found.

Now I can go to Vernessa’s entry in my Nimble contacts and Nimble will show me any tweets we’ve exchanged or that included both or our usernames and her most recent tweets:

Example of what Nimble provides for each contact in your contact manager.

If Nimble does not offer any suggestions for a social account or doesn’t find the correct account you will see ‘ We didn’t find any additional social profiles for this contact. ‘

To add a Social Account to Nimble Manually:

While in the contact click edit and enter the appropriate information to add their account. For example, Nimble did not find Vernessa’s Facebook account because it is the name of her Technology Consulting blog so I manually added it:

How to Manually Add Social Accounts to Nimble

Add Tags to Organize Your Nimble Contacts

Key to making Nimble useful we need to be able to instantly find contacts by collaboration. I am doing this by adding tags. Go to each person’s contact entry, click Add Tags (if there are none) or Edit Tags (if there are).

IMPORTANT: This field is VERY SHORT so put some thought into how you want to categorize your key people because you won’t be able to add them to as many different groups as you might wish.

You can have many tags in Nimble – you just can not currently have many tags for each individual contact.  Click done for both saving any changes you made or canceling when you have made no changes.

Edit Tags to Organize Your Nimble Contacts into Collaborations, Joint Venture Partners, Groups, etc.

At the very bottom right of each contact, Nimble offers me a link to Vernessa’s business under About the Company. If Vernessa were an employee this link would be to her employer. Below the link a company can display a short bio.

How Nimble connects your contacts with their businesses or employing company.

When I click the link for a contact’s business or employer, I see the contact entry for that company including the social stream if the company has social media presences.

Company Listings in Nimble Account Manager

In the bottom right of the company listing, Nimble shows me any contacts I have in that company and a link to Add a Person for any I know that don’t show here:

Nimble Section for People in This Company

Social Exchanges BY COMPANY

In the center you can see the social exchanges you’ve had with anyone associated with the company or whose username was included in a tweet.

In the screen capture below you can see tweets from Nimble’s Community Manager Garick Chan, their CEO Jon Ferrara and their official Twitter account @Nimble.

Social Exchange History in Nimble for all contacts at a company

How to Add Skype Conversations to Nimble

If you use Skype you will want to add the Skype IDs for your key contacts so you can see your Skype exchanges, too.

How to Add Skype ID to Nimble Contacts

How to Find Your Existing Skype Contact’s Skype ID

Find your contact in the Skype contact list, click on their name, click the gray arrow, and select View Profile. A separate small window will open.  Copy their Skype name and paste it into the Skype ID field on Nimble.

Notice how complete Vernessa’s Skype profile is. (You can click on the image to see a larger version – as you can for ALL the images in this post.)

The more information you put in your Skype profile the easier it is for your collaborators to share what you do with potential clients, JV partners and collaborators.

Do your friends a favor and suggest they add their URL or additional information when you see it is not available in their Skype profile.

Tips for Using Nimble

• Nimble is currently not consistent about how you save new information. Sometimes you click Done and other times you must remember to scroll up to the top of the contact edit screen and click UPDATE to save your edits! 
• IF you use email on your own domain the IMAP process for connecting to it may not work out of the box yet. Apparently there is not a standard method each hosting company uses when setting up IMAP. You may have to create a test email account and open a support ticket so that Nimble’s tech support can get your email connections to work. Over time this will be less likely as current Nimble users will have most likely used the same hosting company as you have.

Discuss Nimble on Google+ with Influencers

• We are discussing Nimble – what it does, doesn’t do, alternatives, etc. in a thread Vernessa started on G+.

Find Out More About Nimble

• Official Nimble site provides tour, details. and free Social CRM accounts for individuals.
• Official Nimble FAQs
• Official Nimble Support, Community Center and Forum
• Nimble Blog
• David Strom reviews Nimble’s social capabilities – Vimeo Video
• Free Sorting Through the Twitter Noise eBook from Nimble
• My Nimble YouTube channel
• Nimble 2.0 CRM What’s New
• Nimble does regular Nimble Live Demo Webinars which unfortunately can not be attended by Linux users because they are on GoToMeeting which still does not have Linux support. GoToMeeting is still telling me they are still working to correct that deficiency. Ironically, their support is Windows only. The best Webinar experts I know are using ReadyTalk Audio and Web Conferencing because it is OS independent and totally online – nothing to download,  install or need tech support to get working.

Nimble in the News

• Small Business Trends: Nimble Leads Small Businesses Into The New Social CRM Age With Nimble 2.0 (Feb 15, 2012)
• VIDEO: InmanNext: Nimble Review: Is This The CRM We Have All Been Waiting For? (Feb 14, 2012)
• TechCrunch: Nimble Goes After Salesforce, Wants To Be The “Pandora Of Contacts” (Jan 23, 2012)
• ReadWriteWeb: Nimble’s Unified Social Contact Manager for Teams Reaches 2.0
• bsdb blog: Nimble Leads SMBs Into the New Social CRM Age With Nimble 2.0
• VC News Daily: Nimble Grabs $1M in VC Funding (Jan 5, 2012)

If you have questions about using Nimble feel free to contact me. I will be teaching it to the blogging collaborations I mentor.

Tagged as: contact manager, crm, small business, social crm