The relationship management application Gist became available today. I've been playing with it in Beta, and I'll hazard to say it's a PR pro's dream.

If you're constantly thinking in terms of who you should be talking to in the media, which clients need attention, which new business leads are running hot, and what they're all writing about on their social profiles and blogs and why, Gist will be compelling to you.

There are other social networks that touch upon some of the aggregating features of Gist, but none are dedicated to analyzing your private email exchanges that actually help you conduct business. Gist pulls in info from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and pulls in company info from 50,000 news sites and 20 million blogs.

It acts as a heatmap of your inbox, and automatically creates a dossier on each contact which can be edited and managed manually with notes, next steps, and links. A critical feature Gist added since Beta is the ability to tag a contact or a company to your liking.

I won't go too much in to functionality but suffice to say, you get out of Gist what you put in. It has a lot of features and there's still benefit to letting it do its thing and just absorbing the analysis. It works with Gmail, Outlook, and Salesforce, or you can push a CSV file through it too.

More after the jump:

Though I use it with Gmail, Mashable reports how you can use Gist within a program:

The new Gist comes with three key updates. The dashboard UI has been tweaked to better optimize the new user experience, people and company profiles are now integrated with your Salesforce data, and you can also now use Gist inside an email client like Outlook.

Those who know me know my rap on why obsessive management of one's contacts is critical--it's your earned equity. It's what you bring to a PR job, and what you take with you leave.

What's more, now that any version of your rolodex can be pumped back through any social network to "light up" your contacts, managing them has never been more valuable. All social networks have a "scrape" function to help you build network quickly--Gist brings information on those contacts from both public and personal streams together.