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Social media is clearly becoming the next-gen customer engagement channel of choice for industry. The banking industry is likely to be the frontier in adopting next-gen technologies, including social-networking-enabled business processes. The banking industry has two important classifications based ...

Nutshell CRM officially launched earlier this month. It is, like many startup CRM applications, focused primarily on the sales piece. Nutshell is quite different from other CRM startups in one respect: It is focusing on a long-ignored niche -- the mid-sized company. "There are different consideratio...

I feel like social CRM has become a burger joint. "You want fries with that?" is the traditional up-sell question made famous in skits and jokes, but now I feel like we need to ask something akin in social CRM. The revised question: "You got any data to go with that?" To date, the lion's share of ...

Last week in New York, I began some field research in social CRM that will result in a longer paper later this fall. One of the things that interested me was the level of frustration and, well, anger that some customers have for some of their vendors. It's a mixed bag, really -- some people take gr...

Executives at SAP will be starting off the holidays in a glum frame of mind: A federal jury handed Oracle a victory in its legal tangle with SAP, awarding it $1.3 billion for copyright infringement. The damages stem from a suit Oracle filed against SAP in 2007, claiming that it made tens of thousand...

Dreamforce, Salesforce.com's annual user meeting and thought leadership confab, is two weeks away, and the anticipation for this event is palpable. In a tough economy, people are looking for the company to do some magic and lift our spirits. The company did a smart thing by turning on its new colla...

TCO is a financial estimate that helps enterprise managers determine direct and indirect costs of a system. TCO goes beyond the initial purchase price or implementation cost to consider the full cost of an asset over its useful life. TCO and ROI are frequently confused and misused, but they actually...

Salesforce.com's Service Cloud 2, a Web-based platform designed to help companies handle their customer service needs, includes integration with Salesforce Chatter, the service provider's new real-time collaboration tool. "Service Cloud is the fasting-growing product offering," said Fergus Griffin, ...

Salesforce.com is planning to release a free version of its real-time social collaboration application and platform, Chatter, according to comments CEO Marc Benioff made during the company's recent earnings call. Specifically, the company is working on "a kind of virally based" product, he said. The...

Salesforce.com stock shares soared 17 percent Friday morning to an all-time high in response to its fiscal third-quarter earnings report released Thursday afternoon. In the report, Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said he believes the company will reach $2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2012, making it t...

Selling teams continue searching for ways to reduce the amount of time sales representatives spend uncovering relevant company or contact information before following up with the leads introduced to them within the pipeline. In December 2009 and January 2010, Aberdeen surveyed more than 500 executiv...

For all the talk of social CRM, there's not so much talk of social CRM successes. Oh, sure -- there are scattered success stories, but there's not a wave of SCRM home runs being hit out there. As a result, there's been talk of SCRM having "jumped the shark" or "outlived its hype." In talking to user...

I spent part of last week in the Seattle area at a small meeting Microsoft organized for analysts. The purpose was to brief us on product positioning and plans, and much of the meeting was covered by non-disclosure. Consequently, I am at a loss for how much I can divulge in this setting, at least ...

In life and in business, the old saying "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" fundamentally could apply to everything -- except when it comes to display advertising. Remarketing has disproved that old adage time and time again by affording just that: a second chance to reinforc...

Avaya has introduced its latest iteration of Avaya IP Office -- its flagship communications suite for small and medium-sized businesses. The high points of the upgrade are easier-to-use features, greater transparency into coworkers' presence, and a more intuitive interface. For starters, Avaya IP Of...