Social CRM

One of the tricky parts of developing a social CRM strategy is that it requires left-brain and right-brain thinking. The left brain, where more logical and procedural thinking takes place, is comparable to how "traditional" CRM operates, organizing and distributing data based on predetermined proces...

About five years ago, CRM analyst and author Paul Greenberg set out to develop a definition for social CRM, or CRM 2.0, as some called it at the time. It was this: "Social CRM is a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, ...

Bizo, an online marketing provider that focuses specifically on the business segment, has introduced two new apps that refine its marketing reach. Bizo Company Targeting and Bizo CRM Retargeting are tightly integrated with Salesforce.com, although it is not necessary to be a Salesforce.com client to...

With Salesforce.com's Dreamforce 2012 conference ready to kick off next week, there is little doubt the company has several new products ready to debut. Just in case, though, CEO Marc Benioff made sure the CRM world would be primed for the news. In a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch founder M...

Sage North America has rolled out Sage Act 2013, a new iteration of its flagship application that has been enhanced with mobile, social and email marketing capabilities, as well as new smart task automation functionality. The focus is on contemporary trends of interest to SMBs, said Brandon Balsley,...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've covered technology as long as I have, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies ar...

VerticalResponse recently launched its social platform with two new features: Coupons and Clipper. Coupons lets businesses generate custom coupons that can be published as a Facebook tab on their Facebook page or as a standalone Web page. Clipper is a browser button that lets users save interesting ...

Zoho has been speedily turning out applications to complement its core platform. Earlier this spring, for instance, it introduced Zoho CRM. Now, it is rolling out Zoho Marketing Campaigns to buttress the marketing functionality it introduced in the CRM app. "We had marketing and campaign features in...

Henry David Thoreau's quiet wisdom is best exemplified by sayings like, "in all things, simplicity." That's a nice credo to live by -- but it may be a hard one to fully embrace if you're trying to provide great customer service these days. After all, if you work in service, you have customers comin...

It's good to be busy, but I remember when August was a slow month, sort of like January, and for the same reasons. The holidays are out of the way, there's less to do -- other than eat the Christmas chocolates or the summer squash and tomatoes, and think about spring or going back to school. The A...

Salesforce.com is rolling out a limited pilot of yet another social media initiative -- Salesforce Communities. The offering combines its Chatter product, its Salesforce.com business processes, and an underlying social intelligence that makes it easy to show people the right information and give the...

Awareness has enhanced its social marketing automation suite, Social Marketing Hub, with a new feature called "social scoring." The feature allows marketers and brands to identify, store and rank prospects across all the major social networks based on scoring criteria they define. It is a deliberate...

When people are under stress, many respond with remarkable grace, courage and decisiveness. Then there are those who, under great stress, become paralyzed, flail about, or lash out in unproductive and unprovoked ways. The social era is showing us that while corporations are not people, they are run ...

I'm just back from a week in the woods, trying to get my head around social media and CRM again. That means I'm in the middle of writing up a report on some research that uberanalyst Esteban Kolsky and I did over the last few months, and smack in the middle of CRM Idol judging. Everything's fine, a...

If you mention a certain brand of lower-priced, assemble-it-yourself furniture of Scandinavian heritage, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a response that dwells at some length on how hard it is to put it together. I've never felt that way -- in reality, I actually like putting stuff toge...