Social CRM

SAP on Wednesday unveiled a rapid-deployment solution for marketers. It lets users analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources. Users can combine the information with CRM text data and, if they so choose, business intelligence applications to ...

Social media sites are all about having conversations, and that's true for businesses as well as individuals. The trick for businesses is knowing how and when to engage in these conversations -- and how to keep up with them. Like any conversation, listening is important, and it's one way that busine...

WORX, a power tool company, has a unique Pinterest board: one devoted entirely to tools that aid in zombie defense. The WORX JawSaw, for instance, has a pin that tells consumers to "accessorize before they rise, and protect yourself now!" The board's sense of humor makes it especially effective on t...

When Mary-Jane Mehlenbacher left the corporate world to have her daughter, she didn't realize she would be leaving behind network marketing software that worked. Mehlenbacher had decided to form her own home-based network marketing company but couldn't find an appropriate CRM software application th...

Every time people post an update, "like" a page, or otherwise engage with social media, their movements are tracked, followed and recorded. For businesses, this data is a gold mine of information about consumer thinking, preferences and opinions. "Businesses should view social media as a treasure tr...

Votigo has debuted a full-fledged social marketing suite that builds around its original core functionality of social promotions. The 6-year-old company is offering a price point that is reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as functionality that can scale to enterprise level fai...

I have always been interested in the similarities between biology and economics and ultimately business. In the last few years we've adopted some of the parlance of biology when we talk about business, especially social business. Perhaps the best example is the analogy we freely make between a ven...

Salesforce.com is acquiring GoInstant, reportedly paying $70 million for the startup. The news generally fits the "another day, another Salesforce.com acquisition" story line. The CRM cloud vendor has been on an acquisition binge -- it bought at least six companies in 2011 alone. It is on track to m...

Financial site Adaptu serves people in all stages of life, from young people just establishing themselves, getting married and buying a home, to more mature investors planning for their children's educations or their own retirement dreams. "Some of these people are open to talking about their finan...

This week Esteban Kolsky and I launched a research initiative aimed at better understanding how businesses across the world are adopting social media for their business processes. There has been anecdotal evidence over the last five-plus years about social's efficacy as a business tool, and there ha...

Marketing automation provider Act-On Software has added a unique feature to its product lineup that allows users to track, compare, and then take action on what is being said online and in social media about their company or executives. Act-On Insight lets users benchmark and track these mentions, a...

Avaya has added new products and enhanced existing ones in its Customer Experience Interaction Management portfolio. The overarching goal of the changes was to allow users to reach out to customers via any channel the customers chose -- for example, mobile application, social media or phone. Such ac...

Microsoft has agreed to pay an eyebrow-raising $1.2 billion in cash for the startup Yammer, presumably in the expectation that it will gain a much needed boost in social media expertise. Yammer will remain a standalone service for its 5-million-plus customer base, and Microsoft will also pair it wit...

A year ago, Nimble CRM launched with a simple idea: If one application could bring together a contact's social media profile, online comments, company information and other relevant data, the sales and marketing process would be much easier. The hardest part -- bringing in social media conversations...

Several months ago Constant Contact became aware that much of its customer base was intrigued by the daily deal model. However, it also noticed that once those companies actually tried out the model, their enthusiasm for it diminished considerably. "Daily deals just don't work for a lot of companies...