Social CRM

SugarCRM made enhancements in four areas in the Sugar 6 Spring 2011 release: CRM made global, CRM made mobile, CRM made social, and Sugar as a platform. SugarCRM will also work more on integration with IBM's Lotus family of products. Its acquisition of iExtensions could move its Lotus integration ro...

Zuora and Salesforce.com have announced a new offering that highlights the strengths of each company and delivers new functionality to the telecommunications industry. Zuora for the Communications Industry is a solution based on the Force.com platform that handles billing, payments and customer car...

In yet another step binding it closer to IBM, SugarCRM has acquired iExtensions, the CRM solution for Lotus Notes. A big part of our business is international," SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin announced to an audience of analysts and reporters at SugarCon in San Francisco on Monday. "Quite a number of o...

A new breed of consumer has emerged. This new breed -- the social consumer -- is more connected, more vocal and has greater control. Social consumers use social media to voice their praises about a particular business, but they use social media just as frequently to voice their concerns and anger a...

Recently, a customer was using the Navy Federal Credit Union ATM and encountered some difficulty with his account. He whipped out his mobile device and tweeted to the world that he was having problems. You can probably guess what happened next: He received a return tweet shortly afterward. However, ...

Salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Salesforce intends to use Radian6, a platform for social media monitoring, to help its clients track hundreds and millions of conversations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and other onli...

With the continued emergence of new technology and channels including social media, mobile, avatars and more, the relationship between brands and their customers and prospects has been changed forever. It's interesting to consider the role of technology in these increasingly dynamic relationships.

Oracle CRM On Demand for Partner Relationship Management has integrated a social application that gives users a sense of what customers, partners and employees are saying about a particular sale or activity or client -- and in an orderly fashion. The challenge Accept360 addresses with its applicatio...

On Monday, SuccessFactors announced a definitive agreement to acquire Jambok, a social learning company. You could bypass this announcement as just more dealing by software companies, but it also suggests an interesting combination that will prove to be in synch with the times. As a social learning...

Around the time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed and signed into law, I was a reporter covering that area of technology. Specifically, I was writing about service, measurement, data management and the software that made all that possible for telecommunications companies. Little did I re...

SAP has introduced a new on-demand application for its CRM base. Unlike its earlier attempts at this model, this product is the first of many that are being developed strictly to be used in a Software as a Service environment. The application, SAP Sales OnDemand, is built on the SAP Business ByDesi...

There's a great Churchill quote, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing ... after they have exhausted all other possibilities," which I think applies to our long sojourn in the valley of social networking. Social networking is important and will be a major part of our future, but...

Salesforce.com released its Q4 figures last week, peppered with the usual positives: growth, acquisition, more growth, and so on. Specifically, the company reported that earnings per share were 31 cents on revenue of $456.9 million. Year-over-year revenue increased 29.1 percent. Much of the focus fo...

As I've written before, social CRM best practices don't exist -- but only because in order to be most effective, each business needs to tailor its social CRM approach to its specific customers. However, that doesn't mean you're doomed to a long evaluation process and a tough spell of trial-and-error...

The upheaval in the Middle East is roiling the energy markets, and that will affect CRM. Year-over-year, the price of a gallon of regular is up over half a buck nationally, and the average price for said gallon is $3.18. As gas goes, so does jet fuel. The confluence of rising prices, political un...