Social CRM

Well, that was interesting. 2010, that is. When I started doing a year-in-review column, there was an emphasis on quantifying accomplishments -- tangible things that somehow added up to the year in review. But with the economy still lurching and not many major accomplishments, I thought I'd try so...

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 ...

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...

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...

SugarCRM has released an upgrade to Sugar 6, expanding its CRM suite with new features that will build up its social bona fides. For the first time, it is giving users a mobile app -- Sugar Mobile for iPhone -- developed directly by the vendor. Other new features bolster Sugar 6's global functional...

Shoutlet, which last year launched an app designed to help companies manage their social media operations, has expanded its feature set to include CRM functionality. It is a natural extension of Shoutlet's original feature set, explained President and COO Aaron Everson. "Shoutlet lets a company set ...

Cisco on Wednesday announced two products and a rich media capture platform to extend its contact center capabilities. One product is SocialMiner, software that lets companies search the Web for relevant material. The other product is Cisco Finesse, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for customer care ...

A lot of information is coming together this quarter that begins to put a new spin on social CRM. While we've all been busy getting networked in our personal lives and professionally, a huge mountain of data has been accumulating that will make our work in social technology more valuable. Last week...

Swix has enhanced its original application, Swix Analytics -- a dashboard that tracks ad campaigns and subsequent user engagement across 20 social media communities -- with Swix Social Marketer, a new product that tracks the returns those campaigns are delivering. "Businesses realize there is power ...

It's often hard to maintain high visibility in the marketplace if you happen to be a private company, and for good reason. Private companies tend to be small, and they often do not attract the attention of the financial press precisely because the financial press thrives on the transparency and num...

Social CRM is quickly transforming from a concept to a reality. However, because of the diverse nature of customers and the broad range of options they have among social media channels, the best practices for capitalizing on Social CRM vary from segment to segment. That means some industries may hav...

Bantam Live principal John Rourke remembers well one of the first glimpses the tech industry got of what was possible with real-time activity streams for the corporate environment. He was sharing the stage with a Salesforce.com executive at an industry event focusing on that subject in 2009. They we...

Sometimes I feel like we're stuck in the weeds with social CRM. Hopefully I will get a lot of mail for this, LOL! No, really. Sometimes I feel like we're missing the bigger point of social CRM because we're spending so many brain cells focusing on the technology and not so much on what it does bey...

My favorite scene in "The Social Network" is when Mark Zuckerberg's character has an epiphany that Facebook's screen should have a field to designate a user's status, as in relationship status or availability. Wait, I didn't give something away, did I? You've seen the movie, right? No? Go see it....