Social CRM

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...

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...

By now, it has been drilled into most marketers' heads: Social media is all about conversation -- a two-way conversation. Oftentimes, the conversation entails responding to customers' comments, requests or complaints. From the customer's perspective, it almost certainly means offers of discounts and...

Microsoft is in discussions to acquire Yammer, a social media and communication platform for businesses, according to a report in Bloomberg, which cited two anonymous sources. Microsoft is prepared to acquire the company for a $1 billion purchase price, the report said, and the deal could be reached...

Salesforce.com announced it was buying Buddy Media for nearly $700 million on Monday. In any discussion, that's a lot of money, maybe more than Salesforce has yet spent on any acquisition. What's going on? As you might expect, I see economics playing an important role here, and I think there are ...

The way people and companies decide what to buy is changing, becoming intractably intertwined with social recommendations, noted Sanjay Dholakia, SVP of Marketo's product marketing and corporate development. "This means that consumers and buyers have ability to educate themselves instead of going to...

I was so looking forward to getting the Facebook IPO out of the way, and then splat, like a ripe tomato in the kisser, we have to learn that the underwriters might not have shared some pre-IPO information transparently. Enough already! Bankers appear to be tone deaf to the fallout from their gross...

The trend toward an "always on, always connected" lifestyle driven by the use of social networks and mobile technology has, if nothing else, groomed consumers to become demanding in their expectations of the online experience. Unfortunately, the e-commerce experience has changed little since early d...