Social CRM

Whenever I talk about CRM to people who aren't CRM experts, I find the discussion devolving into an examination of the real common denominator in all of this: the human aspects of doing business. The "R" of relationships resonates far more strongly with people than the "M" in management, and for goo...

Ever wonder what the opposite of CRM would be? I have. In my ruminations it's not as simple as matter and antimatter, up and down, left and right -- though few of us would consider antimatter very simple. If I gave you written directions to my house, you couldn't get home simply by turning the sh...

A year or so after it rolled out v.7.0, Sage CRM has updated its application with social media functionality, more interactivity, and tighter integration with email marketing, including a subscription-based service for managing email marketing campaigns. The latter, in particular, is of high value t...

Although businesses no longer control the conversation with their customers, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way. It's critical to realize that these relationships are a key part of the customer expe...

CDC Software's Pivotal CRM Customer Service and Support has launched, with major changes to the application's integration with social media and email, and more configuration options. This module was developed for the Pivotal 6 platform, which was built on the .Net Framework. The biggest jump in func...

We get so wound up talking about the value of online communities for social CRM purposes -- for instance, in building loyalty, identifying potential leads, and improving the quality of service our businesses deliver -- that sometimes we forget that they're really scaled-up versions of actual communi...

There's a huge difference between the enterprise world and the social media community. While there are many signs of life on the social side, the rank-and-file Global 1,000 seem for the most part to be clueless. That's not an indictment, just a statement of fact, and maybe opportunity. At the Enterp...

Marketo upgrades or somehow tweaks its revenue performance management application roughly every other month, but its latest release is special. Specifically, many of the features included in this release have been more than a year in the making, said Gaurav Kotak, senior director of product marketin...

I have a friend who's a musician, author and former radio personality, and he likes Facebook. A lot. My newsfeed is clogged with his posts -- news from his life, comments about music and movies, photos of his travels, videos of songs, links to other people's articles. I don't think there's any possi...

Salesforce.com is participating in a social media project with Toyota Motor, in what could launch the CRM company into an entirely new industry -- telematics. Or not. The agreement between Salesforce.com and Toyota to collaborate on this offering, called "Toyota Friend," is still very much in its ...

The Kaden Group has launched a new social CRM application, PartnerOption.com. The startup is hoping to carve out a niche by targeting small businesses with a product that combines free CRM functionality -- for now -- with an organized, easily portable business social network focusing on sales leads,...

ListenLogic is moving into the social CRM sphere after building expertise with its two related offerings: a reputation management application that helps corporations identify threats before they reach crisis proportions, and a social market research and listening product. "These were the jumping-off...

Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit 2011 kicked off on Monday in Los Angeles. It is the sister conference to one held in the beginning of the year in London. While the keynote speakers and participating companies vary, the general themes running through both conferences are the same. One is that ...

CoTweet, a social media management application that ExactTarget developed when it realized that email marketing recipients often continue a conversation about a brand in social marketing venues, now has stronger integration for CRM legacy systems. The company recently unveiled new extensions that al...

With its social software platform Mzinga OmniSocial, Mzinga's goal is to deliver a role-based application with CRM capability that a company can then repurpose to collect information from its customers. Rather than concentrating on traditional CRM, Mzinga focuses on the enterprise network side to he...