Salesforce.com's Social Media Smarts Could Help You
At a time when many companies still struggle to manage the rise of social networks and understand what the trend means to their organizations, Salesforce.com has begun tailoring its business software to help people harness the power of social media. During the past year, the company has taken several steps to make its core products work alongside popular consumer applications like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
While analysts say Salesforce.com's efforts to make its business applications more social and consumer-oriented will further bolster its ongoing efforts to uproot old school rivals like Oracle and SAP, the strategy also shows a forward-thinking view in how business technology has changed: The traditional tendency to separate business and consumer technologies is not only unrealistic, it misses an opportunity to interact with current and prospective customers.
"They're the only enterprise vendor that has really embraced the social side of the Web," says Yankee Group analyst Sheryl Kingstone. "Everyone can spend their time on Twitter, but this enables some collaboration with customers because of it."
They've Got a Friend in the Consumer Web
Salesforce.com's latest foray into the consumer Web happened earlier this week. The San Francisco-based vendor announced that organizations using its customer service application (dubbed Service Cloud) would be able to connect it to Twitter, the social networking service where users post short messages.
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Other CRM's are on board, too
Salesforce isn't the only CRM getting on board with Social Networking integration. There is a Social Networking plugin for AddressTwo as well.SalesForce and Social Media - Hmmm
This is a very well done post. as for Salesforce and other "cloud" services, well - their fate remains cloudy for many. With the death of Coghead and no viable redundancy for many of these SaaS startups, though some have many users, I just don't see the point.I tested most of these startups out of the gate for the various tech blogs, and while they have been interesting, I just do not see viable companies flocking to give their proprietary data to them (tho some have).
I just wrote a post about the fate of some of the social networks, and given that most of them are not solvent either, what difference will it make if Salesforce and 100 others are integrated into something that dies? You might take a look at this when you get a minute or ten.
http://www.pamil-visions.net/social-network-er/
I do not mean to sound too negative, but sometimes we put the cart before the horse. 300 million zeros is still zero, and I think the numbers (of users) game is about up.
Thanks so much,
Phil Butler
Natural progression
Years ago when SFDC introduced its integration with Google Adwords, many businesses were unsure about the viability of harnessing keyword targeted ads to capture qualified leads. Now,it's become a staple of the marketing mix.I see this as a natural progression for SFDC and also a valuable tool for CRM customers. With so many folks scratching their heads at how to attain and measure metrics around social media , this integration could help bridge the gap.