So we aren't reporting that it has happened, but we're bracing ourselves in case it does. Since Rapportive is the most useful plug-in ever, we're concerned about something bad happening to it. But if it had to be somebody, an acquisition by LinkedIn could be a good choice.

LinkedIn already has lots of the pieces of a customer (or contact) relationship management (CRM) service like Rapportive. In January 2011, it bought Cardmunch, a mobile app that turns photos of business cards into online contact info. In October, it acquired Connected, which let users manage, tag and sort contacts across platforms, enter notes (which Rapportive does, too), and view recent communications. That's a lot of smoke around the idea that LinkedIn's building a CRM service. But again, we haven't seen any fire.

It sure would make sense, though. LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It's the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it's already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it. For example, last year, it launched a plug-in that lets employers use LinkedIn for job applications on their own sites. Gmail is another obvious place to put LinkedIn information, as Rapportive has proven.

And just for fun, here's another tidbit. Rapportive is currently a browser extension that works on Gmail. If LinkedIn bought it and threw its weight behind it, imagine the enterprise power of Rapportive for Outlook.

Scuttlebutt is that #LinkedIn has acquired #Rapportive - my favorite in-Gmail SocialCRM tool. Hope they don't close it down...

— Ben Kepes (@benkepes) February 7, 2012

@eileentso Sorry, can't comment. But publishing articles on the basis of rumour and speculation is a dubious practice imho.

— Martin Kleppmann (@martinkl) February 7, 2012

Will Rapportive continue to support all the other apps on its platform if LinkedIn acquires it?Will there be Salesforce integration?

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) February 7, 2012

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Today Rapportive is announcing a big upgrade to its baked-in Twitter functionality. You can do so much Twitter stuff in the sidebar of your Gmail now! Check out the demo video below.

I've been testing this feature for the past week and it works really well. It works so well that I've hardly noticed it - it just feels natural. And if you haven't tried tying your LinkedIn account to Rapportive, I highly recommend doing that too. Both are easy to do, just install the add-on, then click the Rapportive menu at the top of the page on Gmail and associate your social media accounts.

It's been over a year now since I urged readers here to stop what you're doing and go install this Gmail plug-in. The email CRM plug-in space is a crowded one, but all the competition is just making it better.

Drupal 7 includes a number of improvements to both performance and usability. The enhancements to the UI mean easier administration, update management, accessibility and content creation. There's also a new image editor that allows users to re-size and crop photos without having to leave the platform.

Drupal 7 also features RDFa semantic technology as part of its core. The design of the platform embeds semantic metadata that will make machine-to-machine search native for a Drupal 7 website. RDFa will be able to give search engines more details not visible to humans, such as latitude and longitude of a venue. According to Drupal's creator Dries Buytaert, "Adding semantic technology to Drupal core will make a notable contribution to the future of the web."

The Drupal platform has seen increasing adoption, powering hundreds of thousands of websites, including a number of quite prominent ones, including WhiteHouse.gov and NASA.

One prominent example is supply chain management (SCM), which is the process by which businesses acquire physical materials and resources, assemble them and deliver them to customers.

While not all companies have the budget for such state-of-the-art technology, there is no shortage of innovation and automation available to most companies when it comes to SCM.

Of course, exactly what SCM processes look like will vary from business to business, but regardless of how complex the process is, automating it will not only reduce costs and increase productivity, but also produce lots of data.

Integrating SCM data with other vital business data

There is no shortage of SCM software, from big players like SAP and Oracle, to newer players like NetSuite, a SaaS solution, and MyERP, a low-cost solution for small businesses.

Whichever platform your company goes with, you'll want to ensure it's either part of a larger enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite that contains other modules like CRM and accounting, or that it's extensible enough to be plugged into third party services with relative ease.

For example, plugging in Web analytics data alongside SCM data using tools like the Google Analytics API or related add-ons can begin to paint a more thorough picture of the relationship between Website traffic and real-world, on-the-ground sales and shipments. Likewise, CRM platforms whether its part of your ERP solution or a separate product can give you a much more detailed picture of who your paying customers actually are.

Even when dealing with SCM by itself, it can sometimes be a challenge to get all of the most vital data under one roof, due to issues like incompatible data formats or other players in the supply chain who may not share the same idea of transparency as you. Thus, bolting on additional sources of information about your business can be critical to gaining a more complete picture of what's going on.

The more data you have available to you, the more you understand about how your business actually functions and thus the more you can do to streamline processes, cut unnecessary costs and gauge productivity.

When you view a contact in Silentale for iPhone, you see their contact details as you would within any Address Book type application, but you also see their social profiles and a complete history of your conversations - whether that included emails, Facebook messages or Twitter posts.

You can then email, reply or forward messages to a contact directly from within the app. You can send an SMS text message or call them, too. And you can view, download and forward the attachments in the messages Silentale finds. Essentially, it's a "CRM-lite" type application for the iPhone.

Silentale: Easy, Great...When it Works

In the past, we were surprised that Silentale didn't get more media coverage - the online service it offers is fairly robust... and free, at least to start. The basic version of the online service lets you import up to 3 accounts, is updated every 3 hours and imports 4 weeks of conversation history. For $49/year, you get 6 accounts, 2 years of history and hourly updates. For $99, you get 12 accounts, unlimited import and half-hour updates.

As to why Silentale seems to be somewhat ignored, our first guess was its name - "Silentale" doesn't really roll off the tongue nor does it give you an idea of what this service offers. Its competitor, "Gist," is branded better, in our opinion. Gist does a bit more, too - it provides dashboards for viewing people and companies, for example, and it incorporates RSS feeds, Web mentions, Google image results and more. It's not "CRM-lite," by any means, but its complexity may also be more than what some people have need of. For those that just want a searchable conversation archive, there's Silentale.

However, it's now starting to become clearer as to why Silentale isn't making waves the way Gist is - the service often seems to suffer from stability issues. During testing, we encountered errors and timeouts more than a few times, both with the iPhone app and when previously testing the online service. The iPhone application wouldn't allow us to authenticate upon first launch, for example. Although today's issues and the prior ones could just be chalked up to launch day jitters (and the problems were soon corrected), it's still a concern. We don't know if the company needs to throw more servers at the problem, acquire more bandwidth or just hire better network engineers, but they can't expect busy people to rely on an app that doesn't consistently work.

No matter, we suppose: it works now and works as advertised, albeit after a lengthy "import" process (and one that required closing, then relaunching the app). But given the prior issues and time-consuming set up, we can't 100% recommend this app until the company gets things straightened out. (And we do hope it does - Silentale is incredibly useful when functional!) All that being said, the app is free, so if you want to brave it, you can download a copy for yourself here on iTunes. Just don't say we didn't warn you if you hit bugs.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/view_complete_contact_and_conversation_history_with_silentale_for_iphone.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/view_complete_contact_and_conversation_history_with_silentale_for_iphone.php Apple Wed, 21 Jul 2010 06:58:08 -0800 Sarah Perez Microsoft filed a lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle, against Salesforce.com for infringement of nine Microsoft patents, according to Horacio Gutierrez, vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing.

Although the frequent target of such suits, the Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft itself has only filed patent infringement suits four times in its history.

The nine patents that Microsoft holds Salesforce to have broken are the following.

• Method and system for mapping between logical data and physical data
• System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu
• Method and system for stacking toolbars in a computer display
• Automated web site creation using template driven generation of active server page applications
• Aggregation of system settings into objects
• Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
• Timing and velocity control for displaying graphical information
• Method and system for identifying and obtaining computer software from a remote computer
• System and method for controlling access to data entities in a computer network

The filing requests triple damages and a permanent injunction against Salesforce's continued alleged use of the patents.

We have been and may in the future be sued by third parties for alleged infringement of their proprietary rights.

In an SEC filing in January, Salesforce acknowledged the interest of a company that appears to be Microsoft.

"The software and Internet industries are characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, trademarks and copyrights and by frequent litigation based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. We have received in the past and may receive in the future communications from third parties claiming that we have infringed on the intellectual property rights of others. During fiscal 2009, we received a communication from a large technology company alleging that we were infringing upon some of their patents. We continue to analyze the potential merits of their claims, the potential defenses to such claims and potential counter claims, and the possibility of a license agreement as an alternative to litigation. We are currently in discussions with this company and no litigation has been filed to date."

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microsoft_sues_salesforce_for_patent_infringement_1.php Enterprise Tue, 18 May 2010 19:00:00 -0800 Curt Hopkins Despite the proverbial "the customer is always right," the relationship between the customer and the company has long been organized for the benefit of the latter. But the ability for companies to completely control this relationship has disappeared.

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management, a report from the Altimeter Group released earlier this month, serves to help companies and organizations understand the changing territory. The report offers a thorough framework with which companies can strategize their adoption of social CRM projects.

]]> Based on research with companies who have pioneered an embrace of social technologies for relationship management, the report lists 18 use cases that serve as entry points for social CRM efforts. These include social customer insights (tracking customers' preferences via social media sites like Facebook), rapid social marketing response (defending the brand in real-time), and crowdsourced R&D (eliciting real-time feedback to enhance innovation).
The report rates each use case by its market demand and tech maturity, indiced to help organizations see which might be the most expedient and appropriate entry points for their social CRM endeavors. It also lists vendors to watch, pointing out that there is currently no single tool to help organizations track customer data and customer conversations in a world of rapidly changing social technologies.

The report has six recommendations for organizations: Breathe social. Complement existing CRM processes. Measure social CRM projects on business goals rather than solely on engagement. Be prepared for rapid change. Find other social CRM pioneers.

The most important, perhaps: Act now. The report cautions companies against falling even further out of step with customers by not engaging with social technologies to expand their CRM processes. Well-researched and with clear definitions, the report could also help companies avoid undertaking social CRM projects merely for the buzz.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/breath_social_the_new_rules_of_relationship_management.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/breath_social_the_new_rules_of_relationship_management.php Social Networks Wed, 17 Mar 2010 19:00:00 -0800 Audrey Watters Cambridge UK startup Rapportive has released a Firefox and Chrome extension that will replace the ads in your Gmail with photos, biographic data and social media links, including a live display of recent Tweets, for whoever you're corresponding with by email. It's fantastic and takes about 2 minutes to set up.

The three person team behind Rapportive queries data provider Rapleaf for the social media profile data and does some local caching for performance optimization. Let's stop talking about it though - just go download it! Check out the screenshot and details below.

]]>

Trusting the Service

You don't need to give Rapportive your Gmail credentials, the service asks you to login via secure Google Federated Login, or OpenID. The startup doesn't have access to your password, but it does access the contents of your email - that's how it builds a service for you to use. Any browser extension has access to everything you do on the web, but I expect some people will feel a little nervous about installing a webmail related extension from a small company. I don't think that concern is warranted enough to justify missing out on this awesome service.

The company says that if your details are inaccurate you can visit Rapleaf and correct them.

Inbox as Platform

Rapportive is developing a platform for the development of custom applets that other companies can integrate within their local data stores so you can look up an email sender on your own system as part of the Rapportive display. Co-founder Rahul Vohra says such integration takes minutes to set up and in the long term the company hopes to create a marketplace for those applets. Team collaboration so notes left on contacts can be shared is also in the works, as is integration with popular paid CRM and customer service systems.

Rapportive was first reported on by The Next Web this morning.

I've been hoping to find something like this for a long time.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gmail_social_crm_plugin_rapportive.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gmail_social_crm_plugin_rapportive.php Product Reviews Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:45:47 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Xobni, the Outlook plugin that reveals the hidden social network in your inbox, has today launched a business service called Xobni Enterprise. With this, I.T. administrators are being given new tools to deploy and manage the plugin across corporate desktops. In addition, the company is offering customizable extensions for popular enterprise systems including Salesforce CRM, SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics, and others. It can even tap into a company's own information store saved in an LDAP database like Microsoft's Active Directory or it can pull from other internal websites.
]]> Deployment and Management Features

With Xobni Enterprise, I.T. admins can manage the deployment and permissions surrounding the plugin's use via a web-based portal that provides access to user's profiles as well as a groups management feature. By placing different subsets of users into groups, I.T. can deploy custom versions of the plugin to different users. For example, everyone company-wide may get a plugin that offers LDAP integration, but only sales professionals would receive the version that connects to Salesforce. Admins can also choose to "switch off" other previously default integrations such as the Facebook and Twitter extensions.



To push the plugin out to end users, Xobni Enterprise offers an MSI file and registry settings that can be modified as necessary.

Extensions for Salesforce, SharePoint, and More

At launch time, Xobni's Solution Provider Program has partnered with a number of Enterprise vendors to provide extensions and integrations for their new system. The current list of partners includes Atlius Consulting, Cogent, Echo Lane and Interdyne BMI, which help Xobni integrate SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce CRM platforms among others.

The new service also comes with an Extensions Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows in-house developers to write their own extensions to integrate other platforms beyond those which are currently available. Xobni suggests this SDK could be used to deliver company news and information from an internal corporate portal, specific business application, or any other web service.

Other Features

Another general enhancement available with this version of the plugin is Xobni's expanded search capabilities that allows users to search calendar appointments, tasks and archived PST files. The search feature includes advanced filters which let users find results by limiting searches to email contents only or the To:, From:, and  or Subject: fields of their email messages. Users can also access their entire contact database from the auto-complete field in Outlook's "Compose" window.

Pricing

The company webpage for Xobni Enterprise does not include any pricing information, only a link to "Request More Info" from the company. This is likely because each Xobni system is being somewhat custom-built in terms of price because there are additional costs to run the pre-defined extensions created by the company. Depending on which extensions a company chooses to deploy and however many users will be using them, the overall cost of the Xobni Enterprise system will vary. However, the company informs us that the system starts at $30 per user per year with volume discounts available.

Xobni has seen over 3 million downloads of their plugin, including both free and paid versions, since their initial debut. This new offering represents the second revenue stream for the company, the first being the launch of Xobni Plus, a premium version of the plugin that sells for $29.95. They also claim to have a presence in 80% of Fortune 500 companies thanks to employee adoption outside of the traditional I.T. infrastructure, a trend known as self-provisioning and one that has steadily increased over the years.

Companies looking to maintain control over what their employees can do on their company computers often end up having no choice but to purchase the enterprise services provided by the startups their employees are already using in order to once again centralize control within I.T. If Xobni's adoption across the enterprise is as strong as they claim, they may soon have several companies looking to implement the Xobni Enterprise Service so they can do just this. Other companies may be tempted to try the product for the first time now that it offers I.T. friendly tools and enterprise level support.

More information about Xobni Enterprise is available here on the company's website.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/xobni_goes_enterprise_20.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/xobni_goes_enterprise_20.php Enterprise Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:19:13 -0800 Sarah Perez Gist is a new service that tracks your contact lists from email and social networks, prioritizes them and helps you quickly view what those people have been up to across blogs, Twitter and elsewhere. The company just released an iPhone app this morning (iTunes link) and what more could you ask for? Instant context for people you're just about to call, meet with or have on your mind?

Unfortunately, the service doesn't work very well yet. The social web is a mess of disconnected identity and activity data; cleaning it all up, tying it together and delivering it on the fly to your phone is an ambitious goal, but that's one of the things Gist is trying to do.

]]> Gist lets you see all kinds of data from contacts, key companies and event attendees. Right now there is some value in what the app serves up. If you're willing to spend some time manually fixing up the streams associated with various contacts, then you could get a lot out of it right away. We reviewed the Gist web app last month and liked what we saw so far.

Unfortunately, it's very hard for any app like this to determine which social network profiles are really associated with the same people and which news coverage about a person is worth reading. (Hopefully the WebFinger protocol will help solve this problem for everyone someday.) If you try out the app you'll see that the signal-to-noise ratio is too weak to make for efficient, quick reading - but a quick scan for a contact's information could still help unearth some relevant information. It may be limited, a few weeks late and often incorrect - but savvy early adopters can still get some value out of it already. It's frustrating in more ways than I'm sure anyone cares to read about, but it's also worth trying out in hopes that the company will really nail it down the road. I know I sure want this to work.

Gist told me today that it is working with the Google Social Graph API for account discovery and MSpoke for disambiguation and content recommendations. Cleaning up the data is still the company's biggest challenge and one they've been working on from the start. The Google Social Graph API is a particularly gnarly tool for many startups like this - it's dependent on markup that too few people use and even fewer people use correctly.

None the less, you should give the Gist app a try if you'd like to see a vision of where the future could go. The fact that a team of very smart people with a good sum of venture capital invested is going to require more time to try and really nail the discovery of relevant, high-quality person-centric streams of information demonstrates what a challenge this important task really is.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gist_on_the_iphone.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/gist_on_the_iphone.php NYT Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:01:27 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick When we first looked at the personal relationship manager Gist back in October of last year, we were intrigued. Here was an online service that had a real purpose: to help you make sense out of your email's data. Gist does this by analyzing the relationships in the hidden social network that is your inbox and then determines who and what's important. It's like your own personal CRM system. At the time of our initial review, Gist was still in a closed private beta. Today, the closed trial has ended and everyone can now try Gist. The company has also added some new features to coincidence with the launch.
]]> What's Gist?

Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.

Through ongoing analysis of your email, Gist determines what's important based on the frequency and types of communications that occur. It then provides you with the following: profiles, insights, and actions. Profiles include both individual and company profiles, insights are the relevant information about your most important contacts, and actions are the ability to share news and contact details using the online service.

When you're signed into Gist, you're presented with a dashboard where boxes display key information like your top emailed contacts, news about those contacts, upcoming events, email attachments, and links. All this information is automatically retrieved from your inbox with no effort on your part. It's as if your email inbox serves as the backend database for this unique relationship management system.



Tabs at the top of the page let you move from the dashboard to sections where you can focus on People or Companies specifically, organizing them into groups, tagging them (a new feature), removing those you don't need to track, managing their importance levels via sliders, editing them, and much more. You can also click to view individual contacts and companies and edit the data there if need be.



New Features

One of the new features included in this updated public version of Gist is the ability to pull in contacts from Salesforce. This is a helpful addition to the program which also supports Gmail, Outlook, general Email/IMAP accounts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. You can import your own CSV file, too.



With additional software, Gist can be integrated right into Outlook and Salesforce. The Outlook integration is done via a plugin which pops up a separate window where you can access info on people, companies, events, messages, and attachments. The plugin was available previously, but has been updated in the new version. The company decided to go with a pop-up type of plugin for a few reasons. For one, by not implementing it as an email sidebar (like Xobni does, for instance), Gist data can be accessed from any screen in Outlook whether that's your inbox itself, a contact's details page, a meeting request form, etc. They also made the plugin work more like a mini-browser so it could perform its actions quickly while not slowing down Outlook in the process.



Also new today is Gist's integration with Salesforce. Not only can you pull data into Gist via the CRM system, you can now set up a Gist widget of sorts that displays right in Salesforce itself. Here, you can stay current on news, blogs, tweets, and other relevant information from your Salesforce contacts.

Integration with Twitter and the ability to share via Twitter and Facebook round out the new features in this latest beta build. Since many business folks can't be bothered to friend and follow their contacts on Twitter, Gist does it for you. It doesn't actually follow users on your behalf in your own Twitter account, but it pulls in their tweets from their publicly available timelines right into Gist. You can then respond or share information via Twitter or Facebook - an important step in managing and maintaining communications in today's tech savvy business world. You can still share items via email or flag them for later, as you could with previous Gist versions, too.

For now Gist remains a free service, though a more advanced paid version is in the works for the future. Gist is also working on their mobile offerings but have nothing to announce as far as specialized mobile applications just yet. New users can sign up for Gist now here: www.gist.com

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/personal_relationship_manager_gist_launches_to_public.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/personal_relationship_manager_gist_launches_to_public.php NYT Tue, 15 Sep 2009 06:01:20 -0800 Sarah Perez Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.

Whether you're Microsoft or Mel's Meat Market, the true power of social media and its impact on brands is really only beginning to be felt. As futurologist Ian Pearson stated in Gartner's Customer Relationship Management Summit earlier this year, the rapid pace of change in technology means that companies need to focus on agility instead of just optimization when it comes to integrating social media and CRM applications.

]]> Both affordable and easy to use, tools for monitoring a brand or reputation are essential and keep getting better. Trackur, Nambu, and the social media discussion search engine backtype all come to mind. Creating and capturing market conversations with customers has also improved greatly with the advent of online branded communities such as Lotus Connections and Clearstep as well as Lithium's emphasis on community and CRM. We have monitoring, communities, and collaboration: but something still seems to be missing.

We need rules of engagement for social CRM.

In other words, how do you effectively manage your dialogue with the market in terms of sharing information, fast-tracking problems, and responding to questions, both internally and externally, with customers, prospects, employees, other stakeholders, and the public? Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang agrees there's a gap here.

Although social CRM platforms and tools continue to evolve and improve, more attention needs to be given to process, ideology and roles in social media engagement. Process could involve your listening strategy: is it enterprise-wide or centralized? For roles, how and when would online conversations get routed to customer service/support, and when would they get routed to your PR, marketing or sales department? Just as important is establishing responsibilities and guidelines for engagement. When does a complaint get routed to the CEO, or a product idea go to your R&D group?

Companies are beginning to figure out how to use social CRM more efficiently by adapting their applications and workflow and adding more "community managers." These include Dell, Intuit, H&R Block, and certainly Comcast. Several community platforms are morphing as well and show promise for providing more robust social CRM capabilities. Neighborhood America's ELAvate platform, for example, includes multiple components for generating ideas, collecting large-scale public comment, and creating a white-label social network. Likewise, Radian6 has introduced a social CRM solution to integrate with Salesforce.com's service cloud; with this, sales and support teams can cross-reference social media content with customer and prospect information, streamline workflow, and manage real-time responses across the enterprise.

Still, it appears social CRM technology is well ahead of the day-to-day reality of actually managing online conversations. We need more thought given to strategy, process, and roles for engaging with customers and non-customers alike: the next new frontier of social media. Are you prepared? Please comment!

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_crm_what_are_rules_of_engagement.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_media_crm_what_are_rules_of_engagement.php Sponsors Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:00:38 -0800 RWW Sponsor Bob Nanna of Threadless, the online superpower that capitalizes brilliantly on hipster T-shirt culture, takes a moment at the company's Chicago, Illinois, headquarters to talk about how employees have used social media to build and grow "brand love," a bleeding-edge, white-hot marketing term I just invented.

From CRM via Twitter to Facebook live video contests, the folks at Threadless have knocked online engagement out of the park and created a community around a brand while building a great reputation for responsiveness. Watch on and be schooled.

]]>

Catch a whiff of the Threadless social aroma on their Twitter and Facebook pages.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_threadless_on_building_brand_love_through_so.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_threadless_on_building_brand_love_through_so.php Social Web Tue, 12 May 2009 04:30:00 -0800 Jolie O'Dell This morning my home wifi was having trouble and I posted a message to Twitter saying, "My wife has decided to start the day with a call to Comcast customer service, I should have offered to poke her in the eye with a spoon. Would have been more fun for her." Within minutes a man named Bill (@ComcastBill, really) publicly replied to ask if he could help.

I didn't think much of it, I assumed he was camped on a search.twitter results page for the word "Comcast" or maybe had subscribed to an RSS feed for the search. It turns out though, that far more than that was happening behind the scenes. An extensive machinery of tracking, delegation and analysis stood between Bill and my little Tweet. Maybe it has to be that way, maybe it's a good thing - but there's something deeply disturbing about it too.

]]> Companies all around the world know that "social media" is important and they are investing time and money into figuring out how to deal with it. Early this morning website analytics heavyweights WebTrends announced that they have made a deal with upstart social media monitoring firm Radian6 to offer a co-branded solution for keeping track of blog posts, Tweets, and other online ephemera mentioning your company.

Now the company's customers will not only be able to see extensive traffic data and to pull that data from what WebTrends calls the first free traffic data API on the market - they'll also be able to view social media mentions off-site in a relatively sophisticated interface. I asked Radin6's Chris Ramsey about what probably went on behind the scenes after I Tweeted about Comcast this morning. He said he couldn't say how Comcast in particular was using the software but it wasn't just a casual conversation. "Absolutely," he said. "There is more going on there."



Radian6 offers a sophisticated interface, but it's an odd one too. It's built in Flash and allows a fair number of different ways to slice and dice data. Data like, how many people are talking about you online vs. a competitor and the relative "influence" of those people. There's more advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology on the way into Radian6. Ramsey told us today that "if you look at all the major CRM companies out there, they are adding social listening technology - and as a social listening service, we're adding CRM."

The interface is slick like an iPhone, though, and an iPhone you can't jailbreak. The company gives you a variety of ways to deal with the data but you can't, for example, get an RSS feed out of it. There's something that feels condescending about these kinds of services. Why can't the marketers using them learn how to use the web, like the rest of us have? That's not an entirely fair critique as many sophisticated marketing geeks find systems like this (and Radian6 in particular) useful for dealing with data in aggregate. Many customers in this market, though, are jumping over from a workflow based on sticky notes and pasting blobs of text into Excel, and sometimes very infrequently even doing that. [Left, @ComcastBill]

The fact is, subscribing to a search feed for relevant terms in various search engines just isn't going to scale for larger businesses. When your online customer service team has a substantial number of people in it, you're probably going to need a system that goes beyond informal familiarity with people and one-off responses to online mentions. Dell's VP of Communities and Conversation, for example, has at least 45 people working under him. Having a system to listen, analyze, track, and export data from makes sense.

This isn't a story just about Comcast, Dell, WebTrends or Radian6. It's a story about corporate engagement with emerging social media.

"Social media is like the social phone, smart companies are listening to that and managing it with some process around it," Radian6's Chris Ramsey says, "That's the evolution of the call center." He says that many major companies have roadmaps that point to training a new breed of marketing and communications/customer service hybrids to staff their call centers.

The end result, though, is strange for those of us interacting with these customer service reps. It's not just Bill from Comcast and I trading public replies on Twitter (I can't DM him, he's not following me), and when Bonnie pinged me hours later in response to conversation about this article, it wasn't a casual person-to-person conversation. It looks like it's just you and them, but behind them there's a curtain covering a whole mess of cogs and pulleys, analyzing you in different ways. How many followers do you have? How did you respond the last time a company rep used your name publicly? Who's in charge of discussing your concerns with you on Twitter, on your blog, or elsewhere?



Add the fact that many of these positions are, or will someday be filled with sales people, have them view these conversations through a closed system of predetermined criteria, and set it all inside a big CRM database. What do you get? Is it a story of authentic connection in a democratized public conversation - or is it a charade?

It's kind of a modern day horror story, isn't it? Web 2.0's potential benefit for humanity tragically sold short by social media because it fell under a fog of marketing software. Would-be short-form conversationalists jumping in with CRM-tinted glasses secured to their faces. One of my co-workers says that within minutes of his wife Tweeting about her art studio last night, she was friended by scads of art companies and salespeople. Who wants to have a conversation in that context?

Or maybe it's just a matter of changing our expectations. Maybe this is all good; the new customer service - a lot like the old customer service, but in your blog comments and replies tab. What do you think? We'd sure like to know, because we expect there will be a whole lot more activity like this in the near term future.

Cog photo by Photoreciprocity. Which one's the cog photo?

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/this_machine_eats_tweets_the_system_behind_comcast.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/this_machine_eats_tweets_the_system_behind_comcast.php Analysis Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:40:05 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick These are reflections from having spent a few days at the annual Salesforce.com event, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce.
]]> 1. They Are Ambitious

Salesforce wants to be the dominant cloud platform for business. Their view is that computing has seen two waves: the first was the mainframe, and then the PC client server, and now the third is cloud computing. They have been consistent about this since their inception in March 1999, so this is no recent bandwagon hopping.

2. They Have a Good Shot at Meeting This Ambition

They have a powerful mix of capability and relentless focus. They have the resources -- cash, cash flow, clients, track record, management team, and so on -- needed to execute on this vision. Their competitors are bigger, but Salesforce has the advantage of focus. They are pure play, and they have no legacy to protect.

3. They Are a Marketing Machine with Flair

Having attended a few big rah-rah events, such as Java One, I see that Dreamforce compares well on scale, details, and flair. Its messaging and visuals were consistent and powerful, and everything just worked well. This all costs a lot of money (which relates to the next point), but that money has to be well spent, and they seem to be doing that. The presentations had real flair and humor. Benioff knows how to be controversial to get press. They are a billion-dollar business that still acts like a start-up. Even the music was good.

4. Their Biggest Issue Is Maybe Price

There are many lower-cost competitors to their base CRM application. Now that SaaS is increasingly accepted, due in part to Salesforce's evangelical marketing, smaller competitors spending a tiny fraction of what they spend on marketing can undercut them. Their most visible competitor is Zoho, and it does not look like Zoho is going to shy away from this battle, and they have staying power. So Salesforce is fighting on two fronts. On the one hand they are competing with Oracle and SAP for big enterprise accounts. On the other hand they are fighting low-cost competitors, such as Zoho. This will require all their marketing and management skills.

5. They See Today's Troubled Economy as Their Moment to Win Big

They got their early big traction in the last downturn around 2001 and 2002 and have never looked back. They are greedy while others are fearful. They spend more, grow, and hire, while other firms lay off people. The basic economic advantages of cloud computing, such as lower capital expenditures and a faster time to market, resonate in a downturn to the point that they overcome the resistance of conservative buyers to cloud computing.

6. Their Vendor Eco-System Is Making Money and Acting Bullish

Salesforce knows that this matters. This is the lesson they learned from Microsoft. Will they move into the spaces currently occupied by vendors? Of course they will. Vendors will have to be agile; that is just how the game works. But today, in these tough markets, we see vendors that are profitable, growing, hiring, and raising money. The winners in many segments are being defined now. It is a great time to be an entrepreneur in this space. Salesforce knows how to leverage all its capability to make a few winners do very well and then promote that success big time, thus inspiring others to come on board.

7. They Believe That Good Software Design Matters to the Core Economics of Cloud Computing

They refer constantly to their "multi-tenant kernel," which sounds very techie for a such a marketing-driven company. It does appear that they are not suffering from the scaling and reliability problems that we have seen affecting consumer Web 2.0 ventures such as Twitter and Facebook.

8. They Also Know How to Partner with Big Companies to Make Themselves Look Bigger

They wheeled out large companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon, as partners. The message was, "We are at the center of an eco-system with big partners." This makes large conservative enterprise buyers feel comfortable.

9. Focused Research and Development

They have a predictable and focused R&D plan, with a major theme each year. This again makes large conservative buyers feel comfortable: they know what to expect.

10. They Will Need to be Careful About Usability Issues

They are adding so much functionality and so many partners that they face the danger of users getting confused and going to simpler point solutions. That "hairball-of-complexity" problem bedeviled Microsoft as it grew fast, but Microsoft enjoyed a lock-in that Salesforce cannot count on. The SaaS world is naturally lock-in resistant, with low switching costs. There is no sign of this being an immediate problem for the company, but it is something they will have to look out for.

See also our most recent story about Salesforce: Salesforce.com Says Hello World.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_things_to_know_about_salesf.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_things_to_know_about_salesf.php Enterprise Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:00:00 -0800 Bernard Lunn