The Buzzient Blog

Social Media marries CRM…

We’ve been predicting for quite a while now that mainstream business applications would eventually recognize the impact of social media. With the rate of user growth in social media exceeding that of any other aspect of the internet, any B2B(or B2B2C) applications vendor needs to have a strategy to reach out to users congregating in social media. Whether for customer support, lead generation, or product development, social media data MUST be incorporated in the workflow of business applications.

Today, with the release by Salesforce.com of their  ServiceCloud V2, we’ve seen a formal embrace of integrating Twitter with Salesforce.com CRM.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/08/everything-you-need-to-know-about-salesforces-service-cloud-2/

Nevermind the fact that we’ve been quietly doing this for months at Buzzient (;o)); this announcement should serve as as wakeup call to other vendors for the need to have a social media integration strategy.

What Salesforce (and RightNow for that matter) and other CRM companies building internal social media extensions don’t address however is the inherent heterogeneity of complex enterprises. Everywhere there’s Salesforce.com installed in a complex enterprise, I’m willing to bet one will also find evidence of Netsuite, Oracle(Siebel, Peoplesoft, Hyperion), SAP, and other applications.  Any social media strategy should also include a way to provide access to that data for on-premise applications as well as products from multiple suppliers. In this fashion, a customer would be enabled to follow a social media post across not just CRM, but also ERP, BI and other business functions.  We at Buzzient are committed to making THAT social media marriage come to pass!!!