CRM List — Social CRM

The CRM List—Social CRM

Social CRM (sCRM) includes the strategy, processes and technology to collectively engage customers in a dialogue that satisfies customers' increasing requests for access to information and resources while providing suppliers with unprecedented feedback, customer engagement and improved customer relationships.

Social CRM extends traditional and largely transaction based CRM strategies with Web 2.0 tools and empowers brands to truly engage customers and as a result advance their customer relationships along a continuum from initial buyer to repeat customer to collaborative partner to unsolicited advocate. Social CRM business strategies recognize the change in controlling the dialogue from the supplier to the customer. However, Social CRM also empowers suppliers to employ tools which are user driven, collaborative, interactive and transparent in order engage customers at the time, place and method they prefer.

Social CRM List for Sales Professionals

Several social networks and online destinations offer a variety of prospect and customer information. Forward thinking sales pros are taking advantage of these sources to better prepare for outbound calls and even uncover buying signals which influence sales strategies.

	InsideView is a social searching solution that combines public, editorial and social media content for business research and intelligence. The Software as a Service (SaaS) product is mainly used by Sales teams in identifying and gathering information on prospects and customers.
	There is a reason the button says "Find us on Facebook". Brand fan pages and executive profiles on Facebook deliver useful information for sales professionals seeking to educate themselves before making cold calls or calling in blind.
	Like Facebook, prepared sales staff will seek out and follow key executives at their prospects and clients in order to learn what those executives think is important. Oftentimes the results help with small talk, and other times they reveal buying signals.
	The Salesforce.com Data.com is an online community-vetted lead and contact database. At last look, the semi-social network managed over 24 million mostly B2B contacts. Contacts are sourced and updated by an online community of sales and marketing professionals.
	The Salesforce.com Chatter product is a real-time collaboration platform that brings together people and data in a secure, private social messaging tool. It was originally described by Salesforce as the "Facebook for the enterprise." Rather than making people search for data, information is pushed to them.

Social CRM List for Marketing Professionals

Lead management software and marketing automation systems (aka Revenue Performance Management systems) are morphing with several types of social media tools and social network destinations in order to mix social CRM tools with internal marketing software systems.

	Eloqua created the lead management software category, and is today the leader in integrating and merging prospect and customer data from internal and external sources, including social networks and other social media destinations, for a more comprehensive prospect view.
	Teradata's Aprimo is a best in class marketing software solution for monitoring prospect and customer activities and behaviors across online and offline channels and intelligently delivering the most relevant messaging at just the right times.
	IBM's Unica is another impressive marketing automation software application, and direct competitor to Aprimo, which acquires data from online and social channels, provides automated campaign management and delivers customer analytics.
	Marketo is another lead management software system that combines anonymous website activities with social media destinations and internal CRM software information to help acquire, score, nurture and transfer sales-ready leads to the salesforce.
	Like Marketo, Pardot is a lead management system with tight integration to social networks. Pardot is designed for the small and midsize business (SMB) market and offers the most aggressive total cost of ownership (TCO) in the lead management software industry.

Social CRM List for Customer Service Professionals

Open communities, vendor managed communities and social networks are becoming the preferred destinations for buyers seeking objective references for products and brands as well as customers seeking answers to questions—or delivering both rants and raves.

	Jive's flagship product is Jive SBS (formerly Clearspace), which ties together collaboration software, community software, and social tools. The most recent Jive SBS release added microblogging, enterprise IM and support for OpenSocial.
	The Lithium Social CRM software includes online customer community applications such as blogs, forums, innovation management, live chat, and tribal knowledge bases with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes.
	This community-based product is described as "people-powered customer service". Anyone can ask a question, submit an idea or complaint, or give a comment. Companies can respond to issues regarding their products or services and their responses are marked as official answers.
	Uservoice provides hosted feedback forums which allow customers to create, discuss, and vote for ideas—and allow companies to better understand customer intent and sentiment and further better serve customers and improve customer relationships.
	Radian6, acquired by Salesforce.com, gives you a social monitoring platform (sometimes called social listening or web monitoring) to listen, measure and engage with your prospects and customers across social networks and most of the social web.