The new world of Social Media integration!

“Social CRM” seems to be the buzz word lately and I wanted to check what the new wave that everybody is talking about connecting with customers or prospects. Social CRM in a nutshell involves plugging into social networking (primarily LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook I guess), as a new channel within your existing CRM processes and investments. You can also get “News feeds” integrated I would presume.

I realize that customers are adopting social networks at a breathtaking pace, but do businesses need to keep up? How much of it useful information and how much is noise is always going to be the big question!

If the goal is to deepen relationships with customers with your personal branding, throwing meaningful titbits during an interaction might be of some value. I don’t see all companies succeeding in improving and strengthening their interaction through social media integration.

Recently, Yammer officials announced native integration between Yammer’s enterprise social-networking and Microsoft Dynamics CRM products. For those not familiar with Yammer, it is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question. According to their website “It brings power of social networking to your company. Yammer is as easy to use as great consumer software like Facebook and Twitter, but is designed for company collaboration, file sharing, knowledge exchange and team efficiency.”

In addition, one can quickly and easily extend the cloud-based Salesforce CRM application to connect with customers in Social CRM contexts. They have Salesforce for Twitter and a facebook agency Force.com to quickly and easily extend cloud-based Salesforce CRM application to connect with customers in Social CRM contexts.

Social networks seems to have altered the balance of power, we don’t just create a website anymore, we now have a separate company page on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. All we can do now is to get started on embracing the new wave, invest in social media training, integrate it as part of our culture and demonstrate the value of adding social media component to our customers

BTW, iLink Systems offers Social Media technology consulting services around:

• Salesforce.com Social
• Web or Intranet Content Management with Social media
• Lead generation from the social chatter
• Consumer moods analysis

Yammer integration

Blogger : Mahadevan Seetharaman