Social Networking Technology
Social networking technologies: mandatory component in every major enterprise IT strategy; http://eicker.at/MobileCloudWars
Tagged: Enterprise Social Networking Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Will Social Business Fail?
Forbes: Why social business will fail; http://j.mp/zySicF #SocialBusiness http://eicker.at/SocialBusiness
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Gerrit Eicker
Nimble
Turn your social communities into customers: Nimble social CRM platform for unified communications; http://eicker.at/Nimble
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Gerrit Eicker
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Best Website Design
As ever, really interesting and also practical piece Social Enterprise « Wir sprechen Online..
Many thanks…
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Gerrit Eicker
Mobile and Cloud Platform Wars
IDC: 2012 will be the year of mobile and cloud platform wars as IT vendors vie for leadership; http://eicker.at/MobileCloudWars
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Gerrit Eicker
IDC: “One year ago, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that the IT industry’s next dominant platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, would begin its transition into the mainstream. Today, spending on these technologies is growing at about 18% per year and is expected to account for at least 80% of IT spending growth between now and 2020. With future market revenues at stake, IDC predicts that 2012 will be marked by some of the first high-stakes battles as companies seek to position themselves for leadership in these critical and fast-growing technology areas. … Overall, IDC predicts that worldwide IT spending will grow 6.9% year over year to $1.8 trillion in 2012. As much as 20% of this total spending will be driven by the technologies that are reshaping the IT industry – smartphones, media tablets, mobile networks, social networking, and big data analytics. … 2012 will also be the Year of Mobile Ascendency as mobile devices (smartphones and media tablets) surpass PCs in both shipments and spending and mobile apps, with 85 billion downloads, generate more revenue than the mainframe market. The mobility market will see heated competition in 2012 as Microsoft joins the crucial battle for dominance in the mobile operating system (OS) market and the Kindle Fire challenges the iPad in the media tablet market. … Competition will also characterize the world of cloud services in 2012 as the strategic focus shifts from building infrastructure to the creation of application platforms and ecosystems. Here the battle for enterprise platform dominance is just getting underway with established players like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle facing serious challenges from Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, and VMware. … Social networking technologies – especially where they are being accelerated by mobile technologies – will be recognized as a mandatory component in every major enterprise IT vendors’ strategy. As a result, IDC expects a number of major IT vendors to make ‘statement’ acquisitions in social business while others continue to expand their community platforms. … Finally, Big Data will earn its place as the next ‘must have’ competency in 2012 as the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 zettabytes (ZB), up 48% from 2011. Over 90% of this information will be unstructured (e.g., images, videos, MP3 files, and files based on social media and Web-enabled workloads) – full of rich information, but challenging to understand and analyze. … The number of intelligent, communicating devices on the network will outnumber ‘traditional computing’ devices by almost 2 to 1 within next 24 months, changing the way we think – and interact – with each other and devices on the network.“
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Gerrit Eicker
IT: Cloud, Social, Mobile, Information
Gartner: Cloud, social, mobile and information combine to transform the IT landscape in 2012; http://eicker.at/IT2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Gartner: “Four IT forces, IT consumerization and new technology styles are forcing IT organizations to see they can’t control IT spending. They must actively manage technology investments inside and outside IT. … This Predicts 2012 special report highlights how the control of technology and technology-driven decisions is shifting out of the hands of IT organizations. New forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending. Specifically, the forces of cloud computing, social media and social networking, mobility and information management are all evolving at a rapid pace. … These technological evolutions in the workplace are largely happening despite the controls IT normally places on the use of technologies. The cloud offers new delivery styles and options that are industrialized in a value chain that renders on-premises IT systems and expertise as only part of the overall delivery of IT capabilities to the company. Social computing is allowing collaboration, and a shift of behavioral patterns of users and the communities in which they work. Mobility offers new access channels to applications and data, and at the same time provides end users with a wide variety of device choices. The combination of cloud, social computing and mobility can be used to increase geographic diversity and raise the productivity of virtual teams. Users expect to get access to personal, work, business applications and data from any device, anytime and anywhere. – Finally, the concept of ‘big data’ is beginning to forever alter the relationship of technology to information consumption, as data coming from multiple federated sources and in structured and unstructured forms must now be analyzed using new methodologies foreign to many IT departments. … As the relationship between ‘technology means’ and ‘technology outcomes’ becomes ever clearer, stakeholders of all kinds are gaining a sharper understanding of how technology decisions will impact the business, and are raising the bar in terms of expectations for success.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Failures
Google doesn’t get social: Google Plus‘ failures are plenty – but calling them dead? http://eicker.at/GooglePlusFailures
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Gerrit Eicker
Slate: “Google+ Is Dead – The search behemoth might not realize it yet, but its chance to compete with Facebook has come and gone. – [A] social network isn’t a product; it’s a place. Like a bar or a club, a social network needs a critical mass of people to be successful-the more people it attracts, the more people it attracts. Google couldn’t have possibly built every one of Facebook’s features into its new service when it launched, but to make up for its deficits, it ought to have let users experiment more freely with the site. That freewheeling attitude is precisely how Twitter – the only other social network to successfully take on Facebook in the last few years – got so big. When Twitter users invented ways to reply to one another or echo other people’s tweets, the service didn’t stop them – it embraced and extended their creativity. This attitude marked Twitter as a place whose hosts appreciated its users, and that attitude-and all the fun people were having-pushed people to stick with the site despite its many flaws (Twitter’s frequent downtime, for example). Google+, by contrast, never managed to translate its initial surge into lasting enthusiasm. And for that reason, it’s surely doomed.”
Scoble: “I wish I had never heard of Google+’s brand pages – The problem is that there’s no editorial tools for anything posted to our Google+ account. Google+ brand accounts are woefully inadequate for public companies’ needs. … Yes, Facebook didn’t have those features for its brand pages at first either but then when Facebook first came on the scene no one thought they would use it for business. Heck, when I first heard about Facebook it was still for college students only. … Did anyone really think these things through? Why did they take five months to get done? – Anyway, this is just a way for me to tell anyone thinking of signing up their company for a Google+ brand account to think twice. You might, because you signed your company up for such a thing, get saddled with an entirely new job that you might not like one bit. One that you’ll find that Google didn’t equip you for success in.”
Ruble: “I have decided not to post here for the time being. I will leave my profile up. Google+ is great. I wish them luck. Really i do. But I have to make choices about where I spend my time and for me that’s Twitter, Facebook and soon Tumblr – where I will be doing more so. It’s where I get the most value for the time invested. So, adios for now. See you on one of those networks. I may change my mind one day, but right now this is my plan. See you online.”
GigaOM: “[T]he problem with many of these criticisms – as with Manjoo’s premature obituary writing – isn’t just that social networks take time to evolve, and users need time to find out what they are useful for and what they aren’t useful for (Twitter is a perfect example of that, since its own creators didn’t really know what it was for when they built it). The problem is that they are seeing Google+ as JASN: just another social network. … But Google has made it clear that it has a lot bigger plans for Google+ than just making it a Facebook clone. Chairman Eric Schmidt has said the company wants to make the network an identity platform for all of its properties… So yes, Google+ is noisy for some, and for others is a ghost town. Many of its features are raw and need work, like the brand page rollout. But Google is not just trying to build a place to share photos of your cat – it wants Google+ to be a social layer for everything it does, and it has some powerful levers it can pull when it comes to encouraging people to use it, such as search and email. The full impact of that integration remains to be seen, but it is far too soon to call the network dead or a loser. It’s barely even the third inning.“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Pages
Google launches Google Plus Pages: Google Plus for local businesses and global brands; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusPages
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “So far Google+ has focused on connecting people with other people. But we want to make sure you can build relationships with all the things you care about – from local businesses to global brands-so today we’re rolling out Google+ Pages worldwide. … Google+ has always been a place for real-life sharing, and Google+ Pages is no exception. After all: behind every page (or storefront, or four-door sedan) is a passionate group of individuals, and we think you should able to connect with them too. … For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you’ll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello. – A number of pages are already available…, but any organization will soon be able to join the community… People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect. … Direct Connect works for a limited number of pages today (like +Google, +Pepsi, and +Toyota), but many more are coming. In the meantime, organizations can learn more about Direct Connect in our Help Center: Google+ Direct Connect lets you quickly navigate to a Google+ page (and even add that page to your circles) when using Google Search. For example, if you searched for the query ‘+youtube’ or ‘+pepsi,’ you could be immediately taken to the YouTube Google+ page, or the Pepsi Google+ page, and given the option to add the page to your circles.”
Google: “A Google+ page is your organization’s identity on Google+. Your business, school or nonprofit can post updates and news, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and engage in conversations with customers and followers. … Circles allow you to group followers of your page into smaller audiences. This lets you share specific messages with specific groups. … To help customers find your page and follow you, we have two buttons you can add to your website by visiting our Google+ badge configuration tool: The Google+ icon is a small icon that directly links to your page. – In the coming days, we’re introducing the Google+ badge, which lets people add your page to their circles, without leaving your site.”
Google: “To get your site on Google+, you first need to create a Google+ Page. On your page, you can engage in conversations with your visitors, direct readers back to your site for the latest updates, send tailored messages to specific groups of people, and see how many +1’s you have across the web. Google+ Pages will help you build relationships with your users, encouraging them to spend more time engaging with your content. … You can also link your site to your Google+ page so that all your +1s – from your Page, your website, and search results – will get tallied together and appear as a single total. … We want to help you get your site on Google+ as soon as possible, so we’re opening the field trial for Google+ Pages to everyone today. Creating a Google+ Page only takes a few minutes. To get started, you’ll need a personal Google+ profile. … To learn more about how Google+ works for your site, check out the Google+ Your Business site. We’re just getting started, and have many more features planned for the coming weeks and months.”
RWW: “Brand pages are one of the most anticipated Google+ features, and Google has been pulling down branded profiles in the meantime. Today’s launch initially only added pages for select partners, in addition to the major Google properties. … Google continues its pattern of rolling out features slowly and incrementally. As SVP of Engineering Vic Gundotra told the audience at Web 2.0 last month, ‘We’re going to take a cautious approach. We don’t want to make the mistakes of others.‘”
SEL: “Finally, Google is now allowing businesses, brands and any non-human entity to participate in its Google+ social network, through new Google+ Pages that are launching today, promised to be available to everyone within the next two days. … Local Is Different – If you’re creating a page for a local business, you have special options including the ability to enter a phone number. From Google’s help page on the topic: ‘Local Google+ pages are unique from other categories of pages because they have features that allow customers to easily connect with that business’s physical location. For example, local pages include a map of the business’s location and feature its address, phone number, and hours of operation.’ – Of course, many local businesses have already claimed their pages in the completely separate Google Places. Much of the information that Google+ Pages for local businesses wants – and more – are on those pages. But they remain unconnected. Google tells me: ‘Currently, Place pages and Google+ Pages must be managed separately. A Place page provides information about a business and makes it easy for customers to find local businesses on Google Maps and local search; while a Google+ page provides business owners with additional ways to engage, build relationships and interact directly with customers.’ … Another difference from personal accounts is that it’s perfectly fine for a business to have multiple Google+ pages. From the help page: ‘Pages can be made for a variety of different entities whereas profiles can only be made for people.’ … Anyone can make a business page for any URL without providing proof that they somehow ‘own’ or are associated with that URL. Potentially, that means pages can pretend to be representing a site they’re not connected with. Verification for big brands (see below) is one way Google aims to combat any problems this might cause.”
SEW: “At first glance, Google+ Pages and Profiles appear almost identical. However, in this help page, Google lays out the differences between Pages and Profiles…: Pages can’t add people to circles unless someone adds a Google+ Page to their circles or mentions (using the + or @ before the name) the page. – Pages are for entities; profiles are for people. – Pages are public by default. – Pages have a +1 button. – Pages can’t +1 other pages, play games, share to extended circles, receive notifications via email, text, or Google+ bar, or hangout on mobile devices. … Soon, advertisers will be able to link their Google+ Page to AdWords campaigns. This will provide a grand total of +1’s, taken by adding up +1’s from your Google+ Page, website, ads, and search results. Google noted that ‘your +1’s will be shown with your brand wherever it appears, including search, ads, Google+ and your website.'”
TC: “Google has made some key tweaks. The first is that a Page cannot add someone to a circle until that user has already added the page to one of their circles. In other words, a Page can’t start sending you messages until you’ve elected to add them to one of your circles. Another key change: the content on a Page defaults to public (as opposed to ‘My Circles’ for personal profiles) and Pages can’t share with extended circles. … Apparently only some users can create Google Pages for the time being – you can see if your account is enabled right here.”
ATD: “Google+ today launches a much-anticipated feature for brands, companies and other organizations to create accounts. … Direct Connect is different: Google is establishing approved relationships with brands to drive traffic to their pages and establish lasting relationships with users of its social network. It’s like a powerful shortcut version of the old AOL keywords or the increasingly ubiquitous ‘Like us on Facebook/Follow us on Twitter.’ … It’s possible that very few people will want to treat the search field as a command line interface, but it’s still highly significant that Google will be actively promoting approved Google+ pages out front of its hotly contested search results pages. … Also coming soon for Pages: Support for multiple administrators, analytics and better Circle functionality to manage millions of people.”
TNW: “How to help Direct Connect find your Google+ Page – According to Google, here’s a few steps you can follow to help the algorithm associate your website and your Page: 1. Connect your Google+ page and your website using the Google+ badge… 2. Add a snippet of code to your site… 3. Adding your website link to your Page… All these methods will help Google’s algorithm to associate content when it rolls out Direct Connect more widely.”
AdAge: “It’s official: Google’s answer to Facebook is finally here with the launch of Google+ Brand Profiles. … This may be hard to believe. Google+ has been billed as a Facebook killer, its user homepage layout borrows heavily from Facebook, and now there are free self-service branded pages for marketers similar conceptually to what Facebook introduced in November 2007 – almost four years ago to the day. … Every link shared through Google+ has media implications as well. Those +1’s appearing on natural search engine results can also wind up appearing on advertisers’ paid search ads and display ads running on Google. If Google+ achieves enough scale, and if ads with +1’s garner higher CTRs as expected, then Google+ powered ads will wind up as the most successful form of social advertising online. … To that end, a brand doesn’t need a Google+ Brand Profile to add +1’s to ads, but having a vibrant community connected to the Brand Profile could be a major driver of those +1’s. … Despite all the reasons to treat Google+ has a unique offering, marketers that decide to create and manage Brand Profiles will need to allocate resources somehow. … Realistically, in the short term, marketers who are already at capacity for social programs will shift their existing staff’s time from Facebook, Twitter, and other communities…”
TNW: “Did Google+ just bury Twitter with its Pages launch? – I’ve said it a few times, and I’ll say it again, Email is still the #1 social network in the world. Everyone uses it, it works cross-platform, and it drives businesses and personal lives. With Google+ integrated into Gmail, it makes sharing information and getting updates simple. Will people get tired of visiting yet another site like Twitter or downloading yet another app? It’s too early to tell, but at the end of the day, everyone likes things to be easy.”
FC: “Business Won’t Like +1 – Google+’s fundamental consumer action model is far more limited than Facebook’s, too. – For the everyday consumer to interact with a brand on Facebook, the only point of entry is the ‘Like’ button. It’s as simple to contract and as long lasting as any parasite. – ‘Like’ a page, and you’ll not only be marked as part of their fan base, but you’ll be subscribed to see their updates. – Google+ rips the ‘Like’ button into two devastatingly separate entities.”
TC: “How Google+ Could One-Up Facebook’s Brand Pages – Google has a chance to make Page applications more accessible to all businesses by creating official templates that can be customized with the images, copy, and functionality desired by brands. Rather than forcing admins to choose between apps built by unknown third-parties, it could give them free templates they can trust to work. This would also allow Google+ to offer Page apps without first having to create a robust set of APIs to support them. – Facebook has forged a functional model for brand presences on social networks. Unfortunately, its focus on app developers and its desire to get brands advertising in order to target specific demographics has left Google some big opportunities to create a friendlier platform for brands.”
RWW: “Day 1 of Google+ Pages: The Muppets Fall Flat, But Brands Are Trying to Engage – It is very early days for Pages with brands. Already though you get the sense that the best way for brands to use Google+ will be to truly interact with their followers. Whether by posts that solicit comments or by video hangouts, Google+ is best used to engage in conversation with other people.”
TNW: “Google’s Bradley Horowitz has fired back at Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that the company is ‘building its own little Facebook’ saying that Google is ‘delighted to be underestimated’ by its rival. … Horowitz rejected comparisons between Google, Facebook and other social networks as being little more than fodder to give the media advertising and click throughs, with the Google man insisting that the company is focused in making its services better and not watching the competition.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Google+ Pages have already provided brands and businesses a new means of connecting to and deeply engaging with consumers. In the weeks since launching pages, we’ve been listening to your feedback and we’re pleased to make some of the most oft-requested features available. – You can now delegate up to 50 named managers as administrators for a page. – A new notification flow will ensure that these managers stay in the loop on all the activity that takes place on a page, giving managers the ability to stay involved in page conversations. – We’ll now show an aggregated count of users that have engaged with your page, either by +1’ing it or by adding it to a circle. This way, both you and your page’s visitors can get an at-a-glance summary of who is interacting with your page.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus + Google Apps
Google Plus is now available with Google Apps, adds sharing history with Google+ Ripples; http://eicker.at/GoogleAppsPlus
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Google Apps fans, today we’re ready to add you to our circles. Google+ makes sharing on the web more like sharing in the real world, and now Google+ is available to people who use Google Apps at college, at work or at home. – Starting now you can manually turn on Google+ for your organization. Once Google+ is turned on, your users will just need to sign up at google.com/+ to get started. For customers who use Google Apps for Business or the free version of Google Apps and who have chosen to automatically enable new services, Google+ will automatically become available to all of your users over the next several days. … Hangouts with extras, which combines multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, lets you work together on projects even when your team can’t be in the same room. … Many students and teachers have sent us their ideas about how they can use Google+ to teach, learn, work, and play. These are a few Google Apps for Education universities from around the world that are bringing Google+ to their campuses today… For those of you who’ve already started using Google+ with a personal Google Account and would prefer to use your Google Apps account, we’re building a migration tool to help you move over. … It took more technical work than we expected to bring Google+ to Google Apps, and we thank you for your patience.”
RWW: “The day has finally come. Google Plus is now available for Google Apps customers. Apps administrators can now manually turn on Google Plus for their organizations. The welcome change will roll out in the ‘next several days.’ … Google Apps users have been crying out for Plus access since the beginning. These are the customers who actually pay Google to use its Web services for their organizations, and yet the Apps versions of Google’s tools routinely lag behind the free versions. … But ever since the public launch, Plus has had this killer feature with no clear user base: Google Docs in Hangouts. It’s an ideal way to collaborate on a project. But how often do casual friends collaborate on projects? Google Plus has had an obvious institutional use case for over a month. Now, at last, Google Apps users in college or the office can use these tools to get things done.”
VB: “While enabling Google+ for Google Apps customers is certainly a big move for the company, eventually Google plans to bring Google+ functionality to all of its various services (Gmail, search, shopping, etc.).”
TNW: “Using Google+ for Google Apps? Your admin has access to all of your data – If you’re a user of Google+ with a corporate or education Google Apps account, your administrator can access and modify your Google+ account and its postings. This information is pointed out in a Google help center topic related to the new feature: ‘Because you’re signing up for Google+ with your corporate email address, your Google Apps administrator retains the right to access your Google+ data and modify or delete it at any time.’ … The fact that an administrator has access to your accounts under Google Apps is nothing new, but this is the first time that Google has had a social network among its Apps offerings, so the privacy implications are a bit more severe.”
Google: “Whether it’s breaking news or beautiful photos, you just don’t want to miss anything. With this in mind, we’re launching ‘What’s Hot’ on Google+, a new place to visit for interesting and unexpected content… Google+ Ripples: watch how posts get shared – There’s something deeply satisfying about sharing on Google+, then watching the activity unfold. Comments pour in, notifications light up, friends share with friends [who share with their friends], and in no time at all there’s an entire community around your post. … Google+ Creative Kit: have more fun with your photos – Now you can add that vintage feel to your vacation photos. Or sharpen those snapshots from the family barbeque. Or add some text for added personality. With the Creative Kit, all you need is an idea…”
TC: “Google+ Resurrects Playback Feature From Wave, Renames It ‘Ripples’ – Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. … And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called ‘Playback’. … Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users ‘re-live’ the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. … In other words, Ripples is a ‘visualization tool for public shares and comments‘, which users can access by simply selecting the ‘View Ripples’ option in the drop down window to the right of the public post.”
TNW: “Google not only wants to show you what’s hot, but wants to show you how it got hot by showing you how a post was shared. The name also brings back memories of a previous Google product, ‘Wave’. … This is a pretty drastic upgrade for Google+, as until now, the only way to find posts that interested you was through its search function, or when your friends re-shared a post.”
VB: “Perhaps more interesting for the visually oriented is Google+ Ripples, a new way to watch how posts travel across the company’s set of social features and through various user’s circles. You can view the ‘ripples’ for any public post; this feature will show you all of that post’s activity. You can zoom in on specific events, check out top contributors and more.”
Gerrit Eicker
Social Business: Strategy, Measurement, Engagement
Social business: harnessing intelligence, measuring community health, moving to engagement; http://eicker.at/SocialBusiness
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Gerrit Eicker
Hinchcliffe: “As businesses begin looking strategically at big data as a way to improve their business performance, an important element of their efforts will be in the burgeoning capability of social analytics… 1. Social media has become the primary creative channel for new information. 2. Business intelligence must look at the whole ecosystem. 3. New techniques are required for social analytics as well as to handle the volumes of big data that result. – While the field is somewhat new, as social analytics has only had a real run-up the last two years, some obvious strategies have started to emerge. For now, most organizations will be trying to build basic social BI capabilities and get experience with them…
- Expertise and Reputation Tracking
- Customer Engagement and Retention
- Social Business Adoption Tracking
- Funnel Analysis
- Social Supply Chain Management
- Human Capital Management
- Compliance and Regulatory Tracking
- Brand Insight
- Operations Management
There are other ways to apply social BI but these will be the most common ones for the majority of companies building or acquiring such capabilities.”
Camargo: “Creating successful online communities is still more art than science, yet techniques and frameworks are now emerging to turn social business into a real discipline. This week we take a look at a new case study that explores metrics that can measure the intrinsic health of communities instead of looking purely at size as the defining barometer. … Conventional wisdom tells us Community Owners should rely on two key metrics to track the success of an online community: Membership (number of registered users) and participation (number of active users in a given time period). That’s well and good but what about measuring the health of the community, not just its size? … Each and every community out there will have its own particular intricacies and you organization will surely require you to adhere to its own KPIs and reporting frameworks. In our case, the content contribution pyramid-inspired reporting model was a very valuable addition to our reporting toolbox. This KPI enabled us to understand variations in context, purpose and participants within each of our communities while keeping an eye on overall growth trends.”
Hinchcliffe: “When we look back at the first decade of the 21st century, it will be obvious that a few momentous changes in the business and computing landscape occurred. Of these, one of the most profound has been a decreasing emphasis on systems of record and the move towards what are called systems of engagement. … Systems of record have matured to the point where there’s only a little strategic advantage to having your own unique capability. Instead, the discussion on strategic technology has shifted to the other 40% of what businesses in industrialized nations do: Knowledge work. … Thus, using technology to enable knowledge work as a strategic capability has sparked a growing interest in improving what are increasingly known as systems of engagement. … For enterprises, ground zero for the transition to systems of engagement in many companies often centers around any pending update of the corporate intranet. … What’s also clear about the changes taking place in businesses today is that systems of record are not going away. … New systems of engagement are now receiving considerable attention in the forms of online communities, crowdsourcing, Social CRM, open APIs, and many other means as a way to connect customers and business partners together to achieve useful outcomes with the most cost-effectiveness and largest result.“
Gerrit Eicker
Social CRM (SCRM)
Gartner: The market for Social CRM [SCRM] is on pace to surpass $1B in revenue by year-end 2012; http://eicker.at/SCRM
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Gerrit Eicker
Wikipedia: “Social CRM is use of social media services, techniques and technology to enable organisations to engage with their customers. As an emerging discipline, interpretations of Social CRM vary, but the most frequently quoted definition is from Paul Greenberg: ‘Social CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.‘ – Social CRM is often used as a synonym for Social Media Monitoring, where organisations watch services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for relevant mentions of their product and brand and react accordingly. However, this is too narrow an interpretation, as Social CRM also includes customer communities managed by the organisation themselves.”
Greenberg: “What this means is that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM. Its a dramatic change in what it adds to the features, functions and characteristics of CRM but it is still based on the time honored principle that a business needs its customers and prefers them profitable and that same business needs to run itself effectively too. – The transformation that’s sparked the need for Social CRM seems to have occurred in 2004. It has been a social revolution in how we communicate, not a revolution in how we do business per se. All institutions that humans interact with have been affected by things like the cellphone/smartphone, the new social web tools and the instant availability of information in an aggregated and organized way that provides intelligence to the person on the street, not just the enterprise.”
Gartner: “The worldwide social customer relationship management (CRM) market is forecast to reach over $1 billion in revenue by year-end 2012, up from approximately $625 million in 2010… Worldwide social CRM is projected to total $820 million in 2011. … Until recently, many companies have treated social CRM as a series of experiments and tactical purchases. Few have a social CRM strategy or established metrics to measure its effect on hard business results. Different departments, employees and managers implement different types of applications for different purposes… The need for integration will favor more-traditional CRM vendors that add social capabilities. Integration did not matter much when enterprises were just experimenting with social CRM… [C]ompanies are asking for the integration of social data with other customer data within sales, marketing and customer service processes, which will require the integration of social CRM with applications such as a knowledgebase for customer service, multichannel campaign management, sales force automation or e-commerce, Web content and Web analytic applications, master data management, and even back-office applications.”
TC: “While the market is clearly competitive, Gartner says that certain factors can help differentiate Social CRM offerings, including interoperation between public social networks and internal collaborative communities, integration with established CRM products, analytics and more. – There’s no doubt that there is growth in the social enterprise in general. And there’s a lot of movement already taking place in the space. Jive just filed for a $100 million IPO, and Salesforce is making big bets on the space with Chatter.”
Nimble: “Today, business has changed. With the advent of social media, email, IM, text messages and more, businesses are overwhelmed by the myriad applications needed to listen to and engage with their customers. The question is no longer how to stay connected – but how to efficiently and cost-effectively build business relationships given multiple communication channels. From that new need sprang Jon Ferrara’s latest innovation: Nimble. … After two years of development and thousands of real world users, Nimble has emerged as the next evolution in relationship management – the only web-based solution that brings together all of your contacts, calendar, communications and collaborations in one simple, free platform. – Nimble’s core benefit lies in its ability to unify email, calendar activities and the most popular social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter), and automatically link this functionality to business contacts. Instead of jumping from application to application, small businesses now have one solution that can help them find individuals relevant to their business – no matter where they are on the Web – listen and engage with those individuals in any number of ways, and build relationships that can lead to opportunity.”
Nimble: “View core contact information, and all activities, emails, notes, and social conversations related to that contact, in one clean and simple screen. – Nimble will automatically identify contact’s social profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter so that you and your team can easily connect, listen, and engage with your most important business associates. – With Nimble, you can send messages, add tasks and events, edit or download the contact profile…right from the contact’s profile window. … Listen to all of the relevant conversations happening in your social networks. Connect with your community from one unified inbox. – Listen to all of the relevant conversations happening in your social networks. – Nimble’s message screen gives you plenty of options for engaging contacts. Quickly create tasks, schedule events, or reply to messages using the most popular social platforms. … Create and delegate tasks to team members with ease. See who assigned the task, or keep track of team member tasks by viewing their calendars and to do lists. … Nimble unifies your social streams and conversations from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Now you don’t have to go to three different places to listen, engage, and build trusting relationships. … Extend the power of Nimble with these great products from our Integration Partners. Offering lead capture and analytics, email marketing support and more, Nimble’s add-ons give your business even more ways to close the marketing and sales loop: MailChimp, Wufoo, HubSpot”
TC: “Jon Ferrara thinks Salesforce is doing it wrong when it comes to social. The founder of Goldmine, a CRM company he sold for $100 million nearly a decade ago, is attacking the market a different way with his latest startup, Nimble. ‘We are effectively Salesforce but social,’ he says, taking a jab at what is now the 800-pound gorilla. – Salesforce would counter that it has Chatter and Radian6, but punching up is always a good way to get noticed (just ask Marc Benioff, who became a billionaire tussling with Microsoft and Oracle). … Nimble isn’t going up against Salesforce head-on. That would be stupid. Instead, it is trying to nail the social component of business communications. Nimble is an enterprise social platform built around contacts, calendars, and communications (both internal and external). It ties together email with social streams (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and puts it all into one interconnected database. … A better way to think of Nimble is as a social contact and communications database which ties into other enterprise and social services. Today, it pulls in messages from Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. With its next release, it will pull integrate with HubSpot (which turns website visitors into sales leads), Infochimps (datasets), and WuFoo (online forms).”
VB: “CRM systems act as a database of people you have been in contact with. From quick e-mail conversations to full out meetings, this often cloud-based software – the best-known vendor of which is Salesforce.com – is your little black book of sales. But because of how many different ways there are to connect with people, along with how many different people we can reach with the advent of social media, customer relationship management has become extremely messy. – Nimble’s solution takes your e-mail, calendar, social networks, business networks, and a number of other points of connection and aggregates them into its software. But even with all of these integrations, CRM systems are static, one-way streets. That’s where Nimble’s changes start. … With the topic of ‘big data’ floating around, Ferrara wanted to touch on not just what you could do or enter into Nimble, but rather what Nimble could tell you. Currently, Nimble’s system sends out daily e-mails announcing a contact’s birthday, job change, or other tid bits of information. But it will soon add alerts to let you know about possible relationship changes with your contacts.”
Comparz: “Nimble’s account set-up, contact-importing and profile-building features are largely automatic and at least as easy to use as those of leading competing offerings. The Nimble interface offers fewer configuration options than those of some other offerings, but is clean and easy to navigate. Nimble’s ability to let users post to Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter and to create e-mails from within the same interface offers more flexibility and agility in integrated management of communications and social networks than available from most leading alternatives. … Nimble goes beyond social media management, adding collaboration, sales and marketing features and consolidated communication options not available with other leading alternatives. Those interested in converting social networking contacts into engaged relationships, business or personal, should look closely at Nimble (and keep tabs on promised enhancements such as add-on applications and campaign management features).”
CRM Idol: “While Nimble is only two years old, it seems like it’s been in the making for the past two decades. The founder, Jon Ferrara, is one of the pioneers of the industry; he was one of the co-founders of Goldmine (contact management application). And that experience, along with his passion for relationship building is at the heart of the company, and the product. … Nimble builds on the valuable experience the core management team obtained while building Goldmine. That experience combined with the organization’s social philosophy has led to a unique application that delivers a nice set of services to SMBs needing to be social and do business. The approach to creating a community of developers and integration partners – as well as relationships with local resellers from the Goldmine days- provides Nimble with an ecosystem most small vendors don’t have at their disposal. Nimble also has the financial resources to compete in the SMB market, which puts them in a great position to succeed in the space – that is unless somebody snaps them up in the near future.“