Connectbeam as Social CRM? Named 2009 Company to Watch on ZDNet

It's always a pleasure to find your company named a "Company to Watch". This week, Connectbeam received that honor in a post by Paul Greenberg on ZDNet, CRM 2009 - Companies to Watch For - Part Tree, er...Three.

Paul Greenberg is the president of The 56 Group, LLC, author of the best selling book "CRM at the Speed of Light: Essential Customer Strategies for the 21st Century" and was one of nine people named by CRM Magazine as 2008 Influential Leaders.

Now here at Connectbeam, we're energized by the possibilities that sharing employee generated content and activity. Share what you find out on the web, share the content you create in different social software apps. And in doing so, you're creating a much richer picture about yourself inside the company.

But CRM? When a guy like Paul Greenberg mentions you in that context, you take note. Here is how Paul describes Social CRM:

"The interest in extending CRM applications and strategies into communities and social media will increase in the large enterprises as they begin to realize that to retain their customers they need to engage them in more valuable activities that will lead to continued purchases."

And it makes sense when you think of it that way. Let me give a couple examples of how this works.

External Market Intelligence

Say you're a large company monitoring your brand, compatitors and market out on Twitter. You either periodically run a search on search.twitter.com to see the latest, or you have a persistent search going via RSS. You find people tweeting good and bad things about you and your competitors. Now the challenge is this: how do I effectively bring the tweet inside the enterprise, share it with others and make it findable?

With Connectbeam, you bookmark it into your own, behind-the-firewall database. You can tag the tweet with labels that give it context, such as a product name, 'feedback', 'positive' or 'negative' and a number of different ways. Whatever makes sense to you and your organization. And you can put it in a dedicated Group, such as Customer Feedback.

When someone runs a search for customer feedback, your saved market intelligence shows up. And if you have an app that accepts RSS, you can pipe these saved tweets into it.

In this way, you've got an easy, effective way to stay on top of market chatter. For additional thoughts on this subject, see Social media redefines traditional business intelligence strategies.

Internal Experts

The other use is when others in your organization are writing about a product, customer, competitor or market trends. They may be doing this on a wiki, blog or forum. Currently, there's no good way to ensure that these great contributions are seen by the wider organization. Nor is it easy to identify who knows something about a customer.

By aggregating the content created by employees across the organization in these social software applications, you have the basis for expanding the reach of this information anywhere someone is looking for it. You also now know who has experience with these different areas.

This occurs because aggregated employee generated content can be added to pretty much any search engine, be it internal or external. Run a search on the intranet or CRM app? You won't miss the latest content created by employees. And you'll get a list of related users.

Social CRM - Let's Check This Out for 2009

Thank you Paul Greenberg for really cracking open this topic. It's one that many companies are thinking about and is only growing in importance. We look forward to seeing how companies look at this in the coming year.

Comments

[Fødselsdagskort]

Seems like a great initiativ, but have you lost momentum lately? It's been a long time between the blog posts.