There's a really neat tool from a startup called Oktopost www.oktopost.com that does the integration between social media and CRM. They've provide turnkey integration straight from twitter/LinkedIn/FB with salesforce.com. I think these kind of integrations between social media and CRM are critical.
That will be a significant development in efforts to monitor conversion rates from initial contact with a prospective customer and actual sales being made. Was wondering how a web-based feedback or a discussion (on social network) will be uploaded on a non-web-based CRM with reference to a specific customer.
True. Though the task of responding to complaints should be delegated to a specific function like sales department but it should be not be confined to them. How about company's CEO or Sales VP responding personally (obviously not frequently) to complaints of customers. This would be an ideal example of leading from the front and imagine the enhancement of brand image due to small contributions like these from the leadership.
WaqasAltaf and magneticnorth: I don't believe that social has to change the nature of handoff between marketing and sales. Marketing is still responsible for bringing in leads (through awareness, but also sometimes directly via lead gen) and then sales takes over from there.
My point that marketing needs to be "sales oriented" with its social media activities, is that there needs to be greater focus on ensuring that time and money spent on social media delivers leads to sales - not necessarily *more* leads, as a I think social media can be effective in increasing the *quality* of leads even if relative numbers are not high (which is the case in B2B in many cases). But marketing's eye should always be on how the investment in social media improves the funnel.
As the market matures, we'll see greater integration between social media and CRM systems so you can track the source of a sale back to a particular tweet or LinkedIn post.
WaqasAltaf: so true. A company that replies to user reviews easily gets plus points in my book. Openness is something we value greatly these days, and being open to receiving complaints is a major thing.
Russell: that depends on the company. I've seen B2B companies with sales departments that are more mature than their marketing departments, especially in terms of training and funding.
My B2B clients have very small marketing departments, who'll surely be overwhelmed by all that work. But they do have huge sales departments with people hungry for new accounts. I think the key to making the above feasible for my clients is sales training on online marketing. That way, the marketing department simply guides everyone while the commission-based sales people do the legwork.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
