How do you connect to Twitter and understand its value and performance? That’s part of the challenge for any enterprise considering how to adopt social technologies to connect with customers.
This week at Sugarcon we heard a lot about how to manage a social CRM envrionment. Increasingly, companies are turning to API’s for integrating third-party applications like Twitter to better connect and interact with customers.
Sonoa Systems calls it an API economy with Twitter serving as the most applied API on the planet.
To manage API’s, Sonoa offers Apigee, a free self-service for developers working with API’s. This week at the Chirp conference, Sonoa broadened Apigee by providing analytics, monitoring, debugging and testing tools.
For example, with API Analytics a customer may monitor usage levels, review usage patterns, see the geo-location and look at performance metrics like response time.
The service now also allows users to share messages with other developers to help with troubleshooting and community learning.
API management will become a major requirement for the enterprise, especially as more applications integrate into CRM environments. As Paul Greenberg stated in his keynote at Sugarcon, the focus is no longer about controlling the customer contact but interacting with the customer in the fashion they wish to communicate.
[Disclosure: SugarCRM paid for a plane ticket for Alex Williams to attend SugarCon in San Francisco.]
