At the annual Salesforce user conference this year, DreamForce ’09, the buzz was about its ability to merge people’s streams, Twitter for example, into their CRM solution.
A new question for the industry emerges: Will the Salesforce cloud reach consumers on on their own timeline, or instead will social media own the stream and connect to the company directly?
This seems like version two of the same battle that was seen in IT in the mid-90s. In those days, marketing owned the company website, which was used as a marketing extension to reach customers. Twitter and Facebook today is in the same place, where marketing is using social media to reach customers, and IT and sales are using CRM systems.
But, in round one, IT ended up ruling the roost of the Web applications and infrastructure. The question of whether IT systems will be the new primary channel via tools like Salesforce is unclear, and could be a make-or-break scenario for those tools to prove their relevancy in the real-time Web.
Facebook was bruised by the community for going too far, too fast in sharing personal information, but it is paving the way for that level of sharing to become mainstream. Recently, we saw the funding and launch of Blippy, a new service that allows a person to share their purchases from iTunes, Amazon, and other vendors with their followers and friends. It shows that transactions can, in fact, be social.
There is tremendous value that comes from knowing a customer’s relationships with vendors. Right now, it is starting to look like social frameworks and the real-time Web are getting the upper hand in the market.
One big benefit when the conversation about the transaction comes from an individual is that it can include all transactions, whereas when the approach comes from each enterprise, the information is limited partner by partner. At best, each vendor’s insight includes just a small slice of the individual based on their relationship, and misses the whole view.
Social media to CRM, check!
