Social CRM Market Heats Up

With the recent acquisition of Buddy Media by Salesforce.com, it’s clear that social CRM and social marketing solutions are part of a very hot new trend. Social customer relationship management (CRM) tools can help organizations monitor and appropriately respond to customer feedback, praise, and complaints on social media sites. It may be time to dive into these social technologies for your marketing and sales efforts, so we’ve outlined some of the other leading technologies. Several such applications stand above the competition for features, service, technology, and breadth. Some of the most well known social CRM tools currently in the market include:

Spaces by Moxie Software 

This enterprise social software suite allows knowledge sharing and collaboration among employees, customers, and partners across a variety of leading social media channels. The primary selling points of Spaces by Moxie are:

• Expert Connect – A collaboration tool ensuring efficient customer communications with customer service and support teams, IT, HR, and sales through email, social media, and chat.

• Spaces Connect – An integration framework that allows the integration of Spaces by Moxie with in-place CRM, ERP, content management, and HR applications.

Salesforce Radian6 

Salesforce Radian6 gives organizations the ability to track comments, questions, and complaints throughout the social Web and respond in real time. The tool provides organizations a framework for monitoring what people are saying about competition, branding, the company in specific, or the industry as a whole across the social media sphere.

SugarCRM 

This open-source solution provides built-in social CRM support allowing for the integration of social media feeds with email marketing opening up opportunities to collaborate online and share documents and sales intelligence online and in real time. SugarCRM lets users access their Twitter feed and Facebook news feeds directly from the Activity Streams dashboard.

Jive 

Jive combines a high level enterprise system with a consumer oriented, user-friendly design. It is designed to launch marketing campaigns across various social channels to engage with potential customers. It also features ways to use the system for internal collaboration and existing customer management.

It’s worth taking some time to investigate new social CRMs and social media monitoring solutions. They are gaining in popularity and are obviously a hot new technology, but it’s because social is becoming extremely important to every aspect of customer relationship management and sales pipeline development.