Social CRM: A Growing Segment
Yesterday’s post on Social CRM vendors not walking-the-talk raised awareness of this nascent space.  However, not everyone was thrilled with the effort, as CTO John Moore gave us an A for effort but a C- for results, and Kim Kobza, the CEO of Neigborhood America (they were an early adopter) left a comment on John’s post suggesting we missed the mark (also, SAP ‘s passionate team strongly represents).  Although we stand by our scoring, both John and Kim are right, our evaluation yesterday was only on a small subset of the industry, but a manageable starting ground, as we continue to unearth the variety of players.

Tracking the Market with an ‘Industry Index’
For a few years ago, I’ve created what I call my posts called the Industry Index (see all) lists to track companies in any particular vertical, it helps me, vendors, and buyers to track the space.  I expect this space to rapidly increase in size as social channels will be bolted onto CRM vendors, and many brand monitoring and community platforms are adding workflow, triage, and tracking capabilities. The purpose of this list is to quickly capture the vendors participating in this space, and to acknowledge those that were not on yesterday’s review, I expect there to be many more vendors who leave a comment, which we can quickly add to this list.

We owe it to the market to try to include as many as possible, although it’s going to be very difficult as this space quickly grows. So first, let’s try to put some scope around this space with a definition.

Social CRM Definition
We prefer Paul Greenberg’s definition of Social CRM, which he summarizes as:

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.” (also read his 2009 review of this space on ZDnet)

It’s a broad definition, but the key criteria he lists out are enough for me to go on.

List of Companies Providing Social CRM Offerings: (34 vendors total)

• ACT!:  This barely fits the scope of social crm, but ACT! allows a single individual to manage multiple types of information, including social, however if this product was extended across an enterprise, it fits the quota.
• BatchBlue: While not a ‘traditional’ CRM like many of the others listed below, has traditional sales automation features, but also connect with existing social graph data, think social aggregation of contact lists.  After watching the demo, it looks like you have to manually enter feeds of contacts, rather than auto-finding data from social graphs by scraping.
• Buzzient: Offers a CRM platform that provides social media analytics that can be used for web marketing, customer tracking, or reporting.  They have partnerships with Salesforce, Oracle, and SugarCRM.
• Microsoft Dynamics:  Offers Accelerators (here and here) that “Allows business professionals to monitor and analyze customers’ conversations on social networking sites, and as a result, provides real-time status updates about their products and services” (thanks Menno, who writes on the topic) They are also partnered with Neighborhood America
• NetSuite:  Offers social CRM with a partnership with InsideView and has Twitter integration (submitted by Paul Greenberg)
• Oracle Siebel Social CRM: Promises the ability to provide insights based on the buying behaviors of similar customers, as well as shared content to be used between sales teams.
• RightNow CRM: Offers several features in their suite such as Support Communities, Innovation Communities, Cloud Monitoring, and Social Experience Design. Rightnow recently acquired Hivelive an enterprise community platform.
• Salesforce: Offers acces to Social Networking like Facebook and Twitter. Salesforce, like SAP is importing the Twitter “firehose” feed, and has offered social features like Q&A, and social networking like Chatter, and has lightweight LinkedIn integration.
• SAP CRM: Imports the Twitter firehose feed, and
• Sugar CRM: Offers “SugarCRM Cloud Connectors connect via Web Services to leading third-party data service providers such as Hoover’s, JigSaw and LinkedIn”
• We Can Do Biz: Offers traditional CRM features (although their website is a bit difficult to navigate) for SMB, and has a unique Twitter scraping feature that filters down by some level of geography and organizes records in the database.  I had a briefing with them on Feb 2010.  Added Feb 2010.

Community Platforms Offering Social CRM (5)

• Jive Software: Community Engagement, offers data integration from Radian6, encouraging management of the discussion.
• Leverage Software:  I recall that Leverage offers built in integration with Salesforce, but I was unable to find it on their site.
• Lithium Technologies offers the Social CRM Suite offering features such as Community Applications, Reputation Engine, Actionable Analytics, CRM Connectivity, and Social Web Connectivity.
• Neighborhood America: Has had a partnership with Microsoft Dynamics, read press release, (they were early on in March 2009) and commentary from Paul Greenberg on ZDNet.
• Concourse:  Offers a variety of integration modules to a variety of apps, including a CRM module that’s prebuilt. (via pjk54)

Brand Monitoring Offering Social CRM (4)

• Alterian: Offers workflow management capabilities with multiple users, emailed to me by Connie Benson, added Feb, 2010
• Radian 6: Offers brand monitoring tools that allow tools to discuss (Conversation Sidebar), triage, and manage disparate conversations, see Dave Fleet’s write up.
• ScoutLabs: Offers teams workflow ability to discuss social interactions.
• Visible Technologies: Offers CRM like features that allow teams to track, manage, triage, social conversations.  Read Jason Falls take.

Social Media/Twitter Clients (2)

• CoTweet: Offers a variety of features that allow teams to monitor, manage, and triage conversations in Twitter, see features page.
• Hootsuite: Provides workflow, analytics, for teams to manage multiple Twitter accounts.

Social Customer Experience (4)

• CrowdEngineering:  Helps to match experts to customer problems, by using a recommendation engine and skill resource set engine.
• Fuze Digital Solutions: Provides a broad and modular multi-channel customer care solution using a community knowledge base as its foundation.
• Helpstream: Offers tools that allow customers to submit questions to each other, with integration into SalesForce in addition to community driven knowledge centers.  see video.
• Parature: Offers chat-like features for support reps to interact with customers, then measures sentiment.
• Get Satisfaction:  Is an off-domain (all the support is done on their site –not yours) community that now offers premium features that offer ability to manage discussions.

Sales 2.0/Social Graph Aggregation (6)

• Flowtown:  Allows marketers to prioritize targets to contact by a variety of influence scores, and their social graph.  It then offers targeted email marketing based on those two criteria.
• Gist: Offers a way to track the social behaviors of your customers and prioritize.
• InsideView: Offers some unique offerings that mine a business social graph to provide alerts as a plugin to traditional CRM systems, Watch this lengthy demo.
• Roving Group: Offers a product called ‘Roving Contacts’ that aggregates the social graphs and contact information from your address book.
• SocioToo: Not the typical corporate enterprise company, this Dutch company offers a search page (and no real corporate site –by intent) that mines social graph data in public.
• Xobni:  This cleverly named (opposite of inbox) Outlook plugin scrapes your social graph and most frequently emailed contacts improving email utility.  This barely falls within the scope of social crm, but if the data was able to export to other systems, it could start to apply.

CRM Applications and Plugins (2)

• Appirio: Offers the ability for companies to create applications on Facebook which then marry data back to Salesforce, called Cloud Connectors.
• SocialCRMTools: Offers integration with Salesforce that imports, monitors, and manages Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. (via John Perez)

Social Networks and Others

• Twitter: Has made motions they plan to offer premium services to brands, that would offer verified accounts, then management-like features. The specifics are still unknown, as they sort out their business model. They have partnered with Google and Bing.
• Google has announced real time search integration, and Bing has shown some early integrations.  While far fetched we should not completely rule them out as eventually building a dashboard for brands to manage their namesakes, advertising, and website analytics, or Google alerts.  Historically, they generate money off content created by publishers, so this actually falls in line with ‘organizing the world’s information”.

• Feb 12,2010: Added WeCanDo.biz after a briefing, and Alterian.

Not on this list? Leave a comment, with justification why you fit in Paul’s definition with a link to your site explaining more, I’ll take a look and add to it, please be patient while I review.  Also, if you want to brief Ray and myself, please read and submit to this briefing form.

Update: Business Partner Ray Wang and I have created a more detailed matrix of this space for our clients.