Web 2.0 meets CRM: the perfect business application

Got a social network struggling to make money? How about climbing in to bed with a CRM vendor and charging businesses a fee to keep their data current?

It’s easy to get bored of reading press releases from social networking companies announcing new rounds funding. Okay, there is a little more novelty attached to them post financial market meltdown, but funding rounds still seems the only source of reliable income for way to many socnets.

So I could easily have written off LinkedIn’s announcement last week: the business focused social network raised $27 million blah blah. Except the detail was more interesting this time, as amongst the companies coughing up cash were SAP.

Now picture this: you use LinkedIn and have a few hundred connections, mostly buddies in former jobs. You go into LinkedIn to read what’s happening with them and connect up with the most recent joiners. But what if you could then press a button and the contact details for your whole network then move into your CRM system. As your relationship with those connections develops, SAP enables you to attach processes to them to ensure you achieve your objectives and no opportunities slip through the net. Neat. But best of all, all the customer records in your SAP are updated by the customers themselves! No more duff data.

This has made sense to me for sometime, coming, as I do, from six years in CRM to now run WeCanDo.BIZ, an online new business network for sales leads. When we launched in May, it was in the back of my mind that integration with CRM systems would be both simple and very compelling. Could LinkedIn be about to steal a lead?

Well, the SAP investment suggests I may not be alone in seeing this as a marraige made in heaven. I’m seeing the power of a system tapped directly in to public profiles where your target market and customers will happily maintain all their current contact details, as well as telling you their likes and dislikes (this could work just as easily on Facebook, where there is way more personal information to mine than there is on LinkedIn). So may SAP be, but I would imagine LinkedIn is seeing what it could charge SAP users for the live connection into its database.

So will SAP and LinkedIn set a trend? SAP isn’t the most prominent player in CRM: Oracle, Microsoft and young upstart Salesforce.com are all better established. The last of these is potentially better positioned to tap into online social networks, as it is a wholly online service itself. But who could Salesforce.com partner with? LinkedIn is out. Facebook is very consumer heavy although a large number of Salesforce.com’s customers are business to business. CEO Marc Benioff likes to innovate, so will Salesforce.com start their own social network (SocialForce?)? Well, with over half a million users they’d get a useful leg-up, but it puts them way behind LinkedIn or even European rival XING on 6 million users; non-Salesforce.com users would need good reasons to sign up to another social network.

Either way, I remain convinced that a connection between socnets and CRM is worthy of consideration by my company; and I doubt I’ll be the only one putting thought to it and looking for partners.

Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz