Social Apps for Social CRM - some options

We saw some characteristics of the Social Apps in an enterprise in my previous post. In this post, I will restrict myself to Social Apps in a Social CRM context and give you some options for their implementation.

In the Cloud

There are many social apps in the cloud, here I mean the Internet. I guess you are very well aware of most of them. The "Conversation Prism" by Brian Solis of the PR 2.0 blog should serve our purpose pretty well, since Brent Leary  says Social CRM is all about conversations. :)

Any which way, the apps in the above diagram are a good representation of the social apps available up in the cloud.

But how do we get them to server our purpose here, which is Social CRM? For that we need integrators. And we might also need to open up our firewalls, albeit selectively & cautiously.

When our CRM app is also in the cloud, like with salesforce.com or SugarCRM based on demand CRM services, we are a tad well off in implementing the integrators. We don't have to deal with opening up firewalls for one, and we don't have to undergo the hassles of setting up the integrators as another.

For salesforce.com we have connectors to Facebook & also upcoming in the near future is a connector to Twitter. FB connector lets you pull in profile details of your customers provided they friend you & allow you to pull in their data on Facebook. Twitter connector will allegedly allow you the service/support personnel to respond to customer tweets in real time and also incorporate them into the Knowledge Base as well as share them with partners.

Please bear in mind, I have not tried out any of the above. So if there are any incorrect statements please do let me know.

On terrafirma

The toughest is setting up social apps on premise & integrating it with the existing CRM apps, also installed on premise. This would be huge exercise and a great opportunity for any integrator. (Disclaimer: my employer is one such integrator with offshore options & I myself lead the CoE for CRM 2.0/Social CRM for my employer.)

Freedom to choose

Being an open source enthusiast, I have tried many open source social apps. I had posted some tweets too about some of them. :) Let me elaborate on them & some more.

BuddyPress - This is a still in beta social n/w app built as a set of plugins for the immensly popular Wordpress platform, specifically the Wordpress MU (multi user) platform. Its got the usual suspects features of profiles, friends, groups, status updates, etc. And of course, its got a splendid blogging backend along with all those other plugins for wordpress.

Enterprises would like to use this if there are lots of creators or at least have majority above the joiners level in the Social Technographics Ladder of Forrester. Since this is difficult to expect from the customers, might be a great internal facing app. But thats just my guess.

There is however no monitoring features in it as yet nor has any integration with tradition CRM systems attempted to the best of my knowledge.

Elgg -  This is a robust option for building social networking sites either on premise or recently, on demand.

Elgg has profiles, friends, activities, notifications, groups, blogs & microblogging. Much like BuddyPress.

I guess its lure will be for those who would prefer a cloud solution that is provided by elgg.com.

Joomla - Though this is technically a Content Management System, it does have many extensions to provide it social capabilities - both networking as well as media.

Joomla Community Builder is the most popular of the communities extensions that provide n/w features like profiles, friends, groups, etc. CB has also spawned many other extensions that build on top of it and thus provide more social features. One of the most popular is the Twitter connector that allows displaying a user's tweets on his/her profile.

Since Joomla is a CMS, it can also be used to run the social media campaigns. Text, images, videos, audio all are covered. So evidently this is an ideal choice for marketers!

However the best compelling aspect is the availability of CRM bridges! They are all however only about lead generation in SugarCRM. :(

I look forward to a connector between one of the forum extensions in Joomla (preferably one thats integrated with CB, like the Fireboard forum) and the service module of SugarCRM.

Get me the scapegoat

Many enterprises are still not comfortable with open source options for various reasons. One that stands out as a sore thumb is theres nobody to take the responsbility for the product, though many service providers are coming forward to support the FLOSS options, its yet to take off big time in the CRM perspective albeit the small success of SugarCRM and such.

In such cases, enterprises go for proprietary options, even it means license costs, et al. along with support costs.

I will try & cover some proprietary social apps in the next post soon. So hang on tight and let me know how you liked this post. :)