Salesforce.com announced ServiceCloud earlier this month, billed as a "next generation platform for customer service," allowing companies to monitor and tap into customer conversations all over the web - i.e., Facebook, community blogs, message boards, twitter, etc.
It's an excellent innovation, and important on several dimensions:
For companies, it's a badly needed interface to a social web that consumers are increasingly turning to discuss products and companies, a structured way of integrating traditional CRM and ad hoc initiatives on platforms like Twitter. It's also an opportunity to create a better experience, better brand, and stronger net promoters cores by delivering a new level of proactive customer support.
For consumers, it offers a new opportunity to be heard and helped in their preferred avenue, and not forced through the company's preferred CS channels and painful 800 numbers, and reflects a shift in the balance of power from company to consumer.
For salesforce.com, it allows them to bridge an increasingly relevant social web with enterprise CRM, to keep CRM core and central and the sales and support, and to rise above (and aggregate) a crowd of new channels emerging for customer support like GetSatisfaction and Twitter.
I've been wrestling with this problem for a few years, I'm curious to see how Adaptive Blue's new Glue product tackles it. The problem focuses on how to adequately manage privacy concerns when user information is passively contributed to a community or social network.
In active contribution, it's pretty straightforward. I may actively bookmark an article on delicious, actively share a post on friendfeed, actively add a connection on LinkedIn, actively post my whereabouts on Twitter. The systems have different privacy options (keep private, restrict to your connections, make public, etc), but since this functionality is often difficult to understand, and often keeps changing (along with privacy policies) the general rule of thumb seems to be to only actively post what you comfortable being public.
We spent a lot of time at Visible Path building tools that helped individual sales reps sell more effectively. Lately, I've been working on determining what, if any, critical insights can be drawn by analyzing different communications patterns inside and between companies. Here's a quick survey for folks in sales management...
There's a fair amount of buzz about Fire Eagle, Yahoo's new location service, at the Web 2.0 expo this week, where the Yahoo! team has been promoting invites to the private beta of Fire Eagle and a new application called Fireball has launched. There is good information available on the web, but the best explanation is Tom Coates presentation at ETech in San Diego last month:
Trampoline Systems launched today what they bill as the 'world's first organizational tool', using the Enron email data set (also available publicly here) to illustrate the power of the tool to map the connectors, hubs and information flows through the company's social network:
