Internet company Yahoo! has entered into an agreement to acquire the Tumblr social blogging service. According to the official press release:

Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business. David Karp will remain CEO. The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators. 

Or, in other words, Tumblr can go on being Tumblr, if it’s not distracted by Yahoo! adds. Read the rest of this entry »

Telligent has announced the release of new capabilities for two of its enterprise social community software solutions: Telligent Community and Telligent Enterprise. A new version of Telligent Analytics was released at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Tracx has announced its new Social Leads product, part of its set of social intelligence tools. The application identifies individuals interested in buying a company’s products by crawling through a variety of social media, community forums, and retail sites, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Amazon, and eBay.

Tracx Social Leads unveils relevant customer conversations as well as what stage of the buying process the customer is at. Read the rest of this entry »

The sales and marketing software for small business vendor Infusionsoft has announced at its annual user conference, InfusionCon 2013, the 2013 Spring Release of its product. The version introduces new features that support social engagement, sales productivity, and marketing campaigns. Read the rest of this entry »

Established in 2002, Socialtext, a Bedford Funding portfolio company (which also owns Peoplefluent), was one of the first companies to deliver social networking software to businesses. Socialtext’s enterprise social networking products—including microblogging, blogs, wikis, profiles, and social spreadsheets—provide more efficient and simpler ways for employees to share vital information and work together in real-time. Delivered in the cloud or securely behind the firewall as an appliance, Socialtext customers can be provided with flexible deployment options that meet their security requirements.

After the recent partnership with Badgeville for gamification capabilities, this week Socialtext announced its distribution partnership with Winvale, one of the premier government-focused solutions providers in the United States. After multi-year success implementing the Socialtext software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with government agencies, the offering will now be available through Winvale’s General Services Administration (GSA) Schedules.

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Like it or not, gamification is here to stay and help bolster user engagement. Employee engagement has become the holy grail in private companies and government agencies, as numerous studies show that engaged employees are far more productive, and stay longer than their non-engaged peers. Companies are increasingly using gamification to reward and recognize both their trading partners and their employees.

When gamification capabilities are added to social software, the idea is for companies to access data and analytics that should provide much needed insight into employee behavior, and then reward employees in a way that increases their commitment to what they are doing while also keeping them aligned with company goals. To that end, Socialtext, a renowned provider of enterprise social software, announced its partnership with Badgeville, the leading gamification and behavior management platform, to infuse gamification capabilities into its variety of applications, widgets, and mobile tools.

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In a previous post I discussed how the social revolution impacted customer relationship management (CRM) and underlined that while processes designed to derive value in CRM remain valid, they are far from being sufficient in the context of social CRM (SCRM). Yet most organizations need structure to conduct their activities.

As far as CRM is concerned, the social aspect has brought to the surface what already existed but had been dodged by businesses, for a long time—the pervasive opinions and attitudes of their customers. By widely spreading individual opinions, social media has encouraged businesses to transform their exchanges with customers. As a consequence, quite a few businesses today have SCRM strategies in place. In this post, I’ll outline some of the potential benefits of SCRM to businesses and their clients. Read the rest of this entry »

Customer relationship management (CRM) has had a great impact on the social media revolution. Or was it the other way around? Of the many types of software solutions catering to businesses, CRM software has been the most attuned to the rise of social platforms. CRM resides in the attitudes and perception of people and what they acquire, individually or as a group. Social media is the place where people pride themselves with what they can afford. The marriage between social media and CRM seems rather unnatural only in the sense that social media is still relatively young while CRM has been around for many years.

The advent of social media has been viewed as a revolution—the Gavroche of the new millennium. Some say that it tipped the balance in favor of Mr. Obama in the 2008 US presidential election campaign. And that it connected the participants to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street events, encouraged engagement between individuals with similar interests across the world, etc.

Consider these statements from a popular social media channel: Read the rest of this entry »

SAP has announced SAP Jam, a new social enterprise platform that permits the insertion of social capabilities into business processes. According to the press release SAP Jam “spans across SAP’s entire technology landscape,” inviting individuals from diverse areas of expertise to cooperate across geographies, share information, make decisions, and reach out to external collaborators. Read the rest of this entry »

tibbr 4 is the new version of what TIBCO calls its enterprise social platform. Beyond issuing a press release, TIBCO demoed the latest version of tibbr at the TUCON 2012 conference to showcase some of tibbr’s new features— Read the rest of this entry »

Vendors of customer relationship management solutions, and the companies that use those solutions, praise the advantages of having a 360-degree view of the customer. The approach is meant to provide a company with a full picture of its customers in order to enhance the customer experience, provide better customer service and support, and improve the company’s sales and marketing initiatives to better target those customers.

One problem that many companies face in using their 360-degree view stems from having focused on only one or two of these objectives. But as its name implies, a 360-degree view demands a holistic approach. Read the rest of this entry »

Sugar CRM announced the latest version of its customer relationship management (CRM) solution at Sugarcon 2012, its annual conference. After the event, I had a very interesting conversation with Jan Sysmans, senior director of product marketing, and Chris Bucholtz, editor-in-chief of CRM Outsiders, and would like to share the most interesting findings here with you.
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It used to be the case that PLM was perceived as being principally about CAD tools and 3D drawings and complex technical specs that no one really understood except the geekiest of PLM geeks.

This perception was justified, to an extent. After all, PLM and CAD tools can be complicated, engineers and designers tend to operate in highly specialized environments, and there’s a common misconception that PLM addresses execution rather than innovation.

But after attending the PLM Innovation 2012 conference two months ago, I realized that PLM is starting to gain a reputation as an enabler of collaboration and innovation. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media provides data to the enterprise on how its customers are interacting. Even though most decision makers understand that gathering and analyzing this data is important, it’s not always easy to know how.

Astute Solutions was founded in 1995 to offer call center and issue management software, which later became a full customer service solution. The acquisition of RealDialog from LiveWire Logic in 2006 added knowledge management to the offering. In 2010, Astute acquired Gamma Engineers for its social media management technology. This has evolved into today’s Astute Social Relationship Management (SRM) solution, with the ambition to offer functionality not just for managing social data, but for using the results in the cross-channel customer relationship activities of a company. Read the rest of this entry »

Learning management systems (LMSs) and Web content management (WCM) systems for corporate or educational environments have a new but not untested contender. Trunity (a combination of the words truth, trust, and community) provides a platform used to collaborate on delivering a significant body of research used by educational institutions. It may be worth a further look and that’s what we at TEC, intend to do shortly. Read the rest of this entry »