E-Commerce Blog

A small group of us were standing on the Dreamforce trade show floor surveying the more than 200 booths and vendors assembled there. We were trying to put a finger on what, exactly, the show had become. Was it a user group meeting, a conventional trade show, a partner meeting, or some hybrid? By process of elimination hybrid won out simply because we could not conclude that the show was anything else. Most interesting to me was the number of new companies with very different ideas about applications and specific business processes.

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The Dreamforce Dream Team

You can’t say you were not warned or that you had no idea of what was happening. The socialization of CRM took a big step forward on Monday when Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told the keynote audience at Dreamforce 2008 in San Francisco that his company has developed technology that will integrate Facebook and Salesforce.com. Amazingly, despite all of the talk about marrying social media and CRM that has taken place over the last two to three years, it was not any of the larger and older — and richer — software giants that made the announcement.

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Nimble Salesforce Scoops Sluggish Giants With Facebook Play

In today’s challenging economy and ultra-competitive marketplace, businesses simply can’t afford customer churn; retention, engagement and overall experience are more important than ever. That’s why business leaders are increasingly adopting and integrating the latest customer relationship management and enterprise feedback management applications to achieve a more thorough understanding of their customer base. While CRM tells the business executive “what” customers have done, EFM uncovers “why” customers act a certain way.

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Enterprise Feedback Management: Getting Inside Your Customers’ Heads

When it comes to social media ROI, suitable performance metrics have proven to be somewhat elusive. In fact, according to survey data for the new Aberdeen benchmark report, “Social Media Marketing: The Latest Buzz on Word of Mouth,” more than one-third of all companies indicated that a primary reason that they don’t currently engage in social media marketing activities is because they lack suitable performance metrics for evaluating the results.

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Want to Measure Social Media ROI? Pick a Metric

Not that it’s a done deal like the title might suggest, but Siebel seems to be reconstituting itself into a rival power in the CRM market once again. After Oracle OpenWorld, I made the observation that Siebel appeared to be returning to its old prominence. The introduction of new products based on Web 2.0 ideas, the continued strength in all global markets, and the continued investment in its on-demand capacity all augured well for what is now a unit of Oracle. Before the acquisition, Siebel suffered a brain drain.

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The Siebel Restoration?