Social networking targets the enterprise

Leveraging advances in communication and integration, a new kind of application -- corporate social networking -- is being folded into the CRM feature set.

Corporate social networking software measures, reads, and evaluates e-mails, instant messages, and calendar entries, capturing the names of message authors while protecting the content. The names are then exposed to algorithms that search, weight, and rank others in the database for possible contacts within the company a user is trying to reach.

Startups offering both point solutions and solutions that are part of a greater CRM suite include Contact Network, Interface Software, Spoke Software, and ZeroDegrees. 

Early next year ZeroDegrees plans to roll out an upgrade to its current offering that will allow users to tap into group functionality to form associations outside their own companies. In addition, the ZeroDegrees application will gain full Outlook integration.

In fall 2004, ZeroDegrees will release a beta version of a sales intelligence dashboard based on the concept of the semantic Web. The tool uses natural language between systems to crawl the Web and search out relevant information.

For example, the ZeroDegrees dashboard would allow a person in furniture sales to be alerted when a large company leases more space or places ads for employees, thus indicating expansion and the need to furnish new office space, said Jas Dhillon, CEO of ZeroDegrees.

“Social networking is a way for us to build a large network of people who use the system,” Dhillon said.

Other vendors ramping up their capabilities include Spoke Software. Next year the company will add a hosted service to its current on-premise solution. Spoke claims it has doubled the size of its relationship base from 5 million to 10 million people a user can access.

Questions that remain to be answered include whether corporate users will be willing to share valuable contacts and whether social networking apps deliver worthwhile information.

Law firm Honigman, Miller, Schwartz, and Cohn used Interface Software’s InterAction suite to land lucrative accounts, according to Cynthia Reaves, partner at the firm.

“We use InterAction to strategize about how to approach a client and develop teams of people to approach a potential client on a particular matter,” Reaves said.

Interface is unique in that its social networking capability is a single feature in a complete CRM application for the professional services industry. It also uses outside content from companies such as Dun & Bradstreet and Hoover’s to extend and improve the quality of potential contacts.

If you don’t know the name of a company, you can search for companies by region and revenue; you can ask for the names of all the C-level executives at those companies; and you can match those names to people in your own company who know them, said Rick Klau, vice president of vertical markets at Interface.

Although users at a professional services company that live and die over good contacts might be willing to share information, one industry analyst believes social networking has severe limitations in the enterprise.

“A friend of mine [isn’t necessarily] a friend of yours,” said Barton Goldenberg, principal at ISM, a CRM research company.