Social Strategy

Getting Results From Your Social Networking Strategies

Here is some excellent advice from Louis Columbus, Senior Manager Enterprise with Cincom Systems, Getting Results From Your Social Networking Strategies.  Be sure to check out the complete source article for more on each of the five lessons outlined below: We’re all getting reminded every day to take ownership of our digital brands and jump on [...]

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What is Social CRM in Bantam Live? - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Tech researchers, analysts, journalists, bloggers and vendors agree that "Social CRM" is a hot sector, and validation of this is that companies are increasingly adopting it to engage and include their customers in business. But few people agree on a precise definition of what social CRM is and the #scrm hashtag on Twitter has frequent links to offerings as this market takes shape. The "Godfather" (or should we say General) of the social-CRM-definition-wars is CRM expert Paul Greenberg whose oft-referenced definition includes the position that social CRM strategies are a "company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation" out there in social media land. In this we seem to all agree.

Social CRM as it applies to Bantam Live refers to both internal collaboration among a business team and external engagement with the voices of customers, prospects, and partners across the social web. Outside is in, inside is out. We explain...

Let's first start out with the internal social CRM aspects of Bantam Live. At the core of Bantam Live, in the dashboard, is the real-time activity stream, which fuses business data objects and communication among a team, so it can stay in the loop and collaborate. In Bantam Live, everything from status updates and team commenting to workflow activity updates (eg. progress on projects, completed tasks, and modifications to deals that a team is collaborating on) cascade in the stream.

This design is similar to the Facebook news feed and it's becoming all the rage in web-based business software. As Marc Benioff of Salesforce wrote on TechCrunch, it's "The Facebook Imperative" for software companies. As ReadWriteWeb said at our private-beta debut last summer, "Bantam Live is part CRM, part Twitter, and part Facebook for business teams." Even content from the web can be imported by users and displayed in the activity stream of Bantam Live, which leads us to the external part of social CRM.

While team members collaborate internally within the activity stream, they can also search from within their Bantam Live workspace out on social networks like Twitter. For example, if you're selling industrial solar panel technology to commercial office parks, you can search for keywords - say "solar panel recommendations" - and upon discovery import a new contact's full profile and the relevant tweet with one click into Bantam Live. From here, you can initiate workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and converse with the new contact for various CRM purposes, while maintaining all annotations and live feeds of this person from a single contact page in Bantam Live. All of this activity cascades in the real-time stream of the Bantam Live dashboard, where team members can comment and interact. For lead-generation (and soon other CRM features), Bantam Live makes the filtered and captured spontaneous content of Twitter transformative and valuable for sales and biz-dev people. As we've said, Thar's gold in them thar tweets!

Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang recently issued a report  that provides a framework and successful use cases of social CRM. In its broad spectrum, we'd say Bantam Live initially falls into the Sales and Collaboration categories of their Social CRM construct, specifically in the SMB space, for now. Interestingly, as we've suggested (see Hunter-Gatherer and Farmer in Social CRM), it's possible that the deeper social "relationships" (in the human bonding sense of the term) between two people will increasingly flourish in small and midsize businesses (without the restrictions of the large enterprise) and, moreover, in the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum, more so than in the ephemeral and transactional nature of a customer service relationship with a brand and its on-duty rep. It may turn out that the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum is the most richly authentic and social of all. Who knows? As we continue to build Bantam Live in the triad of CRM's domain in sales, marketing, and customer support, we'll find out.

Internal CRM collaboration among the team, external CRM engagement with prospects, partners, and customers, all managed in a social workspace with complimentary productivity and collaboration tools for business teams. That's the social CRM you'll find in Bantam Live. Stay tuned as we broaden our social CRM offerings.

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New Module: Analytics for Deal Flow and Sales Revenue - Story From: The Bantam Blog

(Note: image above has partial view of analytical charts; to see all, please login.) Today we released a new module following last week's release of sales pipeline management. It's called Analytics and it allows you and your sales team to visually analyze your deal flow and sales performance. With various, filterable charts you can now better understand what's going on. Pie charts on deal stages and categories, sales performance and deal probability graphs, team leader boards, and year-to-date and trailing 12-month booked revenue can also viewed. Check it out in the Deals section on the Analytics link.

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Design Enhancement: Mixing Meta with Narrative in the Activity Stream - Story From: The Bantam Blog

At the core of Bantam Live is the real-time activity stream, which is all about the sharing of time, being together in the moment of business activity, integrating business apps/workflows/data, and being able to instantly interact with co-worker activity. The stream has significant value beyond the asynchronous sharing of a web page or file via, say, email. With this in mind we introduce today a new design tweak that'll give you a window view into the future evolution of Bantam Live.

Today's design tweak (in the magnified stream item above) doesn't need much explaining, and that's the point when users see this visual enhancement for an updated business object in the stream. Now, when a user modifies a deal setting, it'll display with augmented meta-data in the stream about a change to a business object, instead of only text narrative. In some instances it'll be with graphical icons, as shown. So instead of text-heavy "Bill Jones created the deal XYZ and assigned a value of X with a close date of Y and a probability of Z" the updated items will now display the meta info in a way that's easy to skim to get the essentials. Moreover, we've added some small green/red icons for up/down on certain modifications to a deal, such as a change deal amount or probability percent. Not only do these meta-updates of deals in the stream quickly provide useful information to a sales manager and colleagues; it also fosters team cohesion and sense of purpose that's motivating as well as informative.

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New CRM Module: Sales Pipeline Management - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Today we're releasing pipeline management functionality to better view and manage deals you're working on. Relatedly, as noted in the post above, you'll also see that when you make modifications to a deal, it can optionally be posted in the dashboard activity stream for better awareness, motivation, and interaction among the team or between a sales manager and a sales person. Here are the highlights...

- Filter your sales pipeline: You can now drill down and total your deals by sales person, the stage, amount range, expected close date, probability and category.

- Modify deals in-line: From the deals list page, click on "modify" when your rolling over a deal and change any setting within that deal, such as amount or probability, etc. You can also optionally post your modifications to the activity stream. All modifications will be recorded in the deal's history.

- New design of deal updates in activity stream: You can now see new posts with graphical, colored up/down arrows for changes to closing probability or revenue amount for a given deal. A new display for learning about other modifications to a deal is also published in a new stream format for quick glancing. Juicy, isn't it? We expound in the post above.

- Close date: When estimating an expected close-date for a deal, a user can now specify an actual calendar date, which is then used for analyzing expected vs. actual dates that we'll have in the new analytical charts (coming out next week).

- Customizing deals, Drag-and-drop reordering: You now have the ability to customize deal stages, amount ranges and categories in the backend settings, under 'Deal Settings'. And you can drag-and-drop stages to reorder. See also the post below about customizations.

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New Feature: Deal Customizations - Story From: The Bantam Blog

In addition to the new pipeline management module released today, we've also added the ability to customize your deals in three new ways, as noted here...

Customize Categories: In Bantam Live you can now create customized categories for each deal to better describe and group them. We added the default categories which can act as examples, which are: Biz-Dev Alliance, Existing Account, New Business, Product Sales, and Service Contract. You can change or delete these to suit how you'd categorize your deals.

Customize Stages: In addition to Active, Won, and Lost, you can now customize the name of stages associated with a given deal. For instance, you might add "Qualifying" or "Proposal" as a stage to better indicate how far along a deal is in the sales process. (Note that the Won and Lost stages remain fixed, as this is integral to determining pipeline revenue numbers in the system.)

Customize Amount Ranges: Customize amount ranges for High, Medium and Low so that you can easily drill down on deals with those amount ranges from the deals list page. We've set the default amount filters to $501,000 - $1,000,000 for High, $251,000 - $500,000 for Medium and $0 - $250,000 for Low, but you can change these ranges in the "Deals Settings" section under "Amount ranges" to reflect the typical pricing of your deals.

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New Features. More Cowbell. - Story From: The Bantam Blog

If our customers ask for more cowbell, we should probably give them more cowbell! Login to your team's account and really explore the workspace.

New in the Dashboard

• Linking in the Publishing Zone of the Dashboard: By popular demand you can now "link to" and associate Tasks, Files, and Events to your Contacts, Projects, and Deals - right from the front-and-center publishing zone in the Dashboard as you input updates.

New in Social CRM

• Google Buzz imports: This is just a little taste of what's to come with our Social CRM functionality. You can now enter a contact's Google username in a contact record and view his or her public updates within that contact's page within Bantam Live.

• Tag List Export: To create special mailing lists or other purposes, this new feature allows you to do an export of your contacts (people and/or companies) based on a tag or multiple tag search that generate the list.

New in Task & Project Management

• Colored Task Types: Now you can group "types" of tasks, and affix an associated color for a given type of task to easily view them in the Dashboard and task section.

• Categories for Projects: To more easily collaborate and sort all your projects, you can now create and assign your project into various categories. Easy editing of category names, too.

• Filtering Tasks: Who's doing what? In the task section, you can now filter all tasks by co-workers to view in numerous ways with a simple drop-down.

• Filtering Projects: View your Projects alphabetically, by category, or by most recently viewed.

• Icons for Notes and Comments: In the Task Widget in the Dashboard and in the Tasks section, you'll now see if co-workers have written a note or commented on a task.

• Show/Hide Tasks in Calendar section: View (or hide) a right-side Task panel in your Calendar for a better view.

• Linking Tasks to a Contact, Project or Deal: Now you're able to link tasks from either the publishing zone in the Dashboard, or in a Task Widget, or via the Task section.

• Email Alert for Task Completion: Get an email alert when co-workers complete tasks you've assigned them.

New in File Sharing

• Categories for Files: You're now able to create and assign "categories" for the Files you share and store in Bantam Live.

• Linking Files to a Contact, Project, or Deal: Now you're able to link Files to any object like a Contact (person or company) Deal, or Project from the Files section or upon uploading a new file into Bantam Live.

• Filtering Files: With this enhancement you can sort and view Files alphabetically, by category, by size, or most recently viewed.

• Widgets for Files: Documents associated with Contacts, Companies, Projects and Deals can now be displayed in a widget on each of these object's pages.

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The Long Island Iced Tea of Collaboration Apps - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Bantam Live mixes microblogging, messaging, profiles, project & task management, social CRM, file sharing, calendaring and stirs that with people, content, and data in an online collaboration platform.

With its mix of features and buzz it generates, Bantam Live is the Long Island Iced Tea of collaboration apps.

(Sorry about that one, folks. We came up with that one after work over drinks at Fanelli's. We'll try to keep our messaging chill.)

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Collaboration and Hugh MacLeod - Story From: The Bantam Blog

We like Hugh MacLeod's work and the GapingVoid blog he's created, which is why Bantam Live invited him to create something for our launch this week. Hugh's range goes from abstract drawing to characters with social bite or existential musing. We like the simple "collab" and "oration" words around the tangle of a network abstraction. Thanks, Hugh. (Check out the new "Hugh's Daily Cartoon," the new mailing list to receive a daily cartoon in your inbox.)

The background of our relationship with Hugh goes like this... Bantam Live launched its public-beta last summer onstage at TechCrunch's Real-time Stream Crunchup at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City, Michael Arrington auctioned off copy #1 of "dream big. techcrunch 2009" serigraph by artist Hugh MacLeod. I won the auction. I figured it was a good cause (to the Electronic Frontier Foundation), would give us a promotional bump, and would commemorate for the team an achievement of sorts to have launched in beta as a selected startup from the stage on that day. As Hugh explains, the serigraph was a "social object." It hangs in our loft today.

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Super Bowl Shuffle: Why Marketers Will Shift to ‘Platforms’

Here are several excerpts from an excellent article by Garrik Schmitt, VP of experience planning at Razorfish, Super Bowl Shuffle: Why Marketers Will Shift to ‘Platforms’: Unlike a website, banner, Facebook application or 30-second (Super Bowl) spot, a platform is an always-on digital environment that allows brands to run specific or multiple programs. The goal [...]

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Webinar: Social CRM & Lead-Generation on Twitter for Business Teams - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Most "webinars" are thinly veiled sales pitches. The webinar we're hosting as part of Social Media Week doesn't have much veil. What's wrong with sales pitches, anyway? Join us on Thursday, February 4th, at 2pm EST for a webinar entitled "Social CRM & Lead-Generation on Twitter for Business Teams." In this 30-minute online presention, we'll paint a picture of the broad spectrum of Social CRM and quickly get to Bantam Live and give you a demo of how it works.

REGISTER NOW FOR THE FEBRUARY 4TH  DEMO OF BANTAM LIVE

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Note to Beta-Users: We’re Out of Beta! - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Our beta program has just ended and we've launched the the commercial version of Bantam Live with paid-subscription plans that require credit cards for sign-up. All plans will include a free 30-day trial, beyond however long you've been using the beta version. There is also a free plan. If you don't wish to subscribe to any plan, you can cancel your account. The application has some new design tweaks and optimized performance. Moreover, the social CRM module and Twitter integration has been completely redone and improved for lead-generation, contact importing, and CRM workflows.

During February, March, and April we're working on a range of enhancements big and small. These include Google App integrations, bolstering the project management features, adding deeper social CRM functions along with improved pipeline management and analytics for deals. OAuth for Twitter is coming in the Spring, too. Later this year, we'll also be releasing an API and federating the collaboration features such that users will be able to create multiple workspaces for different groups. There's lots more in ongoing development. iPhone you ask? Probably summertime. The optimized mobile access we have now actually works surprisingly well but we know we'll need to offer an app.

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Food For Thought: Social Media at Fortune’s Best Company to Work For in America

Here’s a post worth reading by David B. Thomas, from the SAS’s conversations and connections blog, Social Media at Fortune’s Best Company to Work For in America: As you may have seen on the homepage of sas.com, or in the tweets and status updates of many of my colleagues, SAS has been ranked number 1 [...]

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We Win a Bet - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Whatever happened to bold statements like, "I challenge you" or "I dare you" in the realm of a wager? Yesterday we came across a sweet tweet about Bantam Live that said, "BantamLive.com is HUUUGELY awesome. SugarCRM is kind of the Defacto, but Bantam is rad as F***  ...Delighted with that user sentiment, I tweeted that I was going to take "Bantam Live is rad as F***" and make a T-shirt out of it. About four hours later, the user tweeted back, "Toxx-Clausing this. Maybe a twitpic of the shirt to satisfy the bet? (I'd buy one)."

Toxx-Clausing? Wha? After a cursory search, I learned that "toxx-clausing" is a sort of bet to follow up on a promise or proclamation that originated on internet message boards. ...Uh, ok. We grew up on the streets of NYC, Boston, and Providence and if any one of us had ever said "I toxx-clause you" you could be sure you'd get smacked upside the head. But hey, interland can be a strange place with a language all its own.

Anyway, I followed up with my original intention to make a T-shirt which you can buy now as we just did. And to Landon Noss of Noss Media: Thanks for your nice compliment about Bantam Live. Now we challenge you to buy one as you promised!

UPDATE >> Landon Noss is a man of his word. After conceding the bet he good-naturedly tweeted "Bantam Live is THE defacto SCRM/SPM tool out there, and it's not even finished" and then took a twitpic of his proof-of-purchase for the T-shirt he inspired us to create. Rock on, Landon.

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Feedback: “What a fantastic product!” - Story From: The Bantam Blog

"What a fantastic product! I have been using Bantam Live to manage several projects here at Brown Medical School, and I have yet to find a tool that makes collaboration as effortless as yours does. I have tried Yammer, Salesforce, Google Apps, Basecamp, Backpack, and others. None of them have worked for our organization until we found Bantam Live."  -- Kumar Vasudevan, Brown University Medical School, Careers in Medicine Program

Unsolicited feedback that's sent to us by email is often a delight to read. Above is an excerpt from one such email we received this week. We contacted the user to get permission to post the feedback and he happily obliged and provided us a headshot too. For us, this validation to our product roadmap helps us shape the answer to the ongoing question related to what Bantam Live can do.

(Thanks, Kumar. And nice to meet you. Beers are on us somewhere on Thayer Street someday.)

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“Ten Technologies to Rock 2010″ - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Bantam Live got a nice mention in TechCrunch's January 1st post entitled "Ten Technologies That Will Rock 2010" in the "Social CRM" category. While the DNA of our product has social CRM in it, we grapple with our product's positioning in the market, as it's capable of social CRM and much more. Perhaps our little tough-in-cheek ad banner now running says it best for now: Huddle up, Yammer On, and Get Your Salesforce beyond idle Chatter. Of course, this cheeky messaging in our beta phase will change in 2010, as Bantam Live expands its unified, integrated apps for business teams during this year. Anyway, we're happy to be mentioned as a serious player in Social CRM in 2010.

Happy New Year!  We hope 2010 does indeed rock for Bantam Live in the Social CRM category - and others. ...For past coverage of Bantam Live on TechCrunch, see:

Bantam Live: The Ultimate Social, Real-Time CRM

Bantam Live Takes The Beta Covers Off Its Social CRM

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Ho Ho Ho from SoHo - Story From: The Bantam Blog

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Our View of Chatter: Salesforce is Following Us! - Story From: The Bantam Blog

We've always admired what Salesforce.com has done in paving the way for the adoption of on-demand, software-as-a-service architecture across the business landscape. It seems they've evidently returned admiration for us with their pre-announcement of their forthcoming product called Chatter that targets the enterprise. To be sure, industry competitors borrow from each other and it's no secret that the "Bantam Live is Facebook for business teams" moniker has been frequently mentioned in trade media and in tweets, and we tip our hat to Mr. Zuckerberg. Indeed, Facebook gave us the idea, now implemented in Bantam Live, that if people wanted to know what was going on with their friends, then maybe workers would want to know what's going on with their coworkers' activities, ideas, productivity workflows, and data - all visible and interactive in a real-time stream.

Our view is that Salesforce is following our lead in the fusion of people/apps/content that we've pioneered with Bantam Live. It's quite validating. A brief history...

> July 10th, 2009: at the first TechCrunch Real-time Conference event, Salesforce.com and Bantam Live give back-to-back presentations from the stage of the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. Salesforce gave a corporate presentation and Bantam Live launched the public-beta version of its unique online product that fuses people, content, and application data with a real-time stream and integrates to social networks like Twitter. We even showed a social CRM demo with a lead-generation workflow, importing contact and content from Twitter. TechCrunch entitled its post of Bantam Live "The Ultimate Social, Real-time CRM" and ReadWriteWeb had said, "Bantam Live is part enterprise Twitter, part CRM, and part Facebook for business teams."

> July 11th - August, 2009: A swarm of Salesforce product managers and developers register with and use Bantam Live.

> November 20, 2009: at the second TechCrunch Real-time Conference, Salesforce will promote its pre-announcement this week of Chatter. Salesforce's description of Chatter is a product remarkably similar to what Bantam Live beta-launched back on July 10th, which fuses people, apps, content, and application data.

Bantam Live - uniquely in this industry - has blended the multiple apps of microblogging, online collaboration, social CRM, project management, document sharing, social network integration, etc., all of which are parsed and assembled into data objects and fully integrated in the real-time stream. If you want to get a glimpse of what Salesforce's Chatter might one day do for the enterprise, sign on today to see who they're following in the SMB space. We launch commercially with paid-subscription plans in January with new modules, features, and highly attractive pricing.

In the SMB space, we look forward to competing with Salesforce in 2010. Stay tuned.

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Halloween Treat: Mobile Access - Story From: The Bantam Blog

Introducing the sweet treat of iPhone and Blackberry optimized access. Now you can thumb through your team's evil activity stream while the kids scurry about the neighborhood for sugar. You can also post creepy status updates to coworkers, access freaky contacts, view horrible tasks, read spooky notes, see scary events, and look up hellish projects and killed deals. Happy Halloween!

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Boo! - Story From: The Bantam Blog

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