5 Very Cool Social CRM solutions for Customer Support Professionals

Open communities, vendor managed communities and popular social networks are becoming the go-to destinations for potential buyers seeking objective references for products and brands as well as customers seeking answers to questions—or delivering rants and raves.

	Jive's flagship product is Jive SBS (formerly Clearspace), which includes collaboration software, community software, and social applications. The most recent Jive SBS release added microblogging, enterprise IM and support for OpenSocial.
	The Lithium Social CRM solution includes online customer community applications such as forums, blogs, innovation management, live chat, and tribal knowledge bases with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes.
	This product is "people-powered customer service". Anyone can ask a question, submit an idea or complaint, or give praise. Companies can respond to issues regarding their products or services and their responses are marked as official answers.
	Uservoice provides hosted feedback forums which allow customers to create, discuss, and vote for ideas—and empower companies to better understand customer intent and sentiment and ultimately better serve customers and improve customer relationships.
	Radian6, acquired by Salesforce.com, gives you a complete social monitoring platform (sometimes called social listening) to listen, measure and engage with your prospects and customers across social networks and the entire social web.

5 Super Social CRM Solutions for Sales Professionals

Several social networks and online destinations offer a plethora of information regarding prospects and customers. Forward thinking sales pros are tapping into these sources to better prepare for outbound sales calls and even uncover buying signals which influence sales strategies.

	InsideView is a cloud-based social searching solution that combines public, editorial and social media content for business research and intelligence. The product is mainly used by Sales teams in identifying and gathering information on prospects and customers.
	There's a reason the button says "Find us on Facebook". Company fan pages and executive profiles on Facebook deliver very useful information for sales professionals seeking to educate themselves before making cold calls or calling in blind.
	Like Facebook, smart sales pros will seek out and follow key executives at their prospects and clients in order to understand what those executives think is important. Sometimes the results help with small talk, and sometimes they reveal buying signals.
	Salesforce.com's JigSaw is an online community of vetted leads and contacts. At last look, the forum managed over 24 million mostly B2B contacts. Contacts are sourced and updated every day by a dedicated online community of sales and marketing professionals.
	Salesforce.com's Chatter is a real-time collaboration platform that brings together people and data in a secure, private social environment. It was designed to be the "Facebook for the enterprise." Rather than making people search for data, information is fed to them.

5 Cool Social CRM Solutions for Marketers

Lead management and marketing automation software systems are morphing with several types of social media apps and social network destinations in order to become the system of record for marketers looking to mix social CRM tools with internal production systems.

	Eloqua created the category of lead management software, and is today the leader in integrating and merging prospect and customer data from internal and external sources, including social network and other social media sources, for a comprehensive view of prospects.
	Teradata's Aprimo is an enterprise software best in class solution for monitoring prospect and customer activities and behaviors across online and offline channels, in order to intelligently deliver the most relevant messaging at just the right times.
	IBM's Unica is another impressive marketing automation system, and direct Aprimo competitor, which sources data from online and social channels, provides automated campaign management and delivers intelligent customer analytics.
	Marketo is another lead management system that combines anonymous website activities with social media destinations and internal CRM software information to help acquire, score, nurture and transfer highly qualified leads to the sales team.
	Like Marketo, Pardot is a lead management system with tight integration to social channels. Pardot is designed for the small and midsize business (SMB) market and offers the most aggressive total cost of ownership (TCO) in the marketing software industry.