Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, held in San Francisco this past week, included a number of new product announcements, notably the launch of Data.com’s Social Key, a tool to deliver social data and integrate it with customer and account information kept in Salesforce.
According to the blog,
By injecting social into traditional with just one click, the Social Key humanizes your business data and brings it to life through real-time updates and a 360-degree perspective.
Social Key will apparently be available in the second half of 2013.
Have we seen this product before?
Of course we have: that product is called InsideView. InsideView has been selling ‘insider sales intelligence’ — allowing companies to see what their customers and prospects have posted on social or digital properties and port that data into their CRM database with a one-click sync. InsideView works with a number of CRM vendors, including NetSuite, SugarCRM, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, LandslideCRM — and Salesforce.
I guess it should be no surprise that Salesforce has partnered with a provider — but then turns around and creates a product that directly competes with it. We have seen this in the IT industry time and time again.
Indeed, InsideView was at Booth 515 at Dreamforce this year.
I really like InsideView’s product — as a former social media analyst, I received several demo’s — though at some point, I’d love to see what the Data.com Social Key will look like, and how it might differ.
I’m thrilled with the very idea that both Salesforce and InsideView are presenting a total view of social data. Counting tweets and mentions via a ‘traditional’ social media monitoring tool is good but it isn’t enough, especially when salespeople need to work smarter for a digitally savvier prospect base.
Below, the presentation from Dreamforce on the Data.com Social Key.
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