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As I type this, I am getting ready to attend Radian6’s Rock Stars of Social CRM event. I’m excited for this event because they are announcing an integration with Webtrends and Salesforce. This is a big moment because it is the first vendor driven integration of social media monitoring, analytics, and a CRM, which are the core apps that drive the value chain of modern Enterprises. Yes I know this first paragraph is loaded with buzz words, so let’s take a closer look at what has me giddy like a school boy.

First let’s talk about Salesforce because it’s pretty straightforward. Radian6 has added the ability to create and browse contacts, leads, and cases in Salesforce from within their dashboard. That means you can now take what you find from monitoring the web and pass it onto Sales and Support. In and of itself, that is a cool feature. While the built in workflow tool within the app is handy, let’s be honest, Sales and Support run off of CRMs. No longer does Sales and Support need to manually update Salesforce from email notifications. In fact, Radian6 has made sure that the data from the River of News is auto-populated in the form that updates contacts, leads, and cases.

Ok, now let’s talk about the Webtrends integration. Radian6 is now able to pull in our Analytics reports using Webtrends Open Exchange API. So, let’s say you got a referring URL on your report that shows a site sent you a flood of traffic, but that traffic didn’t convert into one of your goals. Figuring out why is a time intensive manual job. Using these new integrations, you could be browsing your referrers as a River of News and discover that the site was a customer complaint and then enter it as a case for Support to follow up with all from within the Social Measurement environment. Total time saver.

And we’re just getting started.

You can also do things like keyword analysis of the referrers because Radian6 sucks in the text of the referring URL page. You can then look at how those keywords performed on conversion goals and then use that knowledge to update your SEO/PPC efforts. We’ve been able to do this before with search traffic, by mapping their search terms to conversion goals. But we haven’t been able to analyze the full text of referrers to learn what keywords they are using to describe us. Using that same keyword analysis, Enterprises will also be able to update language used in other marketing efforts to speak in more familiar words. Pretty cool, huh?

We are just beginning to play with these newly integrated tools to discover optimization. And, the truth is, we’ve mostly had our marketing glasses on. Keyword analysis can also help Support and Sales in their interactions. Having all of these systems integrated opens new collaboration possibilities between value chain critical departments like Marketing, Sales, and Support. What has me most excited is that I’ve only known about this for about a week. I can’t wait to see what we’ll learn together as well get our hands on these integrated tools!

It was exciting for us to see Radian6 leverage our Open Exchange API. Our product team is working on the important details for our customers: pricing, support, training, etc. Over the next several weeks we will roll out the details for our Social Measurement customers and prospects. If you have any questions now, please leave us a comment!

Tags: integration, radian6, salesforce

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Industry Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.