This afternoon at 2 p.m. EST, if you are participating in Google Plus, you?ll be able to connect with me through live video at a Google Hangout. Rhonda Burgin of Burgin Construction in California is scheduled to join me and, if all goes well, we?ll discuss some of the potential and opportunity of social media in marketing.
The hangout follows a scheduled 1 pm.phone interview with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.com, an intriguing service which appears to adapt client relationship management concepts for social media ? and what I think is the strongest and most rational use of social media for business development. Here is part of the press release which led me to request the interview.
Over the past year, Nimble has listened to the feedback of its community ? many of whom are on the forefront of Social Business adoption ? and incorporated it into Nimble 2.0 to make it easier, smarter and more flexible. New enhanced features such as social discovery, improved usability and marketing integration have all been added to the product.
?Traditional CRM systems fail at relationship management and that?s why people don?t use them for engagement,? said Jon Ferrara, Nimble CEO and previous founder of GoldMine, a pioneering CRM product. ?The era of customer engagement is now, and it starts with listening. You can?t just snap social onto legacy CRM platforms and expect it to be effective. Nimble was built from the ground up for active social listening and engagement. We?re putting the ?R? (relationship) back into CRM, and with Nimble 2.0, we are disrupting the old CRM ways of doing business.?
Nimble has recently surpassed 30,000 registered users at more than 2,800 companies ? a significant achievement for a start-up SaaS business application. The average Nimble user spends almost 3 hours a day managing business contacts. Nimble has seen phenomenal global growth in its VAR partner channel, having signed up more than 250 resellers worldwide, 50 of which are in Europe.
I don?t want to ?puff? this service just yet, but the daily updates of changes from my social network gathered through Nimble provide intriguing relationship management insights and, accordingly, this may be a truly useful tool. Presumably, I?ll have some live observations from the interview on the Hangout, and will update in upcoming blog and e-letter postings.
