Today social marketing and connecting to people over social networks is very important for a business.
Services like LinkedIn, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and more, have skyrocketed in popularity. Is your business taking advantage of connecting to customers, prospects, and vendors using social networks?
The biggest obstacle I hear about regarding social networking is how to manage all these different services and having the time to do so. Tools like Microsoft Dynamics CRM are making this easier by offering social networking built into a single Interface.
With the Outlook Social Connector, you can expand your social networks and stay up to date without leaving Outlook/Microsoft CRM. Using this tool you can click on a contact’s name to see email conversations, meetings you have attended together, and their activities in social networks. You can also send this contact a request to connect in popular social networks. This allows you to stay up to date and in touch with your contacts with minimal effort compared to maintaining all the social networks separately. It also gives you great content to use as discussion points!
Bringing Social Networking In-House
Tools like Microsoft CRM are also socializing internal business communications.
In the latest release of Microsoft CRM you can subscribe to activity feeds for a customer record for example to stay up to date on everything happening in the system for that record.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Activity Feeds provide real time notifications and quick sharing of information that the team cares about via quick and short updates. Activity Feeds enable a user to follow and listen in on important activities that take place around the people, accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, or anything else that they care about.
Feed status updates can be posted manually by users or automatically based on pre-defined system rules through workflow. Activity Feeds can also be posted to by external applications through the Microsoft Dynamics CRM web services API.
Activity Feeds expose real-time presence functionality so that users can initiate communication activities such as IM, phone calls, and emails.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Activity Feeds will work with all deployment models for Microsoft Dynamics CRM including on-premise, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, and partner-hosted.
Beringer Associates,
