I'm not sure what to think about Salesforce adding Twitter and Facebook into their dashboard. It seems like a good idea, and if I used a CRM instead of an ATS, I'd want fields to add social media id's and handles, but not everyone is so excited about it. Mike Troiano of Scalabe Intimacy (who writes a great blog, btw) chats with me on Twitter.
I agree with Mike that social media has the potential to get really ugly in the sales world, but it's going to happen, and I think those who are responsible actors will do a lot better than those who segregate social media from their sales efforts. Now I have a vested interest in this - my new social media for small business store teaches salespeople how to make money using social media. One of the first titles is Using LinkedIn To Generate Sales Leads. If all we were going to do was treat LinkedIn like a database, that would be a short training, consisting of a few Boolean searches and a note about vanity url's.
But that's not how business is done. Spammers may use sites like LinkedIn to beg for business, but competent salespeople use it to make the very connections that bring new business.
It's the same for Twitter. My view on Twitter is that if you're not making money for someone else, you're not doing it right. Whether that's a recommendation to a restaurant or a dry cleaners or a SaaS project, Twitter is the ultimate referral tool. Does that mean that anyone can jump on Twitter and be successful? Of course not. But the community can clean up bad actors on its own, and that's much different than calling or email lists.
So I welcome the Salesforce integration. There might be a period of rough time as new users come on, but that's already happening. I see the integration as just another proof that the impact of social media has gone past newspapers and government, and is moving strongly into the business sector.
