Saw this in today’s MediaPost:
Appirio-facebookPersonal “friend” information stored on Facebook has become a treasure trove of information for companies looking to recruit new employees.
Appirio Referral Management Solution, released today, lets recruiters and marketers locate new employees, raise buzz for campaigns and create closer relationships with customers, according to Ryan Nichols, VP of product management and marketing at San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio.
Supported on the backend by the Salesforce CRM platform, the technology connects companies with more than 150 million of Google’s social network users. The viral application offers three tools: viral recruiting, viral marketing and viral sales.
Now… the truth is I don’t know squat about this company, and they may be very nice people indeed. I’m singling them out because the above text points toward hell.
If companies start feeding thier CRM databases with social network profiles, some genius is going to figure out how to connect those profiles to all the individual consumer data you can buy from the database marketing guys. When that happens people in the know are going to get their panties in a bunch (rightly so), and the well is going to be poisoned even for brands willing to take a more responsible and enlightened path to success.
This is not your father’s CRM, folks. There’s a line there, and the first company that steps over it is going to be famous for all the wrong reasons.
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Indeed, points out to a nice 'close to privacy' issue. On the web, there's no more delete button. With the social web, we leave drops of blood and sharks will follow them to reach us. Interestingly enough, I think those who will try to abuse it will be discovered at some point and face the risk of having someone do what you just did: calling those practices hell. And because the social web uses technology more efficient (faster) than any companies, others will call them hell and they will have to stop. In this new internet world, we need stronger ethics and company that forget about that will remember I think.
Two words: Facebook Beacon. Tara reminded me of it when she used the word "stalker" in her comment from the previous post. Beacon didn't last a month.
In a way, Beacon was a first attempt at Enterprise SRM with the "Enterprise" being the Facebook constituency.
I really like your idea. My biggest concerns are the privacy/cross the line issues brought up in this post and by commenters in the previous post and being able to filter out the large volume of white noise in the world of social media.
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