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In last post we saw that era of social media monitoring is not yet over. It has become more intense in the form of returning value. People and practitioners  are exploring new opportunities to apply the huge data / information gathered by these tools. These are real and meaningful data. It has information about people, their preferences, their conversations and sometimes their intentions as well. The next part is to channelize them, to integrate them with existing business line.  And, there are quite a few dimensions emerging up.

One of such areas where it has picked up momentum is integration with CRM [Customer Relationship Management]. There are various tools in this category now. They call it Social CRM. The acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce could be seen as one of such moves. Salesforce is a big player in traditional CRM business and by adding Radian6 to its kitty it can very well position itself into Social CRM market. Their latest move to integrate social media monitoring to CRM proves the same. Salesforce is not the only player which is eyeing this market. The other players are also interested to enter this. Lithium’s move to add CRM capabilities is another example of social media monitoring and CRM engagement. As I see, if things will move in right direction, there will be some major acquisitions in this space. This time, it could be by big CRM players like Oracle, Microsoft, Amdocs, etc. Or, even SAP can eye for a social media solution which can add more value to its existing suite. The platform is all set for big market leaders to integrate both of these products and look for a futuristic solution.

This mix and match is working well with smaller social media monitoring tools as well. They are adding CRM features with products like Sugar CRM and vtiger. This solution looks perfect for SMBs which are looking for a CRM solution with social media integration. This combined package will enable them to manage not only their brands on social media but also their customers. They won’t even mind to pay for this package which has got dual benefit. 

A good number of existing social media monitoring tools are moving into Social CRM. It reduces the pain of their marketing team in terms of explaining ROI and it helps the end user to understand the connection. This new line of business has just started and it is surely going to evolve from here.

• Tom Anderson, co-founder and ex-president of MySpace has suggested that Google+ looks good enough to beat Facebook and other social networking websites.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joins Google+ and one of his early connections is current Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.
• The networking model of Google+ is more real. Circles help you distinguish between family, close friends and acquaintances, claims Google.

These are the popular stories of web world today. These stories are making noise because the wonder ball is now open. Google has launched Google+ [to few limited users]. And, it has started creating buzz in the industry. People were guessing about a similar product for long. Few leaked stories also talked about names like loop, circles, etc; but now we know it’s Google Plus. It’s not just another product from Google; they promote it as the future of Google. It’s not buzz or wave. This time they are much more serious and much more prepared.

But, as most of us ask in our circle – the real question is, why Google needed a product like this? The answer is simple. They want to dominate internet market. They are leaders in search, video sharing, emailing and they want to spread their wings to other spaces like photo sharing, group discussion, and social networking. They had products like orkut, buzz, wave but people at Google were not serious about this business, at least till the time Facebook storm took the internet to a new level. Facebook not only emerged as the leader in social networking space but it also become a threat for the core business of Google, emailing [Facebook’s social inbox] and search [Social Search]. Google had to response. And, they responded with a bang this time.

The challenges for others like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster are different. They have to build everything from scratch. But, Google doesn’t face this problem. It has YouTube for video, Picasa for photo sharing, Google docs for document management, Gmail for email service, Android for mobile services and many more utility products. What they needed was a product which can integrate all these utilities and give users a platform to plug and play at a single dashboard. They seem to be winning this race by launching Google+ . Yes, it does provide a single dashboard, a simple look, filled with some powerful features.

But, it doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges. They do have challenges. The challenge for Google+ is not to attract users but to maintain the simplicity it has right now. People have started liking this product because it is simple. It is not clustered and it is not noisy. But, that could be because there are not much people. And, there are not much applications. Going forward when there would be a crowd of users, developers and applications – the real test of Google+ will begin.

Most of the innovative solutions start with supply, followed by demand. A problem occurred to somebody. He tried to solve it. He got the solution. Bingo. It could be a problem for somebody else as well. Let me build a product. This is one of the scenarios as how the supply process starts. Second scenario could be. I have an idea. It can transform many lives. Or, it can help others to do their work effectively. Let me try to build a generic solution. Great. It really works.

There are multiple such examples where an innovative product created a huge market, a market which nobody would have thought earlier.

Let’s take a real-time example. Twitter. Was there a demand for a micro-blogging service like Twitter before it came? No. The demand was created after we had a supply.

Did we demand an email service before Hotmail started providing this? No. We felt the need when the service was available.

Crux of the story is – if your product is good, it will create its market. And, if the product is excellent, it would definitely discover its big blue ocean.