Yesterday InsideView, a service that mashes social data into sales intelligence, announced the launch of SmartCloud, a tool allowing instant integration with practically any social media site or business data source.
With the offering, sales representatives can quickly tap into a content source and receive business intelligence through SalesView, the company’s content mashup engine. The key to the new release is the instant, plug-and-play integration of new content sources into SalesView. The company announced integration with Twitter in May, and the latest release makes it possible to quickly delve into data from a slew of other media sites and content providers.
Social CRM and services of the like are quickly becoming a popular tool for businesses looking to manage the information overload that has come with the increasingly real-time nature of social media. Oracle and Salesforce CRM products perform similar analysis on Twitter, Facebook, and other major content sites, but do not as of yet offer a simple way to integrate new sources.
In the end, it will be interesting to see how social networks address third party organizations leveraging their data for CRM and market research. LinkedIn, for instance, has taken matters into its own hands by offering a few basic features of its own to help locate business opportunities within its network. Other social networks like Facebook and Twitter will likely have a tougher time implementing such features in-house, and may inevitably find that charging a modest fee for third-party data access is the most realistic policy.