Social CRM startup Silentale used to be called the “Dropbox of communication.” It used to compete with the likes of Xobni, Gist and Rapportive. But those days are over. Starting today, Silentale will be ending its former contact management service and rolling out SocialReplay, a B2B social backup solution.
Last week, Silentale’s founder, Laurent Féral-Pierssens, announced the change in strategy on the company’s website (below). In short, starting today, Silentale will no longer update user accounts and all free accounts will be erased on February 14th. For anyone with a Pro or Pro Plus account, their information will be stored for an additional 60 days after the February 14th extermination date. Anyone who wants to get ahold of their data should contact Silentale’s team.
It may seem a bit bizarre that Silentale is ditching its contact management service only 6 months after launching the paid version of its service. But after evaluating user activity and noticing some of the consolidation taking place in the industry – namely Blackberry’s potential acquisition of Gist and Salesforce’s acquisition of Etacts in December – Silentale decided to redefine itself in the B2B space.
With the launch of SocialReplay, Silentale will provide solutions in social back-up. The new product oriented towards companies, brands and social media addicts will enable users to save and analyse their activity across multiple social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter. Thus, Silentale is hoping to become the data source which companies use to do their social media analysis.
And even if Silentale pretty much just announced this change in strategy, some 20 or so Fortune 500 companies are already using the new product. I guess we’ll see in the upcoming weeks how the new Silentale presents itself and how users react to SocialReplay.