The Salesforce Marketing Cloud may be one of the main attractions at this week’s Dreamforce event in San Francisco, but we were just as intrigued by some big changes involving the company’s Data.com Social Key service that we saw demoed earlier today.
Data.com currently gives Salesforce users intelligence on sales leads based on two primary sources: its crowdsourced Jigsaw contact database, and business/firmographic data sourced from Dun & Bradstreet profiles. In the future, however, Salesforce wants to turn Social Key into a potent social-media intelligence gathering tool.
The retooled Data.com Social Key service, which is currently in development, will comb social networks for relevant information about sales leads. The key word here, according to Salesforce reps, is “relevant”— that is, social media intelligence that is directly relevant to a prospect’s business activity, buying behavior, influence and attitudes towards a potential seller.
The real trick is to filter massive quantities of social media data in order to separate relevant business intelligence from a potentially much bigger collection of personal posts or irrelevant material. Based on what we saw today, Data.com is well on its way to being able to do this.
As with the current Data.com offering, Social Key is tightly integrated with a customer’s Salesforce CRM contact manager. In addition to appending and expanding contacts with Data.com lead intelligence, Social Key will add one-click support for an integrated view of a contact’s relevant social media activity, blog posts, influencer scores and other content.
The Social Key solution, according to Data.com representatives, will be available some time during the second half of 2013 — so clearly there’s some work left to be done before the product is finished.
All the same, we can see how Social Key will give sales reps something they can never get enough of — insights into a prospect’s buying behavior, business needs and attitude towards a particular seller.
