Social Media has growth tremendously over the past few years and it definitely has its place in CRM.
Your use of social media such as LinkedIn and potentially Facebook can help build deep personal ties with your contacts. There are several 3rd party components in the marketplace that can integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, one particular is InsideView. When this solution is imported into your CRM environment, this component will pull information from multiple sources into an iFrame on your Company and Contact forms. If you can easily review a contact’s LinkedIn, Facebook and personal blog site right from the Contact form, think how you could use that personal information to help foster deeper relationships with that contact.
To provide you with a practical use, I have created an “Annual Event” entity in CRM to capture data that I would like CRM to remind me of respective to my Contacts. In the screenshot below you can see that I found out that Kevin is an avid motocross fan and that he and his son Justin have been going to the annual Indianapolis Supercross event since 1993. I would like to have CRM send me a reminder 30 days before the event each year so that I can touch base with Kevin about the event. I may want to purchase tickets for Kevin, sponsor an event or even tag along if it’s something that I share a common interest in. Whatever the scenario, I can use CRM to help build deep personal relationships.
This is one example how I can extract personal information about my contacts through the use of social media. I can record that data in CRM and use the platform to allow me to stay on top of items that are not inherently important to me, but are important to my clients.
InsideView component in CRM 2011:
Duane Napier's Blog 