Actiance Links Social Compliance With Salesforce CRMActiance Links Social Compliance With Salesforce CRM

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If you connect with social media on behalf of your employer, Actiance wants to help your employer control that interaction--but also give you credit for it.

Actiance is introducing a connector to Salesforce.com CRM to record social conversations as part of its customer and sales lead tracking.

With its Socialite product, Actiance has added the monitoring and archiving of social media posts to a product line that does the same for instant messaging and other Internet communications. Socialite started with LinkedIn and has since added coverage for Facebook and Twitter. In January, Actiance added Socialite added an engagement dashboard for posting to social media within a corporate process that includes corporate distribution of suggested posts and corporate moderation of posts before they go live. In regulated industries like financial services, Actiance has won customers like Raymond James with this framework for allowing individual participation in social media while ensuring compliance and corporate control.

[ Are you in control of social collaboration? Read The Collaborative Organization: Control The Center.]

Since Actiance is inserting itself into this process for the purposes of compliance monitoring and archiving, it also has an opportunity to capture social communications for other purposes. Salesforce.com integration was requested by many customers, according to Scott Whitney, vice president of product management.

"A rep can now get credit for interactions through Socialite, as it relates to Salesforce," he said. "Typically in Salesforce what [I'd] see is all the email sent, and I could log all my phone calls, but the one thing I wasn't getting credit for in the past all the social activity that I [was] doing."

Organizations like financial services firms may have to be careful about how they sell and what words they use to describe their products, but financial advisors are still ultimately salespeople, Whitney said. Their supervisors want to see all the things they are doing to sell effectively, and having a more complete record in Salesforce.com that includes social media outreach interactions will give them a more complete picture, he said.

The Salesforce.com option will be available Aug. 31 at no additional cost to Socialite users.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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