Sociotoco Blog

The Big List of CRM Systems

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:34:46 +0200

Our team has spent some time researching the many CRM systems available in the world. We were particularly interested in their blogs and social networking profiles. This is the list that we came up with. We’ve found 172 CRM systems, and we’re still counting. If you have some additions or corrections for our list, please let us know!

Click here to see the full list of 172 CRM systems.

New Blog Layout

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 17:41:00 +0200

Finally!

It’s a good thing we’re working harder on our social networks API than on our blog. Because, really, the state of our blog was (almost) an embarrassment.

But, we fixed that today!

Welcome to our blog, in its crisp and clear new layout, which is now much more in line with our website. It even has Twitter and Facebook like buttons! What more could we hope for?

Now it’s just a matter of making more time for actual blog writing. 8-/

Stay tuned…

(picture by Pink Sherbet)

Are There Influencers in Your Database?

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 14:30:00 +0200

A few months ago, on a flight from Sweden to The Netherlands, KLM upgraded me unexpectedly to business class. I happily tweeted about this at the time. And only later I wondered: did KLM do this intentionally because they found out about my higher-than-average number of followers on Twitter? Did they assume I was an influencer?

There has been a flurry of blog posts around the concept of influencers lately, all inspired by FastCompany’s controversial Influence Project, which, some people say, is all about reach and popularity, and not about influence.

If the FastCompany project fails in determining influencers among their readers, then is it possible to identify the influencers in your database? Is it enough to run your database against a social search tool to find out which customers have the most friends and followers on social networks?

Well, let’s see what research says about this:

Michael Wu, Principal Scientist of Analytics, has identified the 6 Factors of Social Media Influence. He writes that someone’s power to influence other people depends on 2 factors: credibility and bandwidth. (And that’s only the first part of the issue, because the likelihood of someone actually being influenced depends on relevance, timing, alignment, and confidence.)

Karen Stephenson, a corporate anthropologist, identifies three archetypes of communicators in social networks: Hubs (people who draw information to themselves and then broadcast it all around them, Gatekeepers (experts at carefully managing information flows), and Pulsetakers (great observers of people and trends).

Apparently, the chance of someone being able to influence other people depends in part on the bandwidth between this person and others, and their power to draw information to themselves and broadcast it all around them. But it is only one part of a complex issue, and the relative importance of the other criteria may be bigger!

But wait, there’s more…

The NewScientist article Why Facebook friends are worth keeping describes the work of researcher Michael Kearns, of the University of Pennsylvania. Kearn’s social experiments indicate that being better connected can give an individual apparently disproportionate influence. It seems, according to this research, that there is a correlation between a person’s influence and the number of his/her social connections.

And in their book The Hidden Power of Social Networks authors Rob Cross and Andrew Parker describe their research, which indicates that a person’s individual excellence or expertise is not a good indicator of his/her performance. Instead, a person’s level of connectedness in a social network is a much better indicator of his/her performance. This might indicate that, in Wu’s model of influence, bandwidth (connectedness) has a bigger impact on influence in the social network than credibility (expertise)!

Now compare this with two opposing views from experts:

Esteban Kolsky, CRM expert, writes that a person with 50 followers can have more influence than a person with 10,000 followers. Strictly speaking, this is true. Just like a person with 1 follower can, in theory, still have more influence than Ashton Kutcher. Such a message appeals to people who claim that the number of followers on Twitter means nothing. But this kind of reasoning is flawed when we’re talking of the likelihood of people having influence, which, as we’ve seen from research, correlates (to some extent) with bandwidth and connectedness. Therefore, by pure logic, the chance that a person with only 50 followers has more followers than a person with 10,000 followers is not 50%. It is less than that! And the number of really influential people among a top 10 of best-connected people is higher than among the 10 least-connected ones.

In an interview with FastCompany, Guy Kawasaki, famous blogger, says “It’s hard to name a person who is unpopular who has influence.” Of course, it is possible to name influencers with low connectedness in social networks. It’s just more work finding them than it is when trying to find them among well-connected people.

And that’s why it makes sense to find well-connected people in your database, and why it would make sense for KLM to find well-connected people among their passengers. It doesn’t mean these people are better influencers. Maybe they are not! And they may get it totally wrong. But it does mean the chance that they are real influencers is at least (somewhat) higher. And if you have just one free business class seat available, you can only make the bet once…

Jurgen Appelo (@jurgenappelo) is CEO/founder of Sociotoco, a Dutch business specialized in people search. He also blogs about software development, management, and complexity theory at NOOP.NL.

(images by abdallahh and sjcockell)

Social Network Profile Search - Case Study

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:24:00 +0200

More and more businesses are using public information about customers and employees on social networks. Marketing & sales, recruiting, HR departments, and finance/credit departments benefit from using such data to improve their operations. And it all starts with finding people on social networks.

In this (anonymized) case study we’ve investigated the social presence of 150 employees of a modern business in The Netherlands. It turned out that 71% of these people had one or more social network profiles. LinkedIn, Hyves, Facebook and Twitter were the most popular networks. And almost half of the people in the sample had more than 100 contacts across their social profiles.

It is still a lot of work to find people’s profiles on social networks. Human eyes are needed to achieve the best matches. Some part of it can be done by software, but one should expect fewer results and lower reliability when things are automated.

However, the results can be quite valuable. For example: in this case study we found employees with aspirations of becoming a model, and employees running their own little business on the side. (And all of this was public information.) The organization in this case study thrives on creativity and entrepreneurship, and management was pleased with such findings about their own employees.

Note: some people find the idea of investigating people’s on-line activities “scary.” But this depends on your point of view, and the goals behind the research. Many tools can serve both good and evil intentions. Scissors can be scary too. It depends on what you do with the tool…

By connecting to people’s public social profiles a person is able to get to know their contacts better. It is a great opportunity for better understanding.

Download the case study report here…

Best People Search Tool: Sociotoco Profiles

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 15:53:00 +0200

Last week we reported that Sociotoco Profiles is proven to be the best tool for finding people on social networks. But we were a bit busy serving customers. Yes, these things happen… So we didn’t have much time to blow our own horn.

But that might change.

Here is the same information we published last week, but this time with better pictures:

Sociotoco Profiles supports the most networks (17 out of a random sample of 20 popular networks):

Sociotoco Profiles has the widest search, finding the most profiles across all social networks (81% of all profiles found):

And Sociotoco Profiles has the deepest search, finding the most profiles within each network that it supports (88% of profiles found):

The Sociotoco API is used as a white-label solution in various platforms. Click here to see how our API supports BatchBook, a leading social CRM platform.

Or check out how we did our research. Yes, it was fair and objective. Honest! :)

Comparison: Best People Search Tools

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 17:16:40 +0200

Our company recently launched a new social network people search tool. And because we wanted to know how well our search tool compares to others, we spent some time comparing them. Here is our evaluation of the Best People Search Tool…

For our evaluation we looked at 123People, Whoozy (same as Wieowie in Holland), Pipl, and our own Sociotoco Profiles. (We know there are several more, but in our experience these are the best tools for finding people on social networks.)

A summary of the results:

Our results show that Sociotoco Profiles (available as a client and as API) is the best people search tool. Yep, it’s true. That’s us. :-) Our tool not only supports the most social networks. It also finds the most profiles within those networks. It probably doesn’t surprise you that we’re happy with these results! :)

We don’t want you to think that we’ve somehow faked the results, or intentionally distorted them, so we hereby give you an explanation of how we got these results. Feel free to contact us if you have questions or doubts about our approach!

Supported networks
We selected a sample of the 20 most popular social networks based on a first pass across all the tools. (We had to do this because of time constraints.) These 20 networks are the ones that resulted in the most profiles in various search results.

It appeared that 123People and Pipl only support 10 of these 20 popular networks, while Woozy supports 14 of them and Sociotoco Profiles came out on top with 17 supported networks in this sample.

The social networks that we evaluated were: Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, FriendFeed, Google Profiles, Hyves, Last.fm, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Plaxo, Posterous, SlideShare, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Windows Live, Xing, YouTube.

(Note: We ignored sites like Amazon and ZoomInfo because they are not real social networks. We also ignored small networks like TripIt and TypePad because their number of profiles was too small to be useful for a search comparison.)

Profiles found in total networks
We created a sample of 16 random names from colleagues, contacts, and celebrities. For each tool we checked how many profiles we found for these 16 people. We did our test searches twice with each tool (on June 21 and June 28), because the search results tend to differ from day to day. And we wanted to compensate for temporary network glitches.

It appeared that 123People could only find 39% of all the social profiles (that we knew about) across all 20 networks. Pipl found 49% and Whoozy found 61%. Sociotoco Profiles came out on top: it found 81% of the profiles across all social networks.

Profiles found in supported networks
When we limit our evaluation to only the social networks that the tools actually support, the numbers are slightly different, but the pattern is the same: In the 10 networks supported by 123People it could find only 58% of people’s social profiles. Pipl scored substantially better: 73%. In the 14 networks supported by Whoozy it could find 78% of people’s profiles. And again Sociotoco Profiles came out on top: in the 17 networks that it supports, it could find no less than 88% of people’s profiles.

(Or in other words: 123People couldn’t find 42% of the profiles that the other tools did find. While Sociotoco couldn’t find 12% of the profiles that the other tools found. The other two scored in between.)

Conclusion
The conclusion is clear enough: Sociotoco Profiles is the best people search tool. It not only supports the most networks. It also finds the most profiles within those networks!

Raw data
We’ve included our results below, so you can check them for yourself…

Profiles found with 123People:

Profiles found with Whoozy:

Profiles found with Pipl:

Profiles found with Sociotoco Profiles:

p.s. We have a simple people search API available for other developers. You can use it to find social profiles in your application.

New People Search: Sociotoco Profiles

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 16:18:00 +0200

Today we’ve made our brand new people search tool available to the public. Officially Sociotoco Profiles is still in beta, and possibly it will be for the next five years (software is never finished). But after some final tweaking by our awesome developers we feel confident enough to remove the locks and open it up for everyone!

How is Sociotoco Profiles different from others?

Well, we have three unique selling points:

We compared our results with other people search engines and we can safely claim that Sociotoco Profiles has better results. Our tool finds more matching profiles! That’s because Sociotoco Profiles augments the search results from social networks with extra searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and we crawl through people’s social network pages in real-time;
We have a great people search API for partners. With just one API it is now possible to search contacts on 30+ social networks. Our Sociotoco API is the perfect solution for vendors of CRM systems and contact management systems;
Our Sociotoco Profiles engine directly connects to Sociotoco Sets. This means that you can save many social profiles under one name, so you can easily refer to multiple profiles using just one simple URL.

Why don’t you give it a try, and tell us if you like it!

Find Multiple Social Profiles with Just One Username

Mon, 31 May 2010 15:33:00 +0200

We have a great new feature available in a new version of our Social CRM API, which was released today:

You can get a user’s profile details from multiple social networks by making a request with just one username.

For example: you supply the Twitter user name jurgenappelo

And what you get in return are public fields from Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, FriendFreed and more…

Example request (with Twitter network=6):

http://sociotoco.com/services/1.1/rest?method=sociotoco.profiles.getRelatedProfiles&nid=6&userId=jurgenappelo&key=<…>

Some fields in the response:

<name>Jurgen Appelo</name>
<location>Rotterdam, Netherlands</location>
<headline>Business Unit Manager at Sociotoco</headline>
<industry>Information Technology and Services</industry>
<recommendations>27</recommendations>
<connections>500+</connections>
<bookmarks>604</bookmarks>
<tags>129</tags>
<location>NL</location>
<company>ISM eCompany</company>
<occupation>Chief Information Officer</occupation>
<gender>m</gender>
<description>Jurgen is a writer, speaker, developer, entrepreneur…</description>
<bio>After studying Software Engineering at the Delft University of Technology…</bio>
<interests>agile, management, complexity</interests>

And you can use exactly the same request when submitting a username for LinkedIn, Facebook, etc… (Only the nid parameter will be different.)

So… how do we get all that data from just one username?

First of all, we crawl through web pages, starting with the username you provided. For example: we check the URL in the person’s Twitter profile and follow that link. This might end up at the person’s blog. The blog page can contain profile links to various other networks.
We can search directly for the same username on multiple networks, because many people use the same login name on different networks.
We’re launching tools that enable people to associate network profiles and join them in a set. We use that information to create suggestions for others about the profiles that are associated with each other.
Some time later we will work with various 3rd party tools to exchange knowledge about profiles that are connected. (We won’t be swapping profile data itself, just the meta-data about which profiles are somehow connected.)
And we will offer tools for people where they can authenticate their own social profiles and join them.

We think this new feature could be a great way to prepopulate fields in a CRM or contact management system.

Social Commerce - What Are We Waiting For?

Tue, 25 May 2010 17:34:00 +0200

Last Thursday Sociotoco organized a small event for customers, partners, and friends about social media in business and e-commerce. The first topic was presented by business unit manager Jurgen Appelo (that would be me) and it was about Social Commerce.

The same talk (more or less) will given next week as a keynote speech at Perspectives ‘10, a seminar organized by GlobalCollect in Prague. Here is the first version, which I’m sure will be updated and fine-tuned before next week.

Social Commerce - What Are We Waiting For? View more presentations from Jurgen Appelo.

The key takeaways from this talk are:

Social commerce is about supporting e-commerce with social media;
There are (at least) six categories of “social commerce”;
Social commerce is not so much a trend but more a transformation;
Social commerce requires that businesses adapt their internal organization;
Facebook and mobile will have a tremendous effect on e-commerce.

If you think this presentation can be improved, please let me know! I’m looking forward to your suggestions and corrections.

We're Moving!

Wed, 19 May 2010 14:52:00 +0200

This is the new home for the Sociotoco blog. Please update any links and feed subscriptions!

The old blog will stay where it was, for our children and grand children.