September 14, 2012
By Kelly Liyakasa,

Unified Unveils SocialConnect Solution

Enterprise marketing technology company UNIFIED has launched socialCONNECT, a solution that was designed to improve social marketing campaigns by leveraging CRM data and linking social information back to the contact record.

This winter, UNIFIED unveiled its Social Operating Platform for companies to measure and manage social advertising campaigns across sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Building on that launch and a $14 million round of financing, socialCONNECT is positioned as a way for marketers to improve social outreach and impact by fostering a bidirectional flow of data between CRM and social platforms.

"What we've done with socialCONNECT is build an intelligent layer that allows us to pull data out of CRM environments without [a company] having to change any of [their] existing Web site infrastructure," remarks Jason Beckerman, cofounder and chief product officer at UNIFIED. Once routed to the Social Operating Platform, a marketer can then "leverage that [data] to create experiences within social environments."

Using SocialCONNECT, companies can do the following:

Track tweets, retweets, Facebook shares, and other social actions generated by a CRM campaign to determine campaign ROI;
Generate an email marketing campaign drawing on CRM data with the ability to embed UNIFIED Amplet technology (such as a social landing pages with Facebook or LinkedIn Connect buttons); and
Target customers more effectively by connecting social profile data with CRM leads.

"If a person comes to your Web site and fills out a lead form, you might know who they are, but you typically wouldn't know who their friends are, what they're interested in, [or] where they are geographically," Beckerman says. "But if you send an Amplet out to users, and that user then connects with Facebook Connect, we can now do data matching to match those user profiles....which ultimately [lets a company] market to them more effectively.

SocialCONNECT will be first available as a native application for Salesforce.com, which is undergoing approval now in the AppExchange. But the company is also looking at SugarCRM and Zoho CRM because of their open APIs, as well as other CRM systems like Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and Oracle. "It's going to really be driven by customer demand," Beckerman notes.