The ACT! by Sage Journal

I had the pleasure today to discuss Social Media and ACT! 2010 with hundreds of ACT! customers during the Discover New Opportunities with Social Media and ACT! 2010 webinar.  The webinar was recorded and can be accessed here.  With the help of some slides and a demo of ACT! 2010 we demonstrated support for a few of the common patterns we see businesses using in Social media: 

·         Finding Prospects and capturing more contact information about those prospects

·         Building relationships with customers, and prospects

·         Gaining efficiencies in interactions with businesses and contacts

 
We showed how to use the Facebook to ACT! import control to create selected Facebook friends as contact records in ACT!, then use the Web Info feature in ACT! 2010 to collect pertinent contact info from social sites to help “fill in” the ACT! contact record.  Big thanks to my colleague Katharine Stalcup who graciously let me use her profile to collect the data live for a “real time” demonstration.  Checking out Katharine’s social media postings we saw how we could discover “conversation starters” and topics of interest to engage in conversations with our prospects. Lastly, we looked at the Web info feature for companies to show how we can discover what things are being said about a company, product or brand in the social media world to provide insight into what’s happening at a prospect or customers organization.  The same insight could be applied to our own internal products/services or competitor’s information to track the pulse of what the world thinks about you or your competition. 

It was nice to see the level of interest in social media and ACT! and we had great feedback from participants, lots of interest in LinkedIn integration and questions around how the Facebook import feature worked.  It looks like a lot of businesses are interested in how they can begin both using social media and participating in the social media world as part of their business.  ACT! Certified Consultants are great points of contact for businesses interested in entering into the social media world, if you’re interested in starting a blog, Fanbook page, or tweeting about your company, consider talking with one of these trusted advisors.  Don't forget, you can also hone your blogging skills right here in the ACT! community as a guest blogger in the ACT! by Sage Journal. If you feel you have an interesting topic to share, anything from best practices, ACT! process tips, to sales and marketing tips, let us know. <actsocialcrm@sage.com>

 We look forward to hearing from our customers about what we can do to continue to support social media and ACT!.