The new social CRM (customer relationship management) is personal social CRM. Social CRM is when businesses try to access the social network interactions of their customers for the purpose of extending business relationships. An example would be a customer tweeting something about a product, which a customer advocate notices and posts in the company’s online help forum. The company’s marketing staff is flagged and then responds by retweeting or other appropriate measures.Personal social CRM is applying these corporate social CRM principles to managing interactions within one’s own social network. The latest websites for personal social CRM include Nimble and Contactually; other somewhat similar tools include Rapportive and Highrise. Nimble and Contactually attempt to show who is important in personal email networks through algorithms that count interaction frequency, length of time for response, and CCs versus direct interactions. Presumably future algorithms could include other influence variables like social ‘klout.’
One de facto and perhaps more useful functionality aspect of personal social CRM sites is that they are essentially a web-based API for social networks like LinkedIn. Different kinds of searches, sorting and management of contacts, for example with context tagging, are available with these tools. This could allow a new way to interact with a greater number of people more effectively.