M & A mania is heating up among social solution vendors. Attensity and Biz360, Lithium and Scout Labs, both increasing solution footprint and platform reach. For the last several years start ups have been springing up building out social business solutions and platforms. As is often the case, these new companies initially focused on a narrow part of the overall social business landscape. As they gain momentum (and customers) they learn what adjacent solutions their customers are seeking and start to look at expanding their footprint. This is a natural progression in tech business and something we've seen over and over. It seems that social business has reached the stage where customers are realizing value from their initial deployments and are looking to do more and carry their success farther,
Lithium's focus is on providing a complete social CRM platform for building and managing social support communities. While feature rich, with community management, mobile, knowledge base, reputation engine, content moderation, workflow, profile management, analytics and connectivity with leading CRM solutions, its focus was on the private label or branded customer community. With the proliferation of public social media and network sites and the growing popularity of using those sites for everything from purchase decision research to product support advice, it became obvious that the branded customer community was only a part of the complete picture of supporting and interacting with customers. The addition of Scout Labs' platform to the Lithium platform combines the branded community platform with a platform to monitor, measure and manage interactions on the public side of the social web. Now the branded support community can add the capabilities to hear what customers are saying in real time on public social networks and media channels, better monitor, understand and reach out to influencers outside the community to build relationships, add proactive customer support and engage customers more effectively in new product and marketing ideas with both platforms in the cloud. This holistic view of the customer, especially in the area of support, is essential and really starts to provide support to customers when, where and how they choose, which is IMHO the most important shift in thinking for effective social support initiatives.
