EMERYVILLE, Calif. – Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of on-demand customer community solutions for the enterprise, today announced the launch of Lithium Social CRM, the first suite to offer businesses a single platform to create a powerful customer network of advocates across the social web. Lithium Social CRM allows businesses to proactively build stronger, deeper customer relationships by integrating social customer conversations into existing CRM business processes and systems. Lithium Social CRM moves well beyond using social media channels to reach individual customers – instead, it creates a network of customer advocates that is integrated into core business processes, allowing companies to drive millions of dollars in untapped value through amplified word-of-mouth marketing, improved customer service, and accelerated innovation. As a part of the launch, the company is introducing three new products: Tribal Knowledge Base, CRM Connect, and Social Web Connect.

The explosion of social media has forever changed the way companies and customers interact. For every interaction that occurs directly between the company and a customer or prospect through traditional CRM systems, there are hundreds or thousands more that are happening amongst customers and prospects in other places on the social web. Too many companies today are missing these conversations – and the potential impact on their businesses and brands. With the launch of Lithium Social CRM , companies now have the ability to use information from social conversations to develop better products, to promote the company by creating incentives for its most valued customers, and to better support customers by answering their questions and concerns no matter where they appear.

“Our research is showing that over half of all executives place the value of a customer advocate at over $50,000 per year,” said Lyle Fong, CEO of Lithium Technologies. “Social CRM allows every executive to become the ‘chief customer officer’ and take advantage of this significant opportunity to deliver value to the enterprise through a new social network of customers.”

Lithium defines Social CRM as the strategy and applications that harness the power of online branded customer communities, broader social networks, and traditional CRM systems to turn customers into advocates for brands and ultimately become their most important competitive advantage. There are five key components to any successful Social CRM solution:

* A suite of customer community applications
* A reputation management and profiling engine
* Workflow-based integrations with traditional CRM systems
* Workflow-based integrations with social media applications including Twitter
* Actionable analytics for the measurement of business value

Today, Lithium announced three additions to its platform that enable it to provide its customers with a complete Social CRM solution:

Tribal Knowledge Base

Lithium’s new Tribal Knowledge Base application complements its market-leading forums, blogs, and ideas applications. It allows customers to highlight the best content and answers from discussion forums and package them into articles that can be used to support other customers. By tracking and measuring users’ contributions, whether they participate directly in creating knowledge base articles or contribute content to discussions or blogs, the Tribal Knowledge Base encourages users to create and maintain outstanding content on behalf of the company. A publication workflow process enables companies to control the quality of information even as they empower their customers to edit articles.

CRM Connect

Lithium’s CRM Connect integrates online community and social web behavior into workflows within a company’s sales force automation and customer service systems. Companies can escalate issues or solutions from the community to a CRM system, and can use CRM workflow rules to ensure that high priority issues or important opportunities are tracked and managed effectively. CRM users can even respond to community members without leaving the CRM console, creating a closed-loop workflow spanning traditional and Social CRM.

Social Web Connect

Lithium’s Social Web Connect allows companies to have visibility into conversations happening on the social web. Lithium’s new Twitter integration, for example, allows companies to stream real-time comments and questions about their brand and products directly into the customer community as well as their own management console. From there, action can be taken. A customer advocate – based on information about their profile and reputation – might be given permission by the system to respond to a Tweet directly or to start a new thread of discussion based on a Tweet. Those responses can not only improve the customer experience, but the amplified voice of the company can now bring more people in from the Twittersphere to the company’s brand.

Comments on Social CRM: Customers

* “As a customer with a lively community on the Lithium platform, we’re enthusiastic about the Social CRM vision,” said Kevin Ryan, VP of Social Media at Barnes & Noble. “The readers engaged in our online Book Clubs at Lithium also have a significant presence in the larger social web, and helping them share the B&N experience elsewhere will bring more people into our community and strengthen our social commerce efforts across the board.”
* “Lithium’s Twitter integration is a perfect fit with our vision to engage with and stay connected to Best Buy customers wherever they choose to congregate online. A key part of our strategy is to harness the power of the voices of our most passionate customers, so we couldn’t be more pleased with the direction of Lithium’s Social CRM vision,” said Lisa Smith, Vice President of Enterprise Customer Care at Best Buy.
* “Lithium has taken the next evolutionary step in enterprise communities by delivering an integrated knowledge base that leverages the Lithium reputation engine,” said Mark Hopkins, Project Manager, Social Media, Lenovo. “The Tribal Knowledge Base allows trusted community members to mesh seamlessly with staff to harvest the most valuable community discussions, transforming them via a managed workflow into richer, more accessible articles. I believe this offering is a great opportunity to improve the customer experience while cost-effectively scaling support.”
* “Lithium’s CRM Connect has helped us increase customer loyalty and reduce support costs by delivering unified search results from across our customer community and our RightNow-powered knowledge base. The integration increases the likelihood that a user can find an answer to their question on their own, creating a better customer experience and lowering our support call volume,” said Larry Miller Director, Customer Systems and Service, PGP Corporation.
* “We started Redfin to make the whole process of buying or selling a home more transparent,” said Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin. “Hosting a Lithium-powered community for thousands of consumers to discuss market conditions, best practices and customer-service problems gives any regular Joe the inside dope, shifting the balance of power between real estate agents and consumers. And it has created an army of Redfin fanatics. Redfin’s customer network comprises our best marketers, sales people, and product designers, allowing a resource-constrained business to operate on a far larger scale.”
* “Our customers are eager to answer one another’s questions in our community, and have a high degree of trust in the advice of peers who use our products every day. Pitney Bowes’ decision to take a more social and open approach to our relationship with customers has both improved our customer experience and helped us better manage our support call volume,” said Rudy Chang, Vice President pb.com Global Online, Pitney Bowes Inc.
* “Customers amaze us every day by their passion for Roomba robotic vacuums and their inventive spirit for customizing our products to perform new tasks,” said Maryellen Abreu, Director of Global Technical Support, iRobot. “Some of our most innovative ideas have come from the community, including those that resulted in features for pet owners.”

Comments on Social CRM: Industry Analysts

* “Businesses are differentiating themselves from their competitors by being more customer-centric, and social CRM is one means of achieving this goal,” said Adam Sarner and Ed Thompson of Gartner in their April 8, 2009 report, “Key Issues for CRM Strategies, and Implementations, 2009.”
* “The phenomenon of the ‘social Web’ is forcing CRM professionals to expand their thinking beyond the goal of optimizing a two-way relationship between an enterprise and customer to include the simultaneous interactions that customers have between themselves,” wrote Bill Band of Forrester Research in the November 17th, 2008 report entitled “CRM 2.0: Fantasy or Reality?”
* In the June 30, 2009 report “The ROI of Online Customer Service Communities,” Natalie Petouhoff, Ph.D., of Forrester Research writes, “Customer service professionals must find innovative ways to engage with “social customers” via emerging social media technologies. Online customer service communities make self-service a more satisfying customer experience, in addition to reducing costs for the provider. Companies that are still spending money on self-service solutions that don’t deliver good customer experiences are hurting their brands and their bottom line. The time to shift gears and join the social media business revolution is now.”
* In the November 24, 2008 report “What Works in Online Company Forums,” Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester writes, “Marketers need a way to keep active members participating. A reputation system that identifies the most active contributors lets marketers easily reward members’ participation and nurture their positive behavior. For example, Lithium Technologies’ system accomplishes this by rewarding helpful members with badges, additional community privileges, and access to VIP areas.”

Additional Resources:

* White Paper – Social CRM
* Video Tour – Social CRM
* Datasheet – Social CRM Platform

* Datasheet – Customer Community Applications
* Datasheet – Tribal Knowledge Base

* Datasheet – Lithium and Salesforce.com
* Datasheet – Lithium and RightNow Technologies
* Webcast – The Power of Customer Influence

About Lithium Technologies

Lithium is the leading provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network. Working with market leaders such as Best Buy, Sony, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is delivering the next generation of customer relationships by unlocking the value of the social customer network. Lithium solutions combine the power of online customer communities with the broader social web and traditional CRM business processes to inspire customers to innovate, promote, and support on the company’s behalf. As a result, businesses measurably improve their marketing and sales, accelerate innovation, and increase customer satisfaction. Lithium’s platform is proven in high-volume, growth environments and provides the security, analytics, APIs, and multi-language support that enterprises demand. Founded in 2001, Lithium is privately held with headquarters in Emeryville, California. For more information, visit www.lithium.com.

CUPERTINO, Calif. – SugarCRM, the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software, announced the GetSocial Twitter™ Module has been named the “Project-of-the-Month” for SugarForge.org. The GetSocial Twitter module allows companies to seamlessly integrate social marketing to Twitter from within SugarCRM. This new capability provides users with tools to improve customer service, expand marketing programs and maintain management oversight.

Each month, SugarCRM highlights a Project-of-the-Month winner on SugarForge.org, the company’s community website. Projects-of-the-Month are selected on the quality of a project’s code, its overall activity and its general usefulness as an extension to SugarCRM.

The GetSocial Twitter module assists companies leveraging the SugarCRM customer relationship platform by providing easily integrated, simple-to-use Twitter features for every department. Internal employees can now utilize Twitter through an authorized channel and client that provides an audit trail and reporting for managers.

“The explosion of Twitter has left many companies searching for answers on how to adapt to the new service in order to provide better customer support, enhanced marketing efforts and maintain management oversight,” said Josh Sweeney, managing partner of ALT-Invest. “In building GetSocial Twitter, we are giving back to the Sugar community by providing an inexpensive, robust open source enhancement for marketing and sales teams to utilize Twitter for increased productivity and business.”

Sales teams can utilize GetSocial Twitter to receive constant updates on client status in order to connect on a deeper level. Support teams can access all product comments to provide more efficient customer support, and marketing can use the built-in Twitter search functionality to gain insight into what customers are saying about their brand. Due to the tremendous support for GetSocial Twitter, ALT-Invest has already released a GetSocial Twitter Pro application and is working on developing a configurable dynamic panels module similar to the already existing Dynamic Account Panels module.

“The GetSocial Twitter module provides an essential open source tool to bridge the gap between management, sales, marketing and the customer,” said Clint Oram, co-founder and vice president of product management at SugarCRM.

To view additional information on the GetSocial: Twitter module project please visit: http://www.sugarforge.org/content/project-of-the-month.

About GetSocial Twitter

The GetSocial Twitter module allows companies who utilize social marketing to Twitter from within SugarCRM. For more information, please visit http://alt-invest.net.

About SugarCRM

SugarCRM is the world’s leading provider of commercial open source customer relationship management (CRM) software. Founded as an open source project in 2004, SugarCRM applications have been downloaded over five million times and currently serve over 500,000 users in 75 languages. Over 4,000 customers have chosen SugarCRM’s On-Site and Cloud Computing services over lock-in based, proprietary alternatives. In the last year, SugarCRM has been recognized for its customer success and product innovation by CRM Magazine, InfoWorld, Customer Interaction Solutions and Intelligent Enterprise.

For more information, call (408) 454-6900 or 1 87 SUGARCRM tollfree in the US, email contact@sugarcrm.com, or visit http://www.sugarcrm.com.

The Service Cloud empowers customer service organizations to join and manage today’s customer service conversations in the cloud
SAN FRANCISCO – March 23, 2009 – Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced Salesforce CRM for Twitter, enabling companies to search, monitor and join conversations taking place on Twitter directly in the Service Cloud. The Service Cloud, announced in January of this year, is the next generation solution for customer service that exponentially increases the quality of customer service, while lowering the cost, by leveraging the expertise of the community. Already connected to leading social networking sites like Facebook, Salesforce CRM for Twitter enables companies to use the Service Cloud to connect directly with the more than eight million Twitter users.

“Since its introduction in January, we’ve seen tremendous momentum and validation from customers, prospects, and partners that the Service Cloud represents the future of customer service,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. “Today’s announcement builds on this momentum by enabling companies to join the conversations happening between the more than eight million users on Twitter.”

“Simplicity has played an important role in Twitter’s success, making it quick and easy for consumers to connect to their community. With Salesforce CRM for Twitter, enterprises can replicate this same experience by keeping track of the conversations happening right now on Twitter,” said Evan Williams, founder and CEO of Twitter.com.

“Customers are talking, but it is a question of who is listening.  Salesforce CRM for Twitter and the Service Cloud allows businesses to not only listen and learn, but to also actively participate in the conversation,” said Frank Eliason of Comcast.

Salesforce CRM for Twitter – Leverage the Service Cloud to Join the Conversations on Twitter
Twitter provides a free platform for users to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less and broadcast the answer to a broader community. These “tweets” can cover any topic area, including specific companies, brands and products. Twitter’s incredible growth has attracted the attention of many enterprises that want to leverage and participate in this increasingly influential community. Twitter enables a direct connection between end-users and enterprises in the more casual world of Twitter conversations. Salesforce CRM for Twitter and the Service Cloud give companies an easy way to join conversations happening on Twitter by enabling:

* Search: Salesforce CRM for Twitter helps companies search through the millions of “tweets” happening on Twitter every day to find the relevant conversations – all from within the Service Cloud.
* Monitor: After identifying an appropriate “tweet,” a company can capture and monitor the conversation by creating a record in the Service Cloud that tracks the original post and all subsequent replies.
* Join: Salesforce CRM for Twitter empowers enterprises to be active participants on Twitter by enabling them to funnel relevant solutions from the Service Cloud knowledge base into a Twitter post, effectively joining the conversation.

“Customers are already sharing knowledge and having conversations about our company on Twitter. Therefore, we are excited about being able to track these conversations and engage with the Twitter community through the Service Cloud,” said Dennis Martin of NJ TRANSIT. “Salesforce CRM for Twitter and the Service Cloud would allow us to reach our customers beyond traditional avenues of communication.”

“Today, customers are looking to the cloud for experts to help answer their service questions. With more than eight million users, Twitter is a new destination for customer conversations, yet most companies don’t have a strategy for joining those conversations. Salesforce CRM for Twitter and the Service Cloud provides companies of all sizes an efficient and effective way to join the Twitter conversation,” said Rebecca Wettemann, VP Research, Nucleus Research.

The Service Cloud – The Future of Customer Service
Traditionally, contact center technologies have been removed from the experts and knowledge found in the cloud. Yet, while companies continued to invest in these technologies, customer satisfaction rates have remained stagnant and customers turned to the cloud to answer their customer service questions. Today, 50 percent of all service conversations take place in the cloud. The Service Cloud unites these two disconnected, yet vitally important, worlds to establish the new model for customer service.

The Service Cloud transforms customer service through the power of cloud computing, and brings together industry leading cloud computing platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter to capture every conversation and leverage every community expert in the cloud. By capturing these conversations, the Service Cloud helps companies deliver the expertise of the community to customers, agents and partners regardless of location or device – ensuring that the quality of customer service is consistent across every channel. The Service Cloud represents the future of customer service, where more than two-thirds of all service conversations will take place in the cloud.

Capturing and funneling information from inside the enterprise and in the cloud into a company’s knowledge base is at the heart of the Service Cloud. 6,800 companies, including Enterasys, Misys Banking Systems and Plantronics, have already standardized on Salesforce CRM and the Service Cloud for their customer service operations.

The Service Cloud Builds on the Power of the Force.com Platform
Built on the Force.com platform, the Service Cloud utilizes the latest Force.com capabilities, including Force.com Sites, Force.com for Facebook, and more to uniquely join together knowledge and conversations regardless of where they take place online. The Service Cloud also taps into the power of more than 100 customer service extensions on the Force.com AppExchange for areas like chat, field service and CTI. Additionally, customers using the Service Cloud gain all the benefits of the proven security, reliability and scalability of salesforce.com’s trusted global infrastructure.

Pricing and Availability
Salesforce CRM for Twitter is currently scheduled to be available at no additional charge on the Force.com AppExchange in the summer of 2009.

Service Cloud packages start at $995 per month, which includes the ability to:

* Create an online customer community with unlimited usage for up to 250 customers
* Set up a contact center with up to five agents
* Connect with native cloud computing sites like Facebook, Google and Twitter
* Invite up to five partners to participate in the service cloud

Service Cloud packages are available today. Force.com Sites is currently scheduled to be generally available later this year. Please visit http://www.salesforce.com/servicecloud for more information.

About Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company. The company’s portfolio of SaaS applications, including its award-winning CRM, available at http://www.salesforce.com/products/, has revolutionized the ways that customers manage and share business information over the Internet.  The company’s Force.com PaaS enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful on-demand applications that deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy across the enterprise. Applications built on the Force.com platform, available at http://www.force.com<http://www.force.com/>/, can be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s Force.com AppExchange marketplace available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/.

As of January 31, 2009, salesforce.com manages customer information for approximately 55,400 customers including Allianz Commercial, Dell, Dow Jones Newswires, Japan Post, Kaiser Permanente, KONE, and SunTrust Banks.  Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all.  Customers who purchase salesforce.com applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available.  Salesforce.com has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CRM”. For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com<http://www.salesforce.com/>, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.