Clearvale is a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service, enterprise, social networking solution that includes interconnected internal and external social networks. It allows customers and employees to collaborate and communicate directly for customer support, idea management, and other needs. Both the internal and external interfaces have familiar components: activity streams, project management tools, communities, discussions, blogs, profiles, embedded media and links.

While there are many  tools to meet these needs individually, Clearvale’s strength is in its ease of use, and in the systems it offers to manage and integrate the internal and external communities. Businesses can create separate social networks for each of these groups, but manage them as a whole. Employees can access the networks using existing tools such as Active Directory, Google Apps, and OpenID; Clearvale has tools to let external partners and customers use various authentication systems. Clearvale can even integrate with e-commerce websites.

The company says that the Clearvale solution gives organizations greater control, with the appropriate levels of access and security, while still enabling deeper customer engagement, and providing the means to integrate with existing social networks.

When I spoke with Richard Hughes, director of product strategy at BroadVision, he told me that after 18 years of experience with developing e-commerce portals, and their recent experiences with enterprise social marketing, the company feels that there is a market for a solution that allows businesses to manage internal collaboration and CRM in one platform.

He feels such a solution will be more effective than trying to use separate social networks for each activity: “At BroadVision we don’t agree that Social CRM is about tightly controlling customer interaction or that it’s primarily about social media monitoring. It should be about integrating all of a company’s customer engagement channels to enable better communication among customers and employees.”

Clearvale is mainly aimed at medium to large businesses of 100+ employees. More information, including a video demo of a Clearvale ecosystem and a more detailed product demo, is available from the Clearvale website.

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Like most other “social CRM” products, for it to work you’ll need to grant it access to the various accounts that you’d like it to pull your contact data from. Connected doesn’t ask you for your usernames and passwords, you’re just asked to authorize access and can revoke it any time, and also has a strongly-worded privacy policy, but that could still be a concern for some.

Once you’ve granted access, it will likely take some time for the initial sync to take place and for the contacts to be processed. Once that initial sync has been processed, any subsequent changes will be updated in Connected seamlessly.

On the account homepage, you have two main tabs: “Contacts” and “Companies.” “Contacts” is an alphabetical listing of all of your contacts. Each entry shows the contact’s name and profile photo (if available), together with their company, job title, the source of the contact and when you last conversed with them. Clicking on a contact brings up a more detailed view, including recent updates (if available), mutual contacts and “Notes” and “How we met” fields. The “Companies” tab allows you to filter contacts by company. It’s a nicely-designed interface that’s easy to use.

There’s a Gmail sidebar to access Connected contacts from with Gmail, while there’s also a mobile-optimized version of the site to use on smartphones. Connected can also send you a daily email with useful info to help you to stay connected to your network, and such as updates from you contacts, job changes and birthday reminders.

With Etacts being shut down, Connected’s main competitor is probably Gist, a social CRM startup that’s been in beta for some time (see our past coverage of Gist here). Connected is nicely designed and has a cleaner interface than Gist, so it will probably be easier to get to grips with. However, after a 14-day free trial period, Connected is pretty pricey for an online address book at $9.99 per month, while Gist is currently free. And although Gist will likely introduce a paid premium offering when the product moves out of beta, it hasn’t been announced yet. Additionally, Gist can connect to Lotus and Outlook email accounts, while Connected can only connect to Gmail accounts. I’d recommend Gist over Connected, even though the latter is a nicely designed app.

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• Gist is an online service that “connects your inbox to the web,” automatically building a profile for each of your contacts from the data that’s available in your inbox and via their social networking profiles. Like Etacts, it will also remind users if they haven’t been in touch with an important contact for a while. It’s available as a Chrome extension, Firefox add-on, and also as iPhone and Android apps, and can work with Gmail, Outlook and Lotus Notes. The service is currently free. See Scott’s review of Gist here.
• Rapportive uses social data (pulled from the controversial Rapleaf service) to provide additional information about your contacts. It replaces the adverts in Gmail’s sidebar with useful information about your contacts: a photo, bio and links to social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc) and works via a Firefox add-on or Chrome extension. As the information is taken from the Rapleaf database, the results are sometimes hit-and-miss, depending on how well Rapleaf has managed to tie a particular contact’s email address to various social media accounts. Rapportive is free. See my review of Rapportive here.
• Plaxo is an online address book that can store contacts from Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, LinkedIn and more. Like Etacts, it’s “socially aware,” tracking social feeds from Twitter and Facebook to keep users up-to-date on their contacts. The basic Plaxo service is free; Plaxo Premium adds sync with Outlook Contacts, Google Contacts and Windows Mobile and some additional features and costs $36.95 per year. See Judi’s review of Plaxo v.3 here.
• MailBrowser. Webyog’s MailBrowser is another CRM app that works with Gmail to provide additional data about your contacts, and can automatically keep contact information up-to-date by pulling data from emails. However, it doesn’t provide easy access to social network profiles or updates. Unlike some of the other services here, MailBrowser is a locally installed app, so it may be a better choice for users with privacy concerns. MailBrowser is free, and is available as an IE plugin, Firefox add-on and Chrome extension. See my review of MailBrowser here.
• Xobni is a popular productivity add-on for Outlook that provides a sidebar offering additional information about your contacts culled from their social network profiles and emails. It can automatically extract information like phone numbers from email messages, and also provides a threaded conversation view and easier ways to find attachments. The basic Xobni product is free, while Xobni Plus costs $30 and adds advanced search features, auto suggest, support for more than one PST file and more. See Scott’s hands-on review of Xobni here.

What are your favorite social CRM tools?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user GretheB

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As Jennifer reports over on GigaOM, after approximately a year of limited closed beta they’ve decided to open up the gates and make the Gist beta public. The folks at Gist had taken a bit of a different take for their beta. A carefully vetted group of participants were given access over an extended period of time, along with direct access to support and incredibly responsive feedback channels. As a result, Gist has improved substantially since our last look and is a highly recommended tool to add to your business arsenal.

In a nutshell, Gist leverages your inbox to determine the importance of people in your network, and then scours the web to gather information about those people. Pulling data from news sites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, Gist automatically creates a personal dossier using this information.

With the proliferation of news sources and the volume of data now available, it’s impossible to keep up and attempt to do this type of research manually. In a survey prepared by Gist, it was determined that 60 percent of respondents spend less than 10 minutes before an important meeting searching for information abut the participants.

By making research easy and doing the heavy lifting for you, those who have limited time can gain more useful information in the time they do have, while those who like to do extensive research can cut that time considerably.

I’ve always liked the fact that Gist doesn’t require you to abandon the communication tools that you are already using. The full web interface pulls data in from external sources and while that offers the most comprehensive views of your data, useful integration with Outlook and Salesforce (announced today) make Gist data available while you are working in your familiar tools.

The integration of Gist with CRM tools is a terribly exciting development. In the Gist survey, only 15 percent of folks said that they looked to their CRM before a meeting for information on participants. Clearly, the bulk of existing tools are lacking in providing useful, timely and relevant information. The shift to Social CRM shift acknowledges the importance of what is happening on the social web. The movement of CRM to be more social, and to recognize that conversations are happening outside of traditional channels is a trend that we’ve been talking about for a while, and one I’m happy to see catching on.

Tools like Salesforce and Batchbook already recognize the value of the social web and are on the leading edge of allowing varying degrees of social media integration right from within their interfaces. Gist’s Salesforce integration is slick and I look forward to more services offering Gist hooks, as the tool is really the most comprehensive that I’ve seen. Even just a quick glance at recent Twitter updates can be a great conversation starter, and with Gist I can see that information while I’m looking up a phone number.

With a nice thoughtful feature set, useful interface and a developing network of integration with other tools, I find Gist to be a radically useful tool. It occasionally overloads me with data but given the alternative, that’s a problem I’m willing to deal with.

Sign up for your spot in the Gist public beta starting today.

How do you keep up to date with your business contacts?

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