Bad News for Social CRM - Facebook Pulls a LinkedIn

The latest news is that, effective April 30, Facebook will be cutting off it’s API access to CRM and SCRM programs. Does this apply to all such applications? That I cannot say for sure but it certainly does apply to my SCRM of choice, Nimble. This shutdown has already begun. When completed, this means (in the SCRM) …

Aggregation of Facebook profile information will no longer occur
Your contact’s Facebook social stream will be gone
You will no longer have the ability to receive or respond to private Facebook messages
Friend requests will have to be made at Facebook or another site that would allow these

For the record, I don’t even like Facebook and barely spend any time at all on it. My clients are largely found on LinkedIn and since LinkedIn pulled this same move over the past year, I have already taken my big hit with these actions. I guess that I can almost understand LinkedIn’s action given their obvious intention to become a CRM on some level. Their feature upgrades all point to this fact.[Tweet “Facebook follows LinkedIn in cutting off API access to other apps. Thoughts?”]

LinkedIn has also been on a business app buying tear as of late as is evidenced with their recent purchases of Refresh (social intelligence) and Lynda (skill development) and their previous purchases of Rapportive, Connected HQ, SlideShare, and Pulse.

However, I do find these trends to be disturbing and what do they mean for the CRM industry, business people, and the social sharing (of information) in general? Are all of these platforms going to build their own little silos? Welcome to castles and moats.

Nimble is not laying down!

For some time now, Nimble has offered the Smart Contacts Widget for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. This widget allows you to take Nimble anywhere with you on the web and either look up existing Nimble records or create new records.

The widget is about to get better! The latest release, due out any day, includes the ability to create a live preview of a Nimble record prior to actually creating one in Nimble. Instead of API connections on Facebook and LinkedIn, we are using improved social profile discovery along with good old fashioned page scraping. The results, as you can see below, are phenomenal! Senator Rubio’s live profile on the right was created entirely by Nimble. The senator and I are not friends. I’m Canadian and I can’t vote anyway 🙂

The Contacts widget will also identify, on existing Nimble records, when information found on the page is in conflict with information on the Nimble record and you will be given the opportunity to update this new information. For example, their employment may have changed. Finally, company information is also now being discovered and generated by the widget.

What happens now?

Obviously, these recent events do mean that we must make some major changes to how we approach Social CRM. Unified messaging (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and email) all in one inbox has been severely compromised. We will no longer be able to review a contact’s social updates from LinkedIn and Facebook. We will need to go to a contact’s social profile page to initiate these actions as well as to gather initial, and updated, profile information.

At least for now, we still have Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, and a dying Google+. For me, that means Twitter. For others, they might be a little better off. Let me say that while I am still trying to wrap my brain around all of this, my rationalization instincts would tell me that this is not all bad, we will still survive, and here is why …

You still have and need a standard CRM – Keeping track of our contacts, calendars, and communications is every bit as important as it has always been!

Going to a contact’s social pages does have benefits – You will always gather more information at the actual site than you can ever hope to feature in an SCRM.

We will become better with the social platforms themselves – There are always things like lists and groups and circles that you need to do at the platform level regardless. These allow you to focus on important groups. Groups like your customers and your prospective customers.

You will automatically be advised of the latest changes to a contact’s profile – This will happen every time you activate the widget on a social profile and you will be able to address these changes (think engage) immediately. Whereas these used to happen in the background, there are now being brought to your attention.

Ultimately, these are some huge changes but, being static is generally not that much fun! What they say about necessity being the mother of invention is true and I am looking at these challenges as being opportunities to revisit my entire Social CRM strategy and to grow in the process.

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Craig M. Jamieson

Managing Member at Adaptive Business Services

Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!