Three Wildfire alternatives

I’ve spoken with two vendors this week that are experiencing an influx of inbound interest based on Wildfire’s impending shutdown. I’m also discovering that not all buyers are ready to commit to the idea of a massive integrated social business platform. If you find yourself in a position to explore Wildfire alternatives, here are a …

sCRM: Stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before

Two weeks ago Oracle acquired social media management (SMM) tool Vitrue and yesterday Salesforce.com’s $689 million acquisition of Buddy Media was confirmed.

Although these deals may be great for the acquired companies and the start of an era of social software consolidation, I can’t shake the feeling that this matters very little, if at all, to client-side marketers.

Tools for herding cats

My company Dachis Group has a tool called Social Portfolio Insight to help brands manage their social presences.

Today, Jeremiah at Altimeter Group has released a report looking into 27 social media management tools used by brands to activate their social media accounts – 178 on average at each company.

The report is embedded below.

Charlene Li on Open Leadership

Last week I discussed the updates to Groundswell and I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the continuing work of co-author Charlene Li. Charlene has been a trusted advisor to marketing leaders for over a decade, helping make sense of search and portals in the early days and then building awareness and understanding of social …

Should you be checking in on Foursquare?

I wonder, just because you can check in on Foursquare, should you? Users do what they want and “unintended” uses often surface interesting emergent outcomes. I’ve heard of a few situations that make me wonder if there really is no right or wrong way to be using the service…