By the Editors of CRM magazine

Posted Jul 20, 2011

The following companies may lack the illuminating glow of the more established players in today’s marketplace. A few may even have little to no name recognition. However, this year’s CRM Rising Stars have a promising sparkle that is worth a double take. This group of six is quite diverse, encompassing traditional CRM solutions as well as some unexpected wild cards. From an auspicious enterprise social networking tool to a collective-buying discount Web site to even a crowd sourcing platform used by some of the biggest names in pop culture today (Did somebody say Britney?), these up-and-comers could enter the big time sooner rather than later.

Crowd Factory
The In Crowd

Britney Spears may have been the hottest female icon in pop music at the beginning of the millennium, but she became something of a train wreck thereafter. After a few botched performances (go ahead and google Britney Spears MTV VMA Awards 2011 and you will catch yourself cringing), the has-been star was losing her sparkle. The Britney camp went into lockdown mode, and she was determined to re-emerge on top.

And she did. In March, her album “Femme Fatale” landed in the number one spot on the Billboard charts thanks to a social media company called Crowd Factory. How did this work? Visitors to Britney’s Web site, Britney.com, saw an offer to pre-order the album and share the offer with their friends. If fans got 10 or more of their friends to visit the site, they would receive a 20 percent off promo code for the entire Britney catalog. Sweet deal.

Since its launch in 2007, Crowd Factory has served a wide range of businesses, including HBO, Sony, Speck, and Universal McCann. Crowd Factory is the first company to deliver a customer acquisition solution that monetizes social activity by connecting it to conversion data. The focus on person-level data and ROI tracking allows marketers to send their campaigns through social channels while tracking the social activity back to purchases and conversions.

However, Britney’s example shows just how useful this company has been for its customers. As a result of the offer, 30 percent of traffic to Britney.com came through Crowd Factory, and each sharer got an average of six or more friends to visit Britney.com. Company CEO Sanjay Dholakia explains why the promotion worked: “We combined the things [deals and gaming]. It’s sort of a game. This makes it more personal and more effective.”

Crowd Factory is honored to be mentioned alongside our friends at:

• Attensity, The Forward Thinker
  • Though Attensity has been around for more than a decade, its acquisition of Biz360 in April gave it added sparkle. With the social media monitoring company under its belt, Attensity has morphed into Attensity360, offering deeper analytics integrated through a longtime co-selling arrangement.

• Constant Contact, The Social Monitor
  • When Constant Contact acquired Bantam Live in February, the former took an important step in its ability to offer small organizations a platform with which to launch and monitor customer engagement campaigns across multiple channels.

• Groupon, Buying in Bulk
  • When 10 Hyundai dealers in the Chicago area in April offered a $29 deal for an oil change, tire rotation, multipoint inspection, and basic car wash—which together would ordinarily retail for $79.95, for a savings of 63 percent—more than 1,300 customers took advantage of the deal.

• LinkedIn, The Professional Networker
  • LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, counts executives from all of the 2010 Fortune 500 among its more than 100 million members in 200 countries. Its hiring solutions are routinely used by 73 percent of the Fortune 100, and nearly 2 billion people searches on LinkedIn took place in 2010 alone. Roughly 1 million new members join each week.

• Yammer, The Enterprise Integrator
  • Enterprise collaboration tools provider Yammer, one of the first companies to help organizations create corporate social networks, has seen tremendous growth in the past year and is not showing signs of slowing down.