Enabling Social Networking within CRM Applications

A primer on integrating your CRM application to Social Networking Sites

Over the past 6 months, there has been an increase in the demand for CRM application integration with Social Networking sites. This integration allows organizations to harvest relationships that have been developed by their employees using tools like Linked in and Plaxo. In addition, this integration can be used for marketing purposes by creating corporate social networking sites on MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc…

These integrations can have a significant impact on CRM user adoptions by eliminating data entry and making CRM information far more comprehensive. While Oracle and Saleforce.com are leading the way with built in social networking features, most other CRM applications can be configured to incorporate social networking functionality.

There are basically 4 levels of integration:

1. Static Linking. By far the easiest to implement but also the most limiting. With static linking you provide a link to the social network sites that are most commonly used by your CRM users. You rely on the smarts of the social network site to do the rest. For instance, you may want to setup a research page in your CRM application and provide links to the search pages on Plaxo, Linked In and Hoovers. This can be accomplished in almost any CRM application with some basic configurations.
2. Dynamic Linking. Most CRM applications allow you to add iFrames with mashups or dynamic links or to other web pages. The dynamic links will contain fields from the current record to allow you to navigate to the appropriate page on the destination site.
   a) Example of this for MS-CRM & LinkedIn; MS-CRM & Facebook
   b) Example of this for salesforce.com & LinkedIn
3. Web Services Integration. Develop web services calls to social Networking sites and integrate data directly into the CRM application. This approach is ideal for creating new leads/prospects or establishing relationship maps. If the social networking site provides an API, the code can be written using the API. Otherwise a screen scraping approach can be used and data can be returned based on the current screen design. A screen scraping approach is not ideal as it can break if the social networking site changes screen designs, but for sites without an open API it is the only option.
   a) Example of this for MS-CRM & LinkedIn (Contact us)
   b) Example of this for SalesLogix & LinkedIn
   c) Example of this for salesforce.com & LinkedIn; salesforce.com & FaceBook
4. MultiSite Integration. You may wish to aggregate data from multiple Social Networking sites. This can be accomplished by creating custom code that integrates with each site or by leveraging a common social networking framework. There are two emerging frameworks fbOpen from Facebook and Open Social from Google.
   a) salesforce.com OpenSocial Strategy
   b) Oracle’s OpenSocial Strategy
   

Developer/API Resources:

• OpenSocial API
• LinkedIn API Information
• Plaxo API
• MySpace Development
• FaceBook Developerment

Integrating LinkedIn and MS-CRM

A simple example of using a dynamic URL to pull LinkedIn information into a MS-CRM iframe.

For this example we will create a simple integration with LinkedIn from the MS-CRM account record. This integration will allow CRM users to quickly see all contacts from this account that are in their LinkedIn network. This feature is enhanced significantly if you setup a group for your Organization within LinkedIn, because this will ensure you see all of the relationships across your organization.

1) Create the iFrame
As a system administrator, go to the Settings tab and click Customizations. Select Customize Entities and then click the Account record. Click Forms and Views under the details section. Click the form record. Add a Tab and name it LinkedIn. Add a section and name it LinkedIn. Add an Iframe and name it IFRAME_LinkedIn. Uncheck restrict cross-frame scripting box and check the “automatically expand to use available space” box under the row layout section of the formatting tab. Click ok to save the iframe changes.

2) Add Code
Click the form properties under the common tasks section of the account form. Select OnLoad from the Event List and click edit. Enter the following code:

var CRM_FORM_TYPE_CREATE = 1;
var CRM_FORM_TYPE_UPDATE = 2;
switch (crmForm.FormType)
{
case CRM_FORM_TYPE_UPDATE:
crmForm.all.IFRAME_LinkedIn.src="http://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&company=" + crmForm.all.name.DataValue+ "&currentCompany=currentCompany&searchLocationType=I&countryCode=us&postalCode=" + crmForm.all.address1_postalcode.DataValue+ "&distance=50&sortCriteria=3";
break;
}

Click ok to close Event Detail Properties window. Click ok to close Form Properties window. Click the Save and Close button on the Account form.

3) Publish
Click Publish from the Action menu on the Account Entity form. The change is now available to your application.

Notes
Required Fields
Account Name and Zipcode are required fields for this integration and should be made as required fields in MS-CRM. The Zipcode requirement can be removed by removing the location references in the URL.

Sorting
The lists will be sorted by the default sorting (degrees and Name). This can be changed by changing the sortCriteria value.
1: Number of Connections
2: Degrees and Recommendations
3: Degrees and Name
4: Keyword (CompanyName) relevance

Troubleshooting
If you get a security message when you open the account record or the following message in the LinkedIn iframe “Navigation to the webpage was canceled”, you need to change security settings in Internet Explorer to enable “Display Mixed Content”.