When I work with larger brands, one of the key concerns by CMOs or Marketing Directors is how the results of their social media strategy will be pipelined into their current ERP system.
I know what you're thinking; a lot of people in these companies have a lot of trouble using the ERP system. Why would we want to add another component to an already complicated system?
The answer is simple: if you can't prove ROI to the company's financial team, there won't be a second social web strategy or social media implementation for this client.
We're not looking at the whole huge umbrella of services typically covered by an ERP system here, either (manufacturing, supply chain management, etc.) - we're mainly examining the Customer Relationship Management components, which would include sales and marketing, and customer contacts, and the Data Warehouse component, which would include some marketing and internet analytics.
When you're talking ERP for small-to-medium brands, some of the ERP vendors that you'd be talking about include big dogs like SAP and Oracle Sage, Microsoft and SSA. There are also a host of smaller players like Epicor.
SAP - This company has two really positive things going for it. They've been digging around in the social media space themselves for over a year and they've been pumping up their SMB offering over the last couple of years as well. It's heartening to see that the brand has even taken some steps in their marketing to allow for sharing-out to social networks from a number of pages on the SAP site. They also published a paper on how they transformed their brand (internally) using social media. While I haven't been briefed on any discrete social media measurement tools within their CRM/ERP solution, I would venture to guess that they're in development for their off-the-shelf SMB product.
Microsoft - Microsoft Dynamics is in a similar position to SAP, but it looks like they're swiftly gaining an edge, due to partnerships. This past October, an Egyptian partner company, Link Development , unveiled a Facebook CRM Connector. This is hot stuff for a brand that could potentially be doing volumes of customer contact on Facebook (think Victoria's Secret)
Most of their marketing (like this financial ERP community) uses many of the conventional tools of B2B social media marketing (blogs, tags, surveys, forums).
Sage - I think, research-wise, these guys are in a similar position to where SAP was about a year ago. They commissioned a whitepaper , "Social CRM: Customer Relationship Management in the Age of the Socially-empowered Customer," that's a pretty darn good read. (Brent Leary wrote this one, and he, along with Paul Greenberg and Chris Carfi are probably my favorite social CRM bloggers).
Oracle - I wasn't convinced that Oracle understood the space until I looked over this deck , especially Slide 15. It's perhaps the best explanation of the how enterprise social media integrates into ERP. Why every other brand doesn't have a similar diagram on their website blows my mind. These guys get it.
Epicor - Aside from basic social media marketing and community features, I don't see a lot going on here.
For further background, you can also check out some of the first mentions of the evolving "blurry line" between social software and ERP came up in this Gaping Void post last year.
If you think I missed any brands
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