We're in one of the most interesting phases of social business right now with the emergence of a software category recently described by Jeremiah Owyang at Altimeter Group as "Social Media Management Systems." Or what Ragy Thomas, CEO and Founder of Sprinklr, calls "the most liquid space I've ever been part of." On the one hand, leading technology providers like IBM are leading the charge for social business, supporting the vision with unassailable sales data from the likes of Sandy Carter and her group at IBM, and on the other, nightmare tales of facebook page hijackings and FDA notifications. As with most revolutions in business (or history in general), it happens that a necessary chaos gives birth to enormous opportunity. Thomas, a serial entrepreneur, was one of the first to jump and with one of the best-baked solutions.
"The world as we know it has ended," according to Thomas. "It ended about two years ago. The socially networked consumer is now in power. We had organized them {customers} into inbound and outbound channels. Now those silos are gone."
When that world ended, Thomas, who had been part of the leadership at Epsilon email marketing followed his entrepreneurial instincts and jumped. With his own backing, he launched the product late in 2009. The company now boasts 40 large company customers, like Cisco, SAP, Newell Rubbermaid, Samsung and Microsoft. Revenue grew by 10X last year, without a significant sales force, mostly by word-of-mouth, and chiefly by the brand agencies that have not been able to provide these services with their campaigns. A recent $5M investment from Battery Ventures will allow the company, which had invested almost entirely in development and client service, to expand its marketing and sales teams.
The newly named and emerged "space" of SMMS is being transformed from simple monitoring, the kind of thing innovated by Radian6 and others, to a more strategic and enterprise-wide functionality that is butting up from below against the functionality and acceptance of traditional CRM - and vendors like SAP and Salesforce. Incorporating monitoring, naturally, SMMS with Sprinklr and its more robust competitors is incorporating internal collaboration as well as social and governmental compliance. Sprinklr, according to Thomas, goes so far as to answer "How do I allow for internal communications that is not to be published? How do I provide framework for legal and put it into workflow? Global crisis? How do I work with each of my 30 markets that can be automatically and manually moderated?"
This is a vision of social that extends not simply to marketing and customer service but to an entire collaborative enterprise, with the customer inextricably involved throughout - whether organized within a campaign or some other measurable goal. It has allowed Sprinklr to grow with strong recurring revenues at the top of the SMMS food chain, according to Thomas, billing on average $5000 per month.
it's exciting to see that we're now at a stage where "social" is the core mission of technology, not an add-on. Where visionaries like Thomas are expanding the functionality from individual platforms like facebook and twitter, to global and more strategic concerns. With this larger goal in mind, Thomas claims, "We're building the infrastructure for Fortune 500 companies to use 7-10 years from now."