Appirio’s ReferMyFriends Connects Salesforce to Facebook to Help Companies Generate More Referrals
Appirio, one of the leading developers of enterprise applications for Salesforce, has released a new Facebook application that makes it easier for companies using Salesforce’s CRM solutions to reach potential customers and hires on Facebook.
The new ReferMyFriends application integrates with SalesForce to let marketers publish their campaigns to Facebook (it’s as simple as ticking a checkbox on the Salesforce campaign settings). Marketers can then login to the ReferMyFriends application on Facebook, which suggests Facebook friends who might be a good match for the marketing campaign at hand. Once users are selected, invitations are sent to those friends, and Appirio tracks responses on the Salesforce backend.
Appirio’s ReferMyFriends is one of the first applications built on new tools created through Salesforce’s strategic partnership with Facebook announced last November. The two companies have created a toolkit for Salesforce app developers called “Force.com for Facebook” which allows developers to build apps that connect to the Facebook APIs.
ReferMyFriends is one of the first enterprise applications we’ve seen built with the new toolkit to be deployed on the Facebook platform.
February 6th, 2009 at 7:15 am
With the development of FB apps geared at a strategic business use of leveraging people’s networks, this makes the actual idea of using FB as a direct marketing tool quite appealing to corporations. This really does bring about some concerns of privacy (ie Do I want to get spammed on FB in addition to my inboxes and pop-ups on websites?) but the potential to reach a pretty active and broad audience is there. Interesting to see how this pans out though.
February 6th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Hi David, I think the whole point of this app is that it does not spam anyone. The person who installs the application makes the decision on which referrals make sense and then decides whether to pass it to his friends or not. The application merely provides a nudge toward a referral and a way to measure the effect of the nudge in Salesforce. So, the only way for me to get spammed would be if my friends spammed me :)
February 6th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
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