Connecting Customer Relationship Management Systems to Social Networks

As the popularity and the commercial potential of social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook increase, we present a framework that aims to reuse social networks data within a customer relationship management (CRM) application. The framework has been implemented in LinkedInFinder that pulls data from LinkedIn into the Microsoft Dynamics CRM system. Our proof-of-concept implementation demonstrates the use of the proposed framework, based on a use case to find seconddegree connections within one’s network that work at a specific company of interest. A survey amongst target users suggests that the application is useful and adequately designed for the intended use.