Bantam Live

Google and Bantam Networks jointly announced today Bantam Live's listing in the Google Apps Marketplace, along with new integrations between Google Apps and Bantam Live. Bantam's press release is here and Google's announcement can be found on their enterprise blog. In addition to that post, Bantam Live was also featured as one of three apps in Google's official blog. These integrations, long requested by our customers, now include:

- Single sign-on via Google from a Google Apps account.

- Google Contacts importing into Bantam Live (as recently noted)

- Google Calendars sharing in a Bantam Live workspace

- Google Docs linking to Contacts, Projects and Deals within Bantam Live

- Google Buzz feeds for contacts profiles in Bantam Live

- Google Map links based on contacts' addresses.

In addition to our recent Gmail enhancement, we think this is a good first step of integrations between Google Apps and Bantam Live. Stay tuned for enhancements and more integrations with Google.

Bantam Live is a proud sponsor of the Downtown Little League of Manhattan. A nonprofit organization serving children in Lower Manhattan, the league provides organized baseball and softball for children, aged six to 16, living in Tribeca, Battery Park City, and SoHo, where we work. Here, the kids pretty much have "control of the conversation" in the argot of social CRM, particularly from the dugout, where their voices often attempt to influence either what the pitcher delivers or batter produces.

Our sponsored team in the apt "minors" division had the top slugger of the division and finished in a respectable 3rd place among 10 teams. Next year, look for Bantam Live to be in the big leagues and sponsoring the majors.

Salesforce CRM has an interface that only the mother of a database technician could love. As a bolt-on, the glossy lipstick of Chatter may help as a overlaying concealer to the core CRM app, but the user experience is still like walking in mud. For small businesses, it seems Salesforce CRM will be easy to use when pigs fly in the cloud.

We're flattered that Salesforce's Chatter is following Bantam Live's lead in the small business sector by offering real-time activity streams, team collaboration tools, and social CRM features. And as a competitor, we're delighted that their makeover is but a fresh coat of paint applied to a vintage CRM system.

See also today's press release about the new ad campaign: Simplicity, Not Lipstick. Images are all in good fun and parody.   : )

In Bantam Live we've added the ability to import your contacts from Google. It's part of a range of Google App integrations we'll be announcing in the coming weeks.

Here's how it works: Go to the new "Google Contacts" page in the Settings section of your Bantam Live account. From here you'll be asked to click and "Add a new Google Account" and authorize this transaction with Google. Now, in 3 quick steps, you can tag your entire import set, specify select groups to import, and set the permissions to view these contacts in the account. It's important to note that Bantam Live is simply making a copy of your contacts stored on Google and importing this copy, which you can do periodically to refresh your new entries as they occur in Google. The system is not overwriting and deleting those contacts stored on Google, which most of our users didn't want. We hope you find this Google integration helpful in managing your contacts in Bantam Live.

Bantam Live now integrates with Rapportive. A free browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox, Rapportive automatically adds a dynamic widget, or "Raplet" in the form a sidebar to your incoming Gmail messages. By installing it you can see useful information about people next to their email message, such as their bio along with publicly available social network presences, recent status updates, and their image on the web. It's now integrated with Bantam Live such that when using Gmail and the Bantam Live Raplet from Rapportive, you get a bit more social.

At the right is what the Bantam Live Raplet looks like within the right-side of Gmail for the contact Rahul Vohra (who happens to be Rapportive's CEO).

What can you do once you've enabled the Bantam Live Raplet?

- Create Bantam Live contacts on the fly from Gmail

- View existing Bantam Live contacts from Gmail (contact info, recent notes, and tasks)

- Write a note for a Bantam Live contact from Gmail

This is just the start of our integration with Rapportive. We think you'll quite useful if you're a Gmail user. Check it out in your settings section within Bantam Live to enable.

In addition to Twitter and Google Buzz, Bantam Live is now integrated to LinkedIn. Today we enabled you to import a contact's profile on LinkedIn and see it displayed on the right side of a contact page within Bantam Live. Enter a person's LinkedIn profile link in the "Social Profile" when adding or editing a contact record, and you'll see the widget displayed.

Last night, Bantam Live took the stage and demonstrated our social CRM workspace to 700 people at the monthly New York Tech Meetup event. Some audience reaction below...

Tech researchers, analysts, journalists, bloggers and vendors agree that "Social CRM" is a hot sector, and validation of this is that companies are increasingly adopting it to engage and include their customers in business. But few people agree on a precise definition of what social CRM is and the #scrm hashtag on Twitter has frequent links to offerings as this market takes shape. The "Godfather" (or should we say General) of the social-CRM-definition-wars is CRM expert Paul Greenberg whose oft-referenced definition includes the position that social CRM strategies are a "company's response to the customer's ownership of the conversation" out there in social media land. In this many seem to agree.

Social CRM as it applies to Bantam Live refers to both internal collaboration among a business team and external engagement with the voices of customers, prospects, and partners across the social web. Outside is in, inside is out. We explain...

Let's first start out with the internal social CRM aspects of Bantam Live. At the core of Bantam Live, in the dashboard, is the real-time activity stream, which fuses business data objects and communication among a team, so it can stay in the loop and collaborate. In Bantam Live, everything from status updates and team commenting to workflow activity updates (eg. progress on projects, completed tasks, and modifications to deals that a team is collaborating on) cascade in the stream.

This design is similar to the Facebook news feed and it's becoming all the rage in web-based business software. As Marc Benioff of Salesforce wrote on TechCrunch, it's "The Facebook Imperative" for software companies. As ReadWriteWeb said at our private-beta debut last summer, "Bantam Live is part CRM, part Twitter, and part Facebook for business teams." Even content from the web can be imported by users and displayed in the activity stream of Bantam Live, which leads us to the external part of social CRM.

While team members collaborate internally within the activity stream, they can also search from within their Bantam Live workspace out on social networks like Twitter. For example, if you're selling industrial solar panel technology to commercial office parks, you can search for keywords - say "solar panel recommendations" - and upon discovery import a new contact's full profile and the relevant tweet with one click into Bantam Live. From here, you can initiate workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and converse with the new contact for various CRM purposes, while maintaining all annotations and live feeds of this person from a single contact page in Bantam Live. All of this activity cascades in the real-time stream of the Bantam Live dashboard, where team members can comment and interact. For lead-generation (and soon other CRM features), Bantam Live makes the filtered and captured spontaneous content of Twitter transformative and valuable for sales and biz-dev people. As we've said, Thar's gold in them thar tweets!

Altimeter Group's Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang recently issued a report  that provides a framework and successful use cases of social CRM. In its broad spectrum, we'd say Bantam Live initially falls into the Sales and Collaboration categories of their Social CRM construct, specifically in the SMB space, for now. Interestingly, as we've suggested (see Hunter-Gatherer and Farmer in Social CRM), it's possible that the deeper social "relationships" (in the human bonding sense of the term) between two people will increasingly flourish in small and midsize businesses (without the restrictions of the large enterprise) and, moreover, in the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum, more so than in the ephemeral and transactional nature of a customer service relationship with a brand and its on-duty rep. It may turn out that the sales and biz-dev end of the social CRM spectrum is the most richly authentic and social of all. Who knows? As we continue to build Bantam Live in the triad of CRM's domain in sales, marketing, and customer support, we'll find out.

Internal CRM collaboration among the team, external CRM engagement with prospects, partners, and customers, all managed in a social workspace with complimentary productivity and collaboration tools for business teams. That's the social CRM you'll find in Bantam Live. Stay tuned as we broaden our social CRM offerings.

(Note: image above has partial view of analytical charts; to see all, please login.) Today we released a new module following last week's release of sales pipeline management. It's called Analytics and it allows you and your sales team to visually analyze your deal flow and sales performance. With various, filterable charts you can now better understand what's going on. Pie charts on deal stages and categories, sales performance and deal probability graphs, team leader boards, and year-to-date and trailing 12-month booked revenue can also viewed. Check it out in the Deals section on the Analytics link.

At the core of Bantam Live is the real-time activity stream, which is all about the sharing of time, being together in the moment of business activity, integrating business apps/workflows/data, and being able to instantly interact with co-worker activity. The stream has significant value beyond the asynchronous sharing of a web page or file via, say, email. With this in mind we introduce today a new design tweak that'll give you a window view into the future evolution of Bantam Live.

Today's design tweak (in the magnified stream item above) doesn't need much explaining, and that's the point when users see this visual enhancement for an updated business object in the stream. Now, when a user modifies a deal setting, it'll display with augmented meta-data in the stream about a change to a business object, instead of only text narrative. In some instances it'll be with graphical icons, as shown. So instead of text-heavy "Bill Jones created the deal XYZ and assigned a value of X with a close date of Y and a probability of Z" the updated items will now display the meta info in a way that's easy to skim to get the essentials. Moreover, we've added some small green/red icons for up/down on certain modifications to a deal, such as a change deal amount or probability percent. Not only do these meta-updates of deals in the stream quickly provide useful information to a sales manager and colleagues; it also fosters team cohesion and sense of purpose that's motivating as well as informative.