Nimble Outlines Vision For Social CRM

On the heals of their launch at DEMO, Nimble is getting some buzz on their new Social CRM service, the basic product of which is free. While there is a free version, Nimble's goal is to serve the SMB and Enterprise markets, both of which suffer from information overload, disparate systems that don't talk to each other and outdated contact management systems which are overpriced and act as silos.

Nimble Contacts unifies communications streams such as email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google Calendar in a Web-based dashboard for sales and customer service people. InformationWeek's David F. Carr recently did an interview with CEO Jon Ferrara and I chose two questions to republish below. The interview in its entirety can be found here and it's definitely worth a read.

Carr: Where does this product fit in the market for enterprise social media?

Ferrara: It's hard to manage your communication by going to all the tabs in your browser. If I see an interesting tweet from someone, I need to be able to jump to the contact record and see who that person is. The idea of Nimble is give people the ability to listen and engage. Today, people use things like [Salesforce.com's] Chatter and Yammer to build internal collaboration.

Carr: What other sorts of applications do you want to integrate with?

Ferrara: We don't want to be all things to all people. I'd rather be the WordPress of CRM than the Microsoft Office of CRM. So we're going to invite in third-party developers and enable them to share and sell their extensions in our app store.

In my mind, in the perfect world, we would love to embrace the existing platforms people have invested in. That's why Gmail and your Google Calendar activities are integrated into Nimble. And you can see that if I've read a message here in Nimble, it's marked read in Gmail.

Disclosure: I helped the team with their launch and was a consultant to the company.