Anthony Bradley

I often get the following question from clients, “How can I leverage facebook for enterprise value?” I usually hit them with my facebook mantra, “Just because they are there, doesn’t mean they care.” Organizations must figure out a way to capture facebook participants’ attention. During a recent trip to San Jose I met with Appirio.

Appirio, with their Referral Management Solution, has new application to help you capture qualified leads from a virally compelling campaign. This is interesting to me from two major perspectives:

1. As stated they have a solution for systematically mining a viral facebook campaign for leads collection specifically tailored to an organization’s needs therefore ensuring a quality lead pipeline. You still must determine a way to capture their attention with a compelling and virally explosive message, but if you do then Appirio might help you turn it into a stream of leads.

2. I have been talking to clients about looking out for “clean slate competitors.” These are competitors that start from scratch with a Web 2.0 mentality capitalizing on new ways of thinking (business models), new collaborative behaviors (community-based) and new ways of using computing capabilities (cloud computing). I have emphasized that today you can design, build, test, market, deliver, and manage a product with nothing more than a browser and an Internet connection. Appirio is such a case. Their data center is an empty room. They don’t have a single server. They build and deliver their applications using salesforce appexchange and force.com and Amazon’s Web Services (AWS).