Appirio Allows Enterprises To Extend Their Sales, Marketing and Recruiting Programs to More Than 150 Million Members on Facebook
SAN MATEO, CA.—February 2, 2009—Today Appirio (www.appirio.com), a leading on-demand products and professional services company, introduced the Appirio Referral Management Solution to help businesses take advantage of existing social networks like Facebook to recruit new employees, raise awareness of new offerings and create closer relationships with customers. The new Appirio solution connects today's fastest-growing social network, Facebook, with over 150 million users, and salesforce.com's industry-leading CRM and Force.com platform to give companies a more systematic way to encourage, manage and measure word-of-mouth referrals.The Solution—Product and Services Overview
This new solution, which was developed specifically for the needs of mid-to-large size companies, includes a viral user application, a referral enginethat connects Facebook Platform and Salesforce CRM, and three different functional extensions:
- Viral marketing: This extension enables companies to promote new offerings, discounts or events to their customers, partners and employees on Facebook. Based on a search of keywords in friend profiles, the application makes recommendations of friends who might be interested in the offer, which users can then choose to take action on. Because of the integration with Salesforce CRM, customers can use the native functionality to track leads, make follow-up offers, and report on campaign success to see how their viral campaigns stack up to other marketing programs.
- Viral recruiting: This extension encourages employees to recommend friends in their network who could be a good match for job openings in their company and earn money towards referral bonuses. Employee referrals are a valuable and economical option for companies who may
have cut recruiting budgets but are still looking to hire the best talent. The viral application
automatically searches Facebook for any friends who match key words in open job descriptions
and surfaces that information on a user's Facebook profile. It's up to the user to recommend the
job opening to their friend, who can thenapply through the application. The entire process can
betracked via Salesforce CRM on the back-end.
- Viral sales: This extension helps increase the size of a company's "virtual account team" by
leveraging relationships that employees might already have to approach strategic accounts or
build customer relationships. The application maps contacts in Facebook with contacts in the
company's Salesforce CRM system, and surfaces those connections to employees within
Facebook. The employee can see if a friend has become a lead, bought a product, attended an
event, filed a support ticket, etc. If the employee chooses they can contact their friend through
Facebook to make a connection and ultimately help contribute to their company's bottom line
(and maybe even their own bonus!)
Appirio introduced in late 2008—MyFriends@Work. Because the value of a referral depends on a trusted
relationship, the application puts complete control over referrals in the hands of users. For those
companies looking to customize these applications to their unique business processes or to get a better
understanding of best practices for viral marketing and recruiting, Appirio offers a range of strategy,
integration, customization and training services.
The Appirio Referral Management solution is now generally available and is already being used or
evaluated by almost a dozen companies. For more information on the product and services, please visit
Appirio's website at http://www.appirio.com/facebook.
The Customer Need - Quotes
"Almost every forward-thinking company today is investigating how they can use social networks to further their business, but many still struggle to generate a tangible benefit. Our customers ask: how do I use word of mouth referrals effectively and responsibly? How do I know if the programs are successful? Appirio can help with all these questionsbecause we deliver an innovative product along with related services that make implementing these viral programs easier and less risky for our customers."
- Narinder Singh, co-founder and CMO of Appirio
ThomasNet is the leading online industrial marketplace and business-building site connecting buyers and sellers worldwide, and is an early customer of Appirio Referral Management Solution for Viral Recruiting. "ThomasNet is always looking for great talent to help industrial suppliers stand out from the competition and achieve their business goals. We first worked with Appirio to redesign our ThomasNet careers website using Force.com and even though it’s only been two months since the site went live we’ve already seen the number of qualified inquiries we receive each month increase by more than 500%. With Appirio’s Referral Management Solution we’re now extending our recruiting efforts to include a social networking component that will make it easier than ever for our existing sales representatives to have a role in our recruiting efforts.”
- Brian Makas, Manager of Business Intelligence, ThomasNet
Fitness Anywhere is ahigh growth consumer products company targeting the $200B physical wellness
market, and is an early customer of Appirio's Referral Management Solution for Viral Marketing. "Fitness Anywhere has a network of personal trainers certified in the use of our personal fitness equipment. We already use Salesforce CRM to manage our marketing campaigns. Now we can use Appirio's solution to get the word out on Facebook about upcoming events and promotions, and enable our trainers to share these offers with their network of current and potential clients."
- Keith McAfee, Director of Operations, Fitness Anywhere, Inc.
Useful Links
- Appirio Viral Marketing demo video
- Appirio Viral Recruiting demo video
- Screenshot of Appirio Referral Management
for Viral Marketing and Recruiting in action
About Appirio
Appirio (www.appirio.com) provides products and services that help enterprises accelerate their adoption of on-demand solutions. Appirio has a proven track record of delivering value to customers by implementing mission-critical Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions based onplatforms such as Salesforce and Google Apps, and developing innovative applications that connect and extend today's leading cloud computing platforms. With offices in the U.S. and Japan, Appiriois the fastest growing partner of salesforce.com and Google, and is backed by Sequoia Capital.Facebook® is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc.
Appirio at a glance
Introduction to Appirio
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