I am a believer in the social networking platforms that are evolving across the globe.  LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and many others... but perhaps not for the reasons that you think.

In my view, these are wonderful additions to the business landscape and hold great potential.  In my own business I am currently connecting Facebook and LinkedIn into my CRM platform - Salesforce.com.  Naturally I would like to do this in an automated fashion.  Unfortunately, this thought appears to be on the front side of the market.  Meaning, I have yet to find a clean solution that helps me entirely avoid manually entering each piece of information.

A brief commentary on the effort:

LinkedIn provides an export function - unfortunately, the export function does not include the public ID/address in the export file.  Although they provide a public ID/address for each LinkedIn user that can be made available, I can't export my own list of contacts and include this ID/address in the export file so I can match it and import it into my CRM application.  So, although LinkedIn provides a wealth of business information that can be useful to me and many others in recruiting staff and selling solutions, the only option I have found thus far is to manually key whack each link into my CRM app.

Faceforce has a neat little application available through the AppExchange (FaceForce) that enables Salesforce.com to connect to Facebook based on an email match; it then pulls information into Salesforce.com... well not really.  In reality, it places a link inside of Salesforce.com and shows the Facebook picture inside of Salesforce.  It's a step in the right direction, but it needs to do a lot more - and it rough at best.

The promise of these technologies is pretty interesting and is holding my interest - especially where I can help  companies that offer services or products that are highly experiential in nature such as outdoor sports, music and entertainment.

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