Came across Bantam Live: The Ultimate Social, Real-Time CRM @ TechCrunch this morning and have been thinking on it all day. My take is that it offers watered down features of Gist with the workflow features of most CRM tools.
Is Social CRM important to the enterprise? Depends. If the customers are there, it is. Most enterprise customers are not there and likely will not be there ever. When I compare 90 second video of Bantam to a tool like Gist, it falls short. Gist offers a comprehensive, implicit way to track and monitor contacts and companies. This is important for Sales. All sales. Bantam falls into the enforcing rules and “sales accounting” dark side of CRM. User adoption does not occur in those scenarios. Be social all you want, but if Sales can avoid using you to fill the pipeline, sales will.