Are Social Media And ERP A Match? NetSuite Thinks So

“Enterprise 2.0” has been a buzzword this year, as ERP and CRM product managers try to calculate the inclusion of social media streams, and now NetSuite is jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon. This week, the progressive ERP giant announced a partnership with InsideView that will provide a social intelligence application built on NetSuite’s SuiteCloud platform.

Social media has mostly been utilized in help desk applications, but InsideView for NetSuite wants to bring these capabilities to the previously–ignored back office, where ERP and finance reside. With the new product, social media mentions and connections are aggregated from sources like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Thomson Reuters, to name a few; an alert system then notifies users of mentions.

Of course, the question still remains: how exactly will this stream of unstructured data benefit the ERP side rather than the CRM/sales and marketing side? The fact remains that even after businesses commit to using social networking feeds to their advantage, that information is still most helpful for identifying leads and performing damage control. InsideView’s founder and CEO, Umberto Milletti, points to damage control as a tool for ERP—collections and finance agencies can take information regarding a company’s financial status and curtail the flow of negative information. Having this information in real-time is especially helpful to accounting departments, and as Milletti points out, they are the unlikely to be active social media users anyway, so the inclusion in InsideView for NetSuite is apt.

For the most part, InsideView for NetSuite seems intended to get enterprises to acknowledge social media as valid sources of information, as well as teach them to uses these forums for collecting inbound information, and not just using them as soapboxes. The intentions are good, and it is helpful to hear of social networking as a financial troubleshooting device, but the previous questions remain largely unanswered. Everyone is acknowledging that social media is huge, and that its presence will have some undeniable effect on ERP and CRM, but the scope of this impact is still up in the air.

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