Helpstream Expands Social CRM Suite With New Social Marketing Module

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - October 6, 2009) - Helpstream, the leading provider of Social CRM solutions, today announced a new social marketing module with integrated marketing automation and social monitoring functionality. Companies will now be able to integrate conversations occurring in public communities such as Twitter and Facebook with their existing customer communities and create actionable insights for market intelligence. Companies will now be able to monitor and track activities within these communities for lead scoring and lead nurturing purposes. The new release provides integrations with leading marketing automation solutions from Eloqua, Marketo, Infusionsoft and LoopFuse.

As an established leader in customer service communities, Helpstream's new social marketing capabilities are a natural extension of its philosophy that "customer service is the on-ramp to community." This new module delivers on the next phase of the company's strategy to enable the Social CRM Virtuous Cycle. A successful Social CRM program starts with an active and vibrant customer community that can be leveraged for marketing and sales initiatives, resulting in increased word-of-mouth advocacy, immediate product feedback, built-in customer references and more effective engagement with both customers and prospects.

Features of Helpstream's new social marketing module include:

--  "Overheard" Cloud Feeds: Enables an organization to bring in feeds
    from any public social network into their Helpstream community
--  Twitter Monitoring: Brings selected search and keyword content from
    Twitter into the community for immediate visibility into relevant
    conversations
--  Tweet Backs: Allows users to tweet community content from their
    personal or corporate Twitter account without leaving the Helpstream
    community
--  Mention This: Allows users to use pre-defined replies to Tweets with
    built in tiny URLs
--  Marketing Automation Integration: Integrates the Helpstream community
    with existing solutions for lead scoring and nurturing
    

"Customer communities offer extensive insight and opportunities for marketers," says Bob Thompson, CEO and founder of CustomerThink, the world's largest community for customer-centric business strategy. "Helpstream's social marketing module exemplifies how an integrated Social CRM solution can help companies drive tangible business value from conversations in social media."

"We believe it's critically important to monitor what consumers are saying about our company and to proactively address comments, both positive and negative," said Jason Seed, CEO and director of CVSDude. "With Helpstream's new solution, we will be able to effortlessly follow what is being said about us in social media forums like Twitter, engage with existing customers and follow up on potential sales leads in a way that generates new business and inspires brand loyalty."

"The rapid adoption of social networking has transformed the old world command and control approach to managing customer relationships. The social Web has put customers in charge of vendor conversations, forcing companies to reexamine their business processes across all functions," said Helpstream CEO Bob Warfield. "Social CRM provides a unique opportunity to leverage customer conversations across both public and vendor communities. Our new social marketing module expands the Helpstream Social CRM suite to address the needs of marketing to better engage customers on the social Web."

Helpstream is sharing its vision for Social CRM in a blog series called the "Social CRM Manifesto." Each week, Helpstream CEO and Enterprise 2.0 thought leader Bob Warfield explores a new segment in the rapidly evolving Social CRM landscape and introduces new approaches to fusing social Web technologies with customer relationship management.

About Helpstream

Helpstream's Social CRM solution helps companies reduce overall customer support costs while increasing customer satisfaction and retention. Helpstream integrates social Web technologies with modern customer service and collaboration processes to drive effective customer and partner engagement across all business functions. Helpstream's SaaS design makes it fast to deploy, easy to use and affordable. The service can be deployed as a complete customer service system or as an integrated self-service and community case resolution complement to existing CRM systems. More than 200 customers and 750,000 users access Helpstream regularly to share information and discover solutions to everyday customer service problems on the Web. Helpstream is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. For more information, please visit www.helpstream.com or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/helpstream.

Contact Information: Media Contact: Amy Neal LaunchSquad 415.625.8555 hstream(at)launchsquad(dot)com