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Escherman Announces Solution Partnership with Nimble: social CRM for PR

escherman: Nimble Solution PartnerHot on the heels of our our recent Hootsuite Solution Partner agreement, we’ve just signed a Solution Partnership with Nimble, a Social Business Platform that combines relationship management and social engagement into an affordable web-based solution. It integrates LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, email contacts and conversations into “one seamless, intuitive environment, empowering small businesses in today’s socially connected world to attract and retain the right customers.”

As far we know, escherman is the first UK consultancy to attain both Hootsuite and Nimble Solution Partner status. We think this a big deal for a number of reasons. Not least for the world of PR.

Joining the social media and social business dots: training, implementation and management

Consider this question: if PR is about managing reputation – and this is largely done through managing relationships with various stakeholders – why has the industry been slow to make use of CRM style technologies?  Admittedly, CRM software has been largely targeted at sales, marketing and customer service – but given you could easily replace the “Customer” in CRM with “Stakeholder”, why haven’t we seen more PR firms and in-house departments make use of tools like Salesforce, SugarCRM, etc?

Cost can’t really be an issue given that most of those tools are SaaS based and the cost per month per user is pretty minimal.

The truth partly lies in lack of knowledge of exactly how to use CRM tools in a PR context. And possibly the fact that these tools haven’t yet displayed any real integration with social.

So when Hootsuite and Nimble announced an integration partnership back in December of last year, the light bulbs went on here.

We’ve been using Nimble as our own relationship management system for some time.  Aside from being a very powerful system at an affordable price, we’ve always liked its emphasis on integrating social elements.  Now, with a direct integration with Hootsuite, we have the makings of a truly 360 degree view of key stakeholder relations and management. And at a price that won’t break the bank.

We think the fact that we are now official solution partners for both Hootsuite and Nimble puts us in a unique position. By combining our popular social media training services with the ability to help organisations implement a combined social media management and relationship management platform, we can help businesses more rapidly start to reap the benefits of social media – across all aspects of the process. Not least of which we have a particular speciality in understanding the needs of PR firms and in house PR departments. There are many ways in which PR and comms teams can benefit from understanding how to exploit the power of social media and social business – we’ll be posting more in coming weeks about how to get the best out of the combination of Hootsuite and Nimble.

In the meantime, click here if you want a free trial of Hootsuite.

Or click here if you want a free trial of Nimble.

And clearly if you’d like to talk to us about social media training and implementation generally, just email us.

(And don’t forget the social media and digital marketing training we provide via the CIPR).

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