• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, June 2, 2015

Lithium Technologies has unveiled a suite of new products to help brands analyze and manage social media, with an eye to more effectively integrating social interactions and information into the company’s broader enterprise. That includes customer relationship management and strategic marketing decisions.

Lithium chief marketing officer Katy Keim outlined the problems facing marketers in an increasingly complicated online world: “Customer experience is becoming the main digital battleground, but it’s really difficult for them to solve this and scale is the biggest problem.

"They can’t deal with the channels all at once, they don’t own the channels, and they don’t always know who’s who. People use different handles, which might not be tied to the CRM system, so they don’t know if this person is a customer or prospect,” he added.

To help marketers overcome these obstacles and respond to opportunities more nimbly online, Lithium’s new “Total Community” service offers an integrated profile that shows the activity and characteristics of social media users across a range of platforms, including their interests, areas of expertise, and interactions.

The profiles include measures of online influence across different social networks courtesy of Klout, acquired by Lithium last year, which should allow brands to identify and engage loyal customers and influential individuals -- for example, with rewards or tailored content to encourage sharing.

Keim noted another new feature that helps companies “connect customers with employee experts to help solve problems and questions they’re facing,” even when the employee isn’t normally involved in CRM. Here she explained: “Employees are often a great resource for dealing with all these inquiries and comments, but we’ve kind of lost that with contact centers. This is a way to route customers’ questions and comments to particular experts in the organization.”

The new Total Community service also includes a new “monitor wall” and “shared dashboards” that will broaden access to social media information across companies, encouraging collaboration around customer insights derived from social channels.

Lithium also unveiled a new mobile app, giving social media teams and other employees access to its analytics and management tools from their devices, as well as updated ratings and reviews functions; new listening APIs; and a new software developer kit.