Facebook 'Friend' Information Leads To New Employees

by Laurie Sullivan , January 30, 2009

Personal "friend" information stored on Facebook has become a treasure trove of information for companies looking to recruit new employees.

Appirio Referral Management Solution, released today, lets recruiters and marketers locate new employees, raise buzz for campaigns and create closer relationships with customers, according to Ryan Nichols, VP of product management and marketing at San Mateo, Calif.-based Appirio.

Supported on the backend by the Salesforce CRM platform, the technology connects companies with more than 150 million of Google's social network users. The viral application offers three tools: viral recruiting, viral marketing and viral sales.

While viral recruiting encourages employees to recommend friends in their network for job openings, viral marketing lets companies promote new offerings, discounts and events to customers, partners and employees, Nichols said.

The integration between Facebook and the Salesforce CRM platform provides functions that let marketers track leads, follow up, and report on campaign success. The viral sales feature helps increase the size of a company's "virtual account team" by tapping into relationships that employees might already have in strategic accounts or customer relationships.

The application taps into the information to which Facebook "friends" have access, Nichols said. "Referrals are the highest-quality, lowest cost of business for any company, and marketers stand to gain a lot through word of mouth referrals."

When a new marketing campaign is created in Salesforce, it sends a notification. The keywords in Appirio's marketing campaign are matched to the user's friend profiles and top matches displayed on the page. The application looks across all of the user's friends to identify and suggest referrals. The application engine makes suggestions, but it's the manager's decision to advance the referral search.

The data used to make the match with the marketing campaign or open job position lives within the Facebook social network. None is collected and stored. For the most part, the big social network sites give consumers control over their personal information.

The ability to share tidbits of personal information faster and more easily has sent Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter to the top of the popularity chart. Younger and working-age adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to venture into social networks. A December survey by the Pew Internet Project reveals that 75% of adults ages 18 to 24 in the U.S. use social networks, compared with 57% of online adults ages 25 to 34, and 7% of adults 65 and older.

While a variety of people appear to flock to social networks, the obstacle has been getting people to understand the benefits of enterprise applications that tie into the sites.

online, social networks

2 comments about "Facebook 'Friend' Information Leads To New Employees".

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Charles Richard from Outsell Inc, January 30, 2009 at 9:19 a.m.
Should say Facebook, not Google, in this sentence in the 3rd paragraph:
Supported on the backend by the Salesforce CRM platform, the technology connects companies with more than 150 million of Google's social network users.
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Tyler Willis from Involver, January 30, 2009 at 3:18 p.m.

Charles, that confused me as well. Hopefully Laurie can make a change.

Interesting idea, but I would love to see exactly how they have solved the problem of accessing friend data and stayed within Facebook's strict TOS, managed not to anger users and

My guess is this acts as a network analyzer and simply looks at your friends, their networks and potentially key data points like employer or job title, fair enough, that's valuable (there was an early player in this space called FaceForce which did much of the same thing, and RapLeaf also does some limited subset of this by finding social network profiles). There's where it gets unclear for me: how are they exporting the data, tracking connections, etc. without the other person opting-in to an app?

I'm curious to hear how they've done that, because having a sales lead need to opt in to yet-another-application would really turn me off from using this.

I'm happy you've written about it though, it's certainly nice to see movement in the space, social networks have inherent benefits to a good CRM system (leads update their own information, communications paradigms are already established and accepted, etc.)