1. Box.net Adds More CRM Integration, This Time It’s SugarCRM 6.0
by David Roe on CMSWire

Box.net has been hovering around the CRM market for some time now, but their announcement that their cloud-based content management system can now be integrated with open cloud CRM provider (and Q partner) SugarCRM generated a lot of interest. In October 2009, Box made the same move with Salesforce.com.

Takeaway: The announcement, which was made at Sugar’s annual SugarCon show on Tuesday, means that Sugar users will be able to access documents stored in Box’s CMS.

2. If you don’t take care of your employees… they won’t take care of your customers
by Mark Johnson of Loyalty360

In this brief but impactful post, Loyalty360’s Mark Johnson discusses the alarming results of recent studies on employee engagement. A few highlights:

A May 2009 survey by consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide (now Towers Watson) found that engagement levels for top performers at large U.S. companies fell close to 25% year over year.

Employees overall experienced a 9% drop in engagement year over year.

A March 2009 survey by Gallup found that 52% of U.S. workers over the age of 18 were disengaged and an additional 18% were actively disengaged.

Takeaway: The headline says it all – if you don’t take care of your employees, what incentive do they have to care for your customers? Johnson notes that the levels of active disengagement reported in the surveys costs businesses an estimated $416 billion in lower productivity. It also costs companies dearly in terms of both employee loyalty and customer loyalty. Make sure you take care of your employees and that your marketing and human resource staff work together to drive both internal and external engagement. Your employees and customers will thank you.

3. Twitter: All the Numbers That Matter
by Mathew Ingram on GigaOm

Mathew Ingram summarizes the hard numbers behind Twitter’s growth and size straight from the source – Twitter’s co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams, who announced the figures at their first-ever developers conference, Chirp.

Takeaway: It seems like every other day there are new facts and figures for Twitter, but these are the numbers that matter the most for marketers and tech wizards alike. The bottom line is that Twitter’s growth is showing no signs of slowing down and there are numerous opportunities for businesses to incorporate the platform into their marketing strategies – whether it serves as a medium for engagement or a platform to provide a new service to your customers.

Kurt Roberts, Technical Director

The most important part of systems integration is making sure that the integration keeps the goals of the business foremost in mind. Integration is only worthwhile if it helps users accomplish their goals more smoothly and quickly.

For marketing websites, this means making it as easy as possible for your Web team to drive traffic to the site, capture visitors’ attention and contact information, convert those leads to sales, and keep visitors coming back. To do this, all of the pieces of the site need to be instantly familiar to the user – a seamless blend from personalization to lead capture, search engine optimization to analytics, from product search to sale.

Kurt Roberts, Technical Director

I’m going to say something dangerous:

Information technology isn’t a stand-alone part of a business – it’s there to facilitate the other portions of the business.

Getting a CMS is really about publishing a website after all; not many people do web content management because it’s fun. It’s not an online game; there are no high scores for most workflows completed. CRM is the same; it’s not so much that it will be great to have all of your contacts in one place – it’s that it will be great to use a managed, up-to-date contact list to do promotions, find new opportunities and grow the business.