A Look at the Social Buzz of Dynamics CRM and Salesforce

In the past I have used Google Trends to review the ‘popularity’ of “Dynamics CRM” and “salesforce.com”. Given the many and varied channels for conversation out there these days, I thought I would look at some other social monitoring tools to see what story they tell. If you are looking at social monitoring and do not want to spend money, these may be worth a peek.

Google Trends

My classic favourite. You can type in any terms you like and Google will compare their popularity over time.

It is clear that “dynamics crm” has been catching up with “salesforce.com” over the past five years. Looking at the past 12 months, we see the catch-up is still happening but is quite slow.

Google Trends also tells us information about which countries, cities and languages are considering Dynamics CRM in their searching.

By changing the ranking, the same can be done for salesforce.com

Some takeaways from these are:

• The Norwegians love Dynamics CRM (probably because salesforce does not support the language), although this does not explain the Danish and Finnish
• The city which loves salesforce the most is San Francisco, CA (where the HQ of salesforce is located)
• In terms of cities, Dynamics CRM is a lot more geographically spread than salesforce (salesforce is in the USA and India, in terms of cities, Dynamics CRM covers six different countries with its cities)

As you can see for searches done via Google, the feedback is comprehensive and potentially quite useful.

Social Mention

I did a piece on Social Mention late last year. Here is the update. We have “Dynamics CRM” in the first two columns, then “salesforce.com”

Strength = Likelihood you will be mentioned in a social channel
Sentiment = Positive to negative mentions
Passion = Likelihood the same people talk about you
Reach = Measure of influence

Of the four, salesforce has a slight edge in everything but passion, which is what I discovered last year (although sentiment has also gone up for salesforce). So while a wider range of people may mention salesforce, Dynamics CRM, surprisingly, breeds the zealots.

Other things of note:

• When people mention Dynamics CRM, they also hashtag salesforce
• Salesforce has more association with the word ‘social’ through both keywords and hashtags (not too surprising given their marketing push)
• Dynamics CRM has better sourcing from image sites (photobucket, picasaweb)
• Salesforce has pixsy as a source which appears to no longer exist
• Salesforce has more corporate-like keywords while Dynamics CRM has more development-like keywords

Topsy

A quick mention-measurer, here are the results for “Dynamics CRM” and “salesforce.com” respectively for the Twitter network.

I have no idea why it adjusted the date ranges when I ran the queries but in all equivalent measures, other than ‘All Time’, Dynamics CRM is beating salesforce.com.

For the Google Plus network, while the numbers are smaller the story is quite different.

Here the clear preference is for mentioning salesforce.com. In other words, it appears that “Dynamics CRM” is becoming the king of Twitter, while salesforce.com reigns supreme in Google+.

Conclusions

If you are looking for insights into keywords and the conversations being had with them, there are plenty of tools out there to get an idea on people thoughts and associations and some good ones are free. In terms of “dynamics crm” and “salesforce.com”, while the use of these specific terms is not a complete picture of how Dynamics CRM and the salesforce cloud suite of products stack up, it does give us some insights in terms of where the products are having success in the world and what associations people have with the products.

Also, there does appear to be a consistent suggestion that the “dynamics crm” term is gaining popularity over “salesforce.com” specifically in general searches and on Twitter.

Try the tools out and see what insights they give to your business. The price is right and you might discover something new.