Cloud ERP Gets Social Spin. Social Software Companies Get Bought.

Yammer, NetSuite Team To Socialize Cloud ERP

Yammer announced a partnership with NetSuite to pipe business events such as generating invoices, shipping products, and getting orders into Yammer's social messaging system.

This will let Yammer users see a snapshot of activity from the NetSuite applications for sales, finance, and other corporate functions, with the ability to start conversations around those updates. The integration is expected to be available in the third quarter of the year, following the second-quarter introduction of Yammer Activity Streams, an integration product that will also open the door to integrating other enterprise applications.

NetSuite also is adding its own SuiteSocial module to allow users to follow records and activities, which also can be syndicated as feeds into external systems such as Yammer. In a joint press release, the two companies said the NetSuite feed will initially be displayed as a separate stream of updates, but the plan is to eventually elevate the most important ones for display in a Yammer user's main news feed.

Social Software Acquisitions: Spinback, Tap11

This week's acquisitions of social media management products include the purchases of Spinback by Buddy Media and Tap11 by Avos, the new company from YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

Spinback is the creator of social media widgets some retailers use to let customers share their thoughts about products and purchases. The Spinback service then tracks those interactions to help retailers see how well their social media efforts are paying off in sales. Buddy Media is a creator of Facebook apps for business that wants to use Spinback integration for more complete tracking from Facebook to ecommerce websites and back.

Tap11 is part of the market for integrated tools to let companies manage posts, measure their effect, monitor social chatter, and engage with customers, prospects, and critics. Avos noted that it also recently acquired the social bookmarking service Delicious.com.

"Our vision is to create the world's best platform for users to save, share, and discover new content," Hurley said in a prepared statement. "With the acquisition of Tap11, we will be able to provide consumer and enterprise users with powerful tools to publish and analyze their links' impact in real-time."