Parrot from Webfortis Seeks to Help Companies Manage Social Media Presence from Microsoft Dynamics CRM

With social media strongly in play in today's business culture, companies need easy-to-use applications to capture and participate in a variety of social media interactions.

To that end, Webfortis LLC has developed Parrot, a cloud-based platform for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that lets companies use social media like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to participate in conversations about their products, customers, and competitors from within either Dynamics CRM Online or on-premise.

"Parrot is an application that we wrote that lives on Azure so it's a hosted cloud app that plugs into both on premise and online Microsoft Dynamics CRM so we're platform agnostic," said Marc Wolenik, CEO of Webfortis. "We've created customized dashboards specifically for social media aggregation. What makes our product unique is that you don't have to go anywhere else. You can work within Dynamics CRM."

According to Wolenik, Parrot enables users to convert the social media's unstructured content stream into a Microsoft Dynamics CRM lead, opportunity, contact, or case. Built on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform, Parrot's functions are fully integrated into Dynamics CRM, so users can track and publish conversations from across social media sites. Parrot works with CRM 4.0 and CRM 2011, Wolenik said.

Parrot also aggregates the content from social media sources into a single viewer so companies can quickly track conversations interface.

Because users don't have to leave Microsoft Dynamics CRM they can quickly perform customer service tasks such as creating new cases, creating new contacts, executing sales promotions, and creating new leads from conversations with information obtained from social media, Wolenik said. Then once the social media interactions are captured in Dynamics CRM, workflow, reporting, analysis, lead conversion and ...