Siebel Social Media Integration

Siebel has not been a big follower of market trends recently. But from time to time we see a new story that catches the imagination of Siebel developers, if none else. Here comes a story of another integration into the Oracle world - this is with Oracle Social Relationship  tools. Even if you are not plugged into that, there are reusable components that can help build the Siebel Social Media integration faster.

Social media is huge. The technology problem of sourcing unstructured data from a number of sites is by itself significant. This is being addressed by various platforms by providing a good many social analytics solutions. “Oracle Social Engagement and Monitoring” is one such component that acts as a listening post to accumulate and make sense of the social conversations. The conversations can be from Twitter, public posts from Facebook, blogs or even comments from Android Market. These conversations can be lead to new leads, opportunities, uncover better avenues to improve service or even discover a new market. Traditional CRM systems can help by plugging actively into the conversations, so that the new source of opportunity, lead or service is channeled quickly through the processing channel.

Siebel does not provide a comprehensive solution for all needs of Social media integration, but acts passively by exposing services to update/insert/query CRM data.

Let’s see what Siebel Social Media Integration means to us as of v8.1:

• Data model and views to store social profiles
• Social media administration views for some basic administration
• Integration services and components

Though the integration and capabilities provided OOB are not going to be a super-exciting story for Siebel folks, the solutions can indicate better practices for such integration. The data model, business services and workflows can be reused for custom integration to derive a better value proposition from the OOB model. A few examples below..

• Social Media Administration screens
• Contact Social Media profile views and data model
• Integration objects (Query for “SM *” against Integration Objects in Siebel Tools)
  • “SM Social Profile IO” to create/update contact social media profile, “SM Service Request IO” for create/update of service requests
• Workflows (Query for “SM*” against Workflows in Siebel Tools)
  • “SM Service Request with DataMap” to create service requests against existing or new contacts, “SM Lead with DataMap” for creating leads
• Social Media Service webservice

Refer Siebel bookshelf for component details and more information.