By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Ol' Blue Eyes's Songs For Young Lovers:

According to a report recently published by research firm Cutting Edge Information, new CRM initiatives for the pharmaceutical industry track interactions with different audiences and help companies better understand their key customers.

"When it comes to drugs, mass marketing techniques that serve other industries often fail to create lasting customer connections," the report finds. Instead, companies turn to more direct, personalized communications to build relationships with doctors and patients.

Cutting Edge Information identified several reasons why some pharmaceutical companies are leading the field in customer relationship management. Organizations on the cutting edge of CRM tend to share seven core principles of success: They invest adequate resources at the outset of the initiative and provide sufficient investments annually to support the program, create an internal champion for CRM through the structuring of a CRM department, team or ad hoc group and establish a centralized database to share knowledge across the company.

They also define CRM and educate internal parties to ensure buy-in, understand target audiences and provide customized messages via preferred media touch points, recognize that CRM requires a long-term commitment, in terms of both resources and measurements and improve their programs by continuously monitoring progress and industry advancements.

Cutting Edge Information's findings are drawn from the report, "Pharmaceutical Customer Relationship Management," which explores how companies build business cases to attain sufficient resource backing for CRM programs and to win senior management buy-in.

Download a free summary of "Pharmaceutical Customer Relationship Management: Developing and Improving CRM" or purchase the report at http://www.PharmaIndustryCRM.com.

…

Boasting " rich integration with on-demand CRM," iNetOffice, a vendor of browser-based word processing applications, has along with spreadsheet vendor EditGrid and ShareMethods, an on-demand document management vendor, announced the general availability of ShareOffice.

It combines an online office based on open standards with document management on-demand, bringing major product categories together into an Office 2.0 application.

ShareOffice addresses what officials from the three firms describe as "significant limitations in current office-productivity" products. Desktop-productivity suites are proprietary closed systems difficult to extend or to modify to meet user needs, they say, and existing online office suites are "targeted broadly at many different user groups and do not address specific workflows. Many online office applications provide limited or no support for offline use with documents."

To address these issues, ShareOffice enables an online office ecosystem via open standards, supports business-critical workflows, operates entirely as a software service via a browser and provides offline capabilities such as document synchronization and local document backup.

"We are excited about the launch of ShareOffice for AppExchange," said Rene Bonvanie, senior vice president and GM of AppExchange at salesforce.com.

The features and benefits of ShareOffice include an Office 2.0 platform designed to enable the assembly of dozens or hundreds of online office applications using common and open Internet infrastructure for document sharing, single sign-on, and cut and paste best-of-breed online documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

ShareOffice works in conjunction with ShareDrive OnDemand to allow offline access to key documents including offline synchronization of files and folders, scheduled data backups of documents to a local server or laptop as well as batch upload/download, etc.

Spreadsheets can be exported to Excel, PDF, OpenOffice, OpenDocument, XML, and more; documents can be exported to HTML, Word, and PDF.

A single browser interface for word processing, spreadsheets, document management and CRM allows users to work in a single integrated application without any need to upload or download documents. Customer data automatically inserted into online documents from salesforce.com, with documents automatically associated with Accounts or Opportunities.

…

Buongiorno a multinational operating in the market of digital entertainment, has announced today the acquisition of UK and US agency operations of Flytxt, a leading company in mobile marketing and advertising. Flytxt will focus on its mobile CRM platform, Neon.

Flytxt has been involved with such events as a CRM campaign with Smash Hits, an on-pack campaign with Cadbury "Txt 'n' Win," the text to screen campaign with Britain's Channel 5, a short code donation campaign for Comic Relief and collection campaign for Coke's "Text to collect."

Following the recent acquisition of HotSMS B.V., an Amsterdam-based prominent player in the mobile advertising and marketing arena, the present acquisition is also being carried out by the new sub-holding Buongiorno Marketing Services Netherland B.V. and will be completed in cash for about euro 4 million.

The newly formed Buongiorno Marketing Services Ltd. and Buongiorno Marketing Services Inc. will retain all agency clients and the Flytxt agency team. Buongiorno Marketing Services Inc. will be lead by Flytxt co-founder Carsten Boers.

The acquisition of Flytxt, "with its presence both in the UK and in the US, perfectly fits into our strategy to strengthen our marketing services offering and our positioning as a really global player in the mobile advertising and marketing arena," said Carlo Frigato, Buongiorno Group Chief Financial Officer.

The mobile market is big -- one billion handsets have been sold in 2006 and billions of text messages are sent each day. Flytxt's work with Orange on its "Orange Wednesdays" campaign was noted as how powerful the use of mobile can be as a marketing and advertising tool by Buongiorno's Alvise Zanardi, Head of Marketing Services.

…

Hey, test drive Microsoft CRM: Altico Advisors, a Microsoft Certified Partner, has launched a monthly "test drive" series. Continuing throughout the year on the second Friday of every month, Altico is offering potential users an opportunity to walk through the basic sales, marketing, and service components of Dynamics CRM.

At the company's Marlborough, Massachusetts offices, "prospective users can get under the hood of Microsoft Dynamics CRM," as the test drive "puts each user in the driver's seat with a fully loaded version of Dynamics CRM 3.0 on a laptop computer, guided by a seasoned instructor," company officials say.

…

Mindshare Technologies has announced that Firestone Complete Auto Care and Tires Plus has selected Mindshare Technologies to help measure customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Mindshare's Voice of the Customer products helps retail clients understand the customer experience and identify strong and weak performing areas by store, on a daily basis, from the customer perspective. This is accomplished through real-time, Web-based reporting that provides critical metrics such as store rankings, trends, and goal performance.

The reporting includes actual customer voice or text comments plus customer call back tracking to help enhance customer retention. It has customers take an automated survey by toll free phone number or Web and receive a store discount incentive for doing so.

If  read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content.