by Andy Macmillan, SVP & GM, Data.com

You know better than anyone: Companies need to leverage data in order to grow their business and maintain relationships with customers. But it’s a continuous battle. All that updating and cleaning just to think about leveraging that data. And meanwhile, the social revolution has only made data more complicated with the constant stream of unique updates on the social web.

What if you were able to gain context and a holistic perspective on a current or potential customer with the click of a button? What if you could make sense of all that social data and put key pieces of information in the hands of your customer-facing team in real-time?

Well today we have exciting news that will tackle just that. We’re launching Data.com Social Key to deliver the missing connection between the social information available on the web and the core customer and account data you keep in Salesforce.

With the Social Key, you’ll be able to bring together your business data with social information to gain a holistic, social view of your customer within seconds. And the best part about Social Key is having that information delivered right where you and your teams work – your Salesforce Sales Cloud.

Since its inception, Data.com has provided clean, actionable business data so companies, like yours, can focus on communicating with current or potential customers versus data management. And soon you’ll be able to use Data.com Social Key to comb the social web, including the best social networking sites like Facebook, Klout, Twitter and YouTube for the most recent and relevant social information. Data.com Social Key will harness real-time public social data (like tweets, recent news or a view into what your customer is interested in) and connect it with business context of traditional data (like employer info or a phone number), giving companies the data insights necessary to develop deeper connections with customers.

Imagine having context into a prospect’s interests, likes and dislikes before walking into a sales pitch – you may even learn what competitors are in the deal. Priceless context that will help you strengthen your relationships with customers and close more deals, faster. By injecting social into traditional with just one click, the Social Key humanizes your business data and brings it to life through real-time updates and a 360-degree perspective. With the Social Key, you can automatically manage, filter, clean and update social data so you can focus on what matters: growing your business. 

Currently scheduled to be available in the second half of 2013.