Six degrees of separation...
One of my long term dreams for CRM has been to see how my contacts may be related to one another. We use Thomson One at our work, and it has a pretty cool feature I just discovered that you can enter any two names (primarily senior management or board members of public companies) and it draws out the connections between the two people, including all the middle steps. For instance the CEO of company A (who we know well) also sits on the Board of Company B with another board member who is the CFO of company C, and we're trying to get an introduction to Company C's CEO. This could be pretty useful to us, the biggest problem is we have to know both the starting and ending point...but if the starting point could be any of the contacts in our CRM it would pretty dramatically transform our business.
I've kind of sat out of the whole social network thing, but is this kind of what LinkedIn does, and if so is there any good way to integrate LinkedIn with CRM (maybe through Zoho's API, or maybe a different app entirely). Are there other apps out there that do the same thing (it would be great to have something that could scan public information, not just people that have proactively been added to some friends network).
Appreciate to hear any thoughts on this both from Zoho employees as well as any other community members who might have dealt with similar issues.