Unified Communications Featured Article

How SocialGrow Will Help Drive Unified Inbox's Unified Communications Plan

By Steve Anderson
Contributing TMCnet Writer

Recently, Unified Inbox announced that it had acquired SocialGrow, a firm that offered up a new breed of social networking application. This acquisition brought with it an exciting new proposition in unified communications (UC) that should serve to give Unified Inbox users a lot more utility in the field, as well as a much simpler means to stay in touch.

Unified Inbox reportedly had its eye on SocialGrow—to the point where it actually acquired the firm for an unnamed sum—and along with that brought SocialGrow's co-founder and current chief marketing officer Ken Herron to serve as Unified Inbox's new head of marketing. SocialGrow makes it easier to connect to users on different social networks, particularly if such users are already known, and Unified Inbox will be adding SocialGrow's line of tools to its own product line to provide more impact for users.

With SocialGrow's tools in place, users will actually be able to both collect and manage contacts from email inboxes and outboxes alike. Unified Inbox will be able to note that users send email back and forth with certain people, and then suggest that the user add said individuals to social media listings, thus opening up a fresh communications channel for the user to work with. This actually simplifies things quite a bit from the original use of SocialGrow, where users had to not only create an account with SocialGrow, but also had to tie in other social media accounts. With the Unified Inbox addition, meanwhile, users simply only have to choose which networks that should be kept track of, and then carry on with sending email back and forth, getting relevant suggestions as such become available.

Previously, we'd seen Unified Inbox bring in SAP HANA technology for its InboxRank system, another illustration that Unified Inbox is eager to expand its reach outward and bring in more utility for users. What this actually does is provide a means to better augment our social media presences by capitalizing on what Mark Granovetter referred to as the “strength of weak ties,” getting us better connected with people that might only account for casual or limited connection now. This isn't easy to do—most of us don't think fully about who we could be socially connected to—but with a system like this, it's in one handy package, showing both the power and the value of UC.

Being able to connect to others more readily is a big part of what UC can do, and with Unified Inbox's new tools, that connection becomes that much easier to establish and, from there, operate and maintain. This could be a very big development for those involved, and a great way to show off the extent of UC's capabilities.