Siebel: Integrating Twitter

If you have not yet seen the demo of Twitter integration with Siebel on Dipock's blog, it is probably a good time to see it. Available there is a demo video that lists out three basic steps to integrate Twitter search in Siebel. For those of you who have a slower internet connection, here are the steps:

1. Create a calculated field that uses a iFrame to retrieve Twitter search results based on Account name, URL will be something like "http://search.twitter.com/search?q=siebel crm"
2. Expose the field on a separate applet and display the results in a view

Simple enough to allow the user to search for the account and what not, but how will we make this "actionable"? There comes the use of Siebel's powerful Virtual Business Components (VBC) functionality. Twitter exposes APIs that can fetch search results in atom format. A simple transformation followed by conversion to property set and voila, we have results in a format fit enough to be displayed in any view that you like. The steps you ask?

1. Create VBC and applet based on VBC
2. Write supporting script/business service to make sense of the search results, to retrieve Twitter search results using API at http://search.twitter.com/search.atom
3. Transform and map the values to VBC fields
   

Not exactly as simple as the previous idea, but the biggest advantage is that you can use this data for subsequent actions - may it be creating a follow-up activity for the Tweet, creating a Service Request to address the complaint raised or just to track the conversation thread for the particular user/tweet.

Although these steps are listed with Twitter in focus, the same will be applicable for any Social media which expose APIs in atom/xml format. The process itself is not entirely different from your regular interface to an enterprise app, but yes, the treatment of how exactly you leverage the Social media effectively certainly is.