DEMO: Nimble Contact joins social customer relationship management race

Nimble Contact is one of 53 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2011 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

For small businesses who may be feeling overwhelmed by large amounts of traditional and social contacts and communications, Nimble Contact may have a solution. The company is launching today at DEMO Spring 2011.

Nimble Contact dubs itself a social customer relationship management (CRM) tool and pools LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, email contacts into one location. The tool automatically syncs calendar, mail and social profiles with each contact and allows the user to see all correspondence with any contact with just one click.

Nimble Contact has several additional features that may be especially interesting to a small business, including “social listening” which lets a business monitor popular social networks, like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, for brand mentions. In addition, Nimble Contact can work with existing tools the business may already be using, including Google Apps, like email and calendars.

A host of social CRM companies exist, although each appears to have different sets of features and target audiences. Sprout Social gives users one central location for managing social contacts and the ability to engage and monitor brand mentions, but it focuses more on social than traditional contacts. Constant Contact, and its recent addition of Bantam Live, now offers users the ability to manage their traditional contacts with their social ones, but it lacks the social monitoring. Of course, there’s CRM giant Salesforce.com, which hosts a myriad of traditional and social features, but its main target audience appears to be large businesses.

The Santa Monica, California-based company, founded in 2009, currently has 30 employees and is self funded by founder John Ferrara, founder of GoldMine, an early innovator of CRM for small to medium-sized businesses. Ferrara sold control of that company to holding company FrontRange in 1999.