Now you have another reason to stay away from Facebook.
San Mateo, California-based Appirio, a company that helps turn friends into better sales leads across the social-networking giant, on Wednesday said it picked up a $10 million third-round investment to boost its business.
“Word-of-mouth is a better way,” Appirio Chief Marketing Officer Narinder Singh said. “It’s how people find jobs. It’s how people find products and services. With Facebook we wanted to tap into that word-of-mouth marketing”
Appirio’s ReferMyFriends Facebook application, launched earlier this month, is not yet winning any popularity contests on the social site with its 234 users. The application is intended to alert people when friends do business with their company and is connected with Salesforce.com.
Here’s what the application promo promises:
”Sales: Say an old friend on Facebook becomes a lead for a different department in your organization. If you knew, you could help facilitate an introduction and deepen that connection.”
It may sound creepy, but in industries where software and interactions are increasingly migrating online, the startup’s business model starts to make sense. It’s also a well-paved path of software services companies to unleash armies of consultants to help customize software for businesses.
Appirio, something of a software products and services hybrid for the Web 2.0 world, is positioning itself to do services for such online office applications as Google Apps. In some ways Appirio’s services business makes the same sense as hiring IBM or Oracle to tweak business software—except for on the software of Google, Facebook, and Salesforce, among others.
“We’re like IBM without the baggage of hardware,” Mr. Singh said.
Investors like the business model. GGV Capital and previous investor Sequoia Capital participated in the funding. Formed in 2006, Appirio attracted a $5.6 million second-round investment led by Sequoia Capital in July 2008. The startup has raised a total of $16.7 million.
Appirio's headquarters, which has over 100 employees, is among dozens of small companies that incubate inside Salesforce.com office space.