A colleague of mine recently gave a presentation about the impact of social media to me and several other business owners.  He owns a small retail chain with particular appeal to the inner city younger demographic, and uses Twitter extensively to communicate with their followers.    When several of the group expressed skepticism about who actually has time to follow all this stuff, let alone respond, he gave us a simple example – he tweeted saying that he was in the middle of a presentation and wanted feedback about the importance of social media.

Even though it was 5pm on a Sunday afternoon, more than a dozen responses were received in the first 3 minutes!  (And of course the responses were consistent – get with it or your business will be obsolete before long.)  He then quoted the statistic that under 25s consume 16 hours of media a day, in about 7 hours.  They are on-line with Facebook, Twitter and other sites, while watching TV and texting.   I wonder if kids’ brains are changing to enable them to process more streams of information?

I just posted a note the other day looking for information about how people were using social media in relation to CRM – it didn’t take long before I saw this post on Anneke Seley’s Sales 2.0 blog:  Social Networking in Sales.  It has some great concrete examples of sales teams using LinkedIn and Twitter with measurable results.

Recently saw salesforce.com’s presentation on the Service Cloud, which included discussion of integration with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  The concept of monitoring what your customer base is saying about you in the cloud and reacting appropriately is  getting a lot of attention at the moment.

Certainly the ability to find out more about your customer contacts through the various social & professional networking apps makes a lot of sense – a lot of us look up people on LinkedIn before making initial contact to get some idea of who we are dealing with.

And I also buy in to exposing solutions to customer issues on the web in a way that is easily searchable – if you have a problem with a product, you are more likely to search for a solution in Google than to start with the manufacturer’s knowledge base, so if your company’s solutions are out there in search engine land they are more likely to find them.

But I’d be interested to hear other ways that people are using their customer relationship systems to interact with social media…

Over the past few weeks I’ve been researching more and more into the SaaS world.  The ScioDec blog has some interesting posts, and this recent one doesn’t have a lot new to say, but sums up what most of the people I speak to are thinking.

http://blog.sciodev.com/2008/12/31/prediction-more-clouds-and-saas-in-2009/

In the meantime, it’s not totally clear to me how the business model is going to work for a lot of the smaller players unless they get swallowed up by salesforce.com or others.

I’m also reading Groundswell, the book about social media written by analysts at Forrester.  It’s a great summary of the impacts that social media is starting to have in the world of marketing and how corporations can harness the power and reach of social media to their advantage.