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.