The past year has seen a wave of integration and innovation with social networking sites and CRM platforms. NetSuite jumping on the bandwagon is nothing new.

NetSuite has teamed with InsideView to integrate InsideView’s social media monitoring into the NetSuite platform. Again, not really new. InsideView already has a similar application on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange.

What is new is the way NetSuite went about it and that it’s pulling social media monitoring into its ERP system.

That NetSuite turned to an outside company for social media intelligence is interesting. InsideView monitors Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Jigsaw and editorial sources such as Thomson Reuters, among others and provides users with results relevant to their role. As social media monitoring and collaboration tools become a requirement for a CRM system, the CRM vendors need to figure out how they deliver that technology — developing, partnering or buying.

We’ve seen each approach so far. Oracle was among the first, creating its Social CRM applications, separate modules like Sales Prospector and Sales Library, that essentially serve as collaboration tools for sales people within an organization. Others have built out integrations to social networking sites. RightNow has built a connection to Twitter and YouTube it calls the Cloud Monitor. Salesforce.com has also built integrations between Facebook, Twitter and its customer service application (throwing in ask and answer functionality) it calls the Service Cloud 2. Salesforce.com obviously has some high hopes for the application because CEO Marc Benioff devoted most of the very expensive stage time he paid for at OpenWorld to demonstrating the Service Cloud 2. Microsoft has added Twitter integration with one of its CRM accelerators. Apparently, even SAP is preparing to roll out Twitter integration.

Acquisitions, so far, have been relatively few. RightNow, apparently tired of giving Lithium all of its community building business, acquired HiveLive and is incorporating community-driven customer support capabilities into its own suite.

The size of some of these social media start ups (HiveLive cost RightNow just $6 million), would indicate that more such acquisitions are in store. As John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research with the Service and Support Professionals Association, said at the time of the HiveLive acquisition.

“Partnering is just not enough. That’s what this proves. Buyers want more than a partnership.”

So, who’s next? Well, there’s a plethora of small social media monitoring and social networking companies out there. Even the largest social networking sites are getting attention. SAP has invested in LinkedIn via its venture capital arm. I won’t speculate other than to predict more consolidation in the technology business, a prediction that never fails.

And maybe we’ll see some interest in integrating social networks with ERP. NetSuite and InsideView are betting on it.

Mini Peiris, NetSuite’s vice president of product marketing, told me that the InsideView’s results can extend to roles beyond the typical sales, service and marketing and to back office employees like people in recruiting, collections and procurement.

“For a collections professional you can leverage [company profile information] to find other people in an organization to get the invoice that you’re chasing paid,” Peiris said.

LinkedIn integration can be a powerful tool for people in HR the same way information on financial results or bankruptcy filings can be powerful for collections, Peiris added.

InsideView on the other hand seems to be benefitting itself.

“NetSuite has a number of objects not available in other applications because it’s an end-to-end platform,” InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti said. “The number of places we’ve integrated is above and beyond what we’ve done before.”

I plan to be there tomorrow at Benioff’s session to see if he plays the polite guest (my guess is he will), but in the meantime, there were a few interesting tidbits from some successful CRM deployments at a customer panel.

These are not necessarily Oracle-specific but some practices I hadn’t seen before and worth noting here.

ANZ, an Australian financial services firm, extended and upgraded a small Siebel 7.8 deployment to Siebel 8.0 across the organization. A new CEO wanted to make the company more customer-centric and pushed for the new system. Getting executive buy in is a well-known imperative for a successful CRM project. So is ensuring user adoption, which ANZ did by involving users throughout the project.

“The native Siebel 7.8 UI is really devoted to call center users and not everyone’s cup of tea,” Christian Ventner, head of sales and services for the bank, noted.

But, beyond that as part of the project, ANZ included an “I know the customer” program. To provide a greater customer experience, ANZ included a large “What the customer wants” button as part of the UI. So, right away an employee notes why the customer is there, be it for investment advice or a question about an account. It can be adjusted by role (for example, a teller may not be able to offer investment advice) and quite clearly ensures the customer is getting the right person and the right information.

US Foodservice tests the application in a live environment

US Foodservice went beyond just including users in its design; it had them test out multiple products in a live environment. The company was transitioning from a niche CRM application that hadn’t met its needs to Oracle CRM On Demand. It narrowed down its list of finalists to three and then took the applications to its sales reps.

“We decided to go to the divisions with [reps] and let them work with it,” said Bridget Warns, senior director of US Foodservice. “In real time, we were configuring this application based on their feedback. The investment they had was key in our success of rolling it out.”

Three clicks or less for Scottish Widows

Similarly, Scottish Widows, a UK-based life pension and investment company, was choosing between Oracle On Demand and Salesforce.com and tried both in a live environment for two months with its sales force, swapping out one for the other.

“From that we were really able to build our business case and get backing from our director that it was the right thing to do,” Stephen Miller sales operations manager for Scottish Widows, said. “We rolled it out to 300 people at 14 sites in two months.”

Additionally, it made sure to make the application easily navigable.

“We wanted to ensure we met key design principles,” Miller said. “In any application there was a max of three clicks to get to any information.”

Nothing grabs attention in this market like tales of CRM failure, but these are a few tactics that led to success.

No, I didn’t get one.

Yes, I signed up for one.

No, I don’t take it personally.

The Twittersphere, the Blogosphere and all those places where gadget-heads meet up to discuss the latest “revolutionary” product is already abuzz about Wave.

So, how does that affect CRM?

Well, Salesforce.com, never a company to hesitate to latch onto emerging technologies, is already prepared to ride the wave (and yes, I promise I will never use that term again).

It issued a demo of a prototype showing how a company could leverage Google Wave with its customer service team.

So, maybe you run a forward-thinking contact center that has evolved past simple phone and IVR communications and now utilize chat and self service and maybe you’ve even found a way to involve social networks, internal and external. But it looks like you may have one more technology and business process to master.

Don’t get me wrong — Google Wave could very well be a very good thing and may, in fact, “revolutionize” how customer service agents interact with your customers. Our friends over at Unified Communications Nation, after all, are calling it Unified Communications gone wild and most people still haven’t wrapped their heads around unified communications in the contact center.

However, it is an example of how quickly companies like Saleforce.com and Google are changing things and how fast companies need to adapt.

I’m curious if that makes you excited or nervous? Or both?

By the way, SAP hasn’t stayed in the background, it’s just that its contribution focuses on collaborative business process modeling, not CRM.

Here’s a list of the extensions and prototypes for Google Wave.

 Kundra expressed excitement and optimism for deploying cloud-based applications in his blog:

Federal agencies and departments encounter many difficulties in deploying new IT services and products. Procurement processes can be confusing and time-consuming. Security procedures are complex, costly, lengthy and duplicative across agencies. Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology. Past practices too often resulted in inefficient use of purchased IT capabilities across the federal government. We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.

Yet he also sounded a note of caution:

We are just beginning this undertaking, and it will take time before we can realize the full potential of cloud computing. Like with Data.gov, Apps.gov is starting small - with the goal of rapidly scaling it up in size. Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services. Over time, as we work through these concerns and offer more services through Apps.gov, federal agencies will be able to get the capabilities they need to fulfill their missions at lower cost, faster, and ultimately, in a more sustainable manner.

 Apps.gov store. RightNow has also been instrumental in bringing government agencies on board with SaaS. In April, it released hosting capabilities to support the Department of Defense (DOD) and other civilian government and intelligence agencies that have stringent compliance and security standards.

Bill Ives lauded both RightNow and the federal government at the time. He wrote:

 I am pleased to see greater government uptake on the opportunities the cloud brings. There seems to be a genuine drive to balance security requirements with flexibility, cost savings and reduce unnecessary red tape with standardization.

 While at the Gartner CRM Summit this week, I had a chance to talk with Jason Mittelstaedt, CMO of RightNow, who said that providing an application secure enough for the DOD has helped allay the reliability and security concerns of many potential customers.

Yet, one attendee I spoke with at lunch still wondered how people are coping with security and privacy when it comes to SaaS. His company, a financial institution in the Midwest, is running Oracle CRM on-premise and has already invested in the infrastructure required to house the system. It is still nervous about SaaS.

SaaS vendors still have some convincing to do, but the stamp of approval from Kundra and the DOD should help.

A few of Maoz’s statements stood out, particularly in light of recent announcements from RightNow and Salesforce.com, who are integrating customer communities and customer interactions into their CRM platforms.

Maoz outlined a recent issue he encountered when the water pump in the refrigerator at his newly-purchased house failed on him. He went to the company’s website, searched for a replacement and was left totally underwhelmed.

“It was a tidy website. It had a blog, a community, it was searchable - all those things a Gartner analyst would love,” Maoz said. “And I hated it.”

Instead, a quick Google search led him to Amazon, where he found three possible replacement pumps, reviews and a 30% discount. In this case. an internal community failed him while an external community solved his problem, but not all external communities offer helpful info either.

Companies are racing to establish a presence on social networks and that’s been proven in Gartner inquiries, Maoz said. The bulk — 80% — are “the worried majority,” typically public sector, consumer goods and media organizations, that “know we have to get through this. We have to do something,” Maoz said. Another 10% are panicking, mainly in retail, thinking “we just need to stay alive.” The other 10% are the aggressors.

“They know this is the best time to go and win market share, the ‘crisis is a terrible thing to waste’ people,” Maoz said. “It’s important to know who you are and how you fit in.”

 The problem is, some don’t know what they’re doing and establishing a community is no panacea, Maoz warned.

“Most of us think we know more about social media than we actually do,” he said, “Everything sounds rosy until you start to find a lot of the stuff on these sites is stupid stuff. I don’t think there’s a better term than stupid stuff. It’s gossip. It’s group think.”

A colleague found this out first hand when she simply wanted to unsynch her iPhone from her PC so she could manually manage music on it and wound up erasing her entire music stash, spending several hours on community help sites and still not getting an answer to her problem.

“I’ve wasted more time on that site (I think it’s well optimized for search, but often for crappy content) - not to mention a host of other forums with bad, outdated, incorrect or stupid information that wastes my time,” she told me. “I often feel that no ’smart’ people are ever posting to these forums.”

I’ll add another example myself. I’m in a fantasy baseball league and look for information and insight into what players to add, drop, trade for and generally manage my team. Yahoo!, which has a team of writers offering specifically this type of information, provides a feedback option at the bottom of each article. Invariably, the first comment under the story is someone writing “First,” taking pride in being the first one to post a response for some unknown reason that even I as a fantasy baseball dork don’t understand.

So, if that’s the case, and Maoz, my colleague and I are all wondering what the benefit is and finding that communities can be full of unhelpful content, what is one to do?

Many a social networking expert will point out that organizing comments by date is far from a best practice. Additionally, I’m sure they’ll point out that a voting system that allows “the wisdom of the crowd” to win out will push the best answers to the top.

Maybe. But it’s instructive that Wikipedia, the poster child for successful social networks recently decided to add another level of editorial oversight to its entries.

It indicates to me that there’s still a lot of work to be done in getting all of this right and we’ll likely go through some trial and error.

As Maoz noted in his keynote, Starbucks created a site to solicit ideas from its customers and with 30,000 entries came up with a stopper for the tops to its plastic cups.

“Maybe there’s something more to it, maybe there’s something to getting them to participate in discussion,” Maoz said. “The use of analytics is going to be a key point in this.”

I’ll be offering up more coverage from the show this week and hopefully providing a few answers. In the meantime, some of the more interesting comments (and some not so interesting) can be found in the Twitter stream.

It might not be all marketing hype. Just look to one of the SaaS vendors themselves. As Larry Dignan blogged about a few weeks ago, SuccessFactors launched a Salesforce.com project, switched to Oracle On Demand and then switched back to Salesforce.com, a flip-flop Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was more than happy to mention on the company’s third quarter earnings call.

SuccessFactors, which provides on-demand employee management software, runs nearly all of its applications via the SaaS model, according to Paul Albright, chief marketing officer.

“We run on Saleforce.com, NetSuite on the finance side, we use Xactly for sales compensation, Concur for expense management — I can barely think of any exceptions,” Albright told me in a recent briefing.

While Benioff credited SuccessFactors’return to its sales force clamoring for his application, Albright was a little more political.

“We wanted to use CRM in ways that were stretching the bounds of what Oracle had publicly available,” he said.

Perhaps more interesting than this opportunity for Benioff and Ellison to trade jibes (Dignan has done a nice job of pointing out their public statements already) is the fact that Albright called the switches back and forth, “a seamless migration.”

Look, no one expects the chief marketing officer of a SaaS vendor to tell a member of the media that a SaaS data migration was anything but easy and painless, but the fact that SuccessFactors went through it twice would seem indicate it couldn’t have been that hard.

If the data can indeed be migrated seamlessly between SaaS applications, and if more vendors offer their applications via that model, it will be interesting to see how this affects pricing pressure on the major SaaS vendors. NetSuite, for example, last year rolled out a program offering incentives for Salesforce.com customers to switch to NetSuite. We’ve already seen Microsoft enter the CRM SaaS market at a competitive rate. It will also be interesting to see how many more companies emerge like SuccessFactors, who rely almost entirely on SaaS applications and how willing they are to move back and forth, be it the demands of their sales force, “the bounds of what’s available,” or another reason.

It’s readily apparent the integration problem for SaaS is not what it once was and that business leaders need to take a greater role in SaaS integration.

Switching is not going to be “easy” no matter what. There are too many risks with data, training, user uproar and more for one to call it easy. But it just might provide some negotiating leverage for new and existing CRM buyers.

Natalie Petouhoff, an analyst with Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, recently authored a report outlining five strategies to achieve customer service excellence with social media. Petouhoff interviewed a number of organizations, including Comcast and iRobot, to learn best practices and pitfalls to avoid with social media initiatives.

In this 15-minute podcast, she details some of her research and conclusions and outlines the five pest practices for customer service excellence with social media.

For more on social media and customer service:

Read Natalie Petouhoff’s blog entry on the five strategies for customer service and social media

See her case studies on Lenovo’s social media customer service and Sage Software’s initiative

In addition to thoroughly enjoying Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, I also liked a few select passages from the blogosphere.

They’re listed below. Enjoy. I’m also open to suggestions for a new book to finish out the summer.

If I were asked for a list of things I wanted to believe in, but had to admit were pure fantasy, the top three would be Santa Claus, world peace, and the “360 degree view of the customer.”

 From Ragsdale’s Eye on Service by John Ragsdale

It’s official.  The brand marketeers have gone totally off the twist.  Call the men in white coats.

From The Sales Machine by Geoffrey James

Apparently while I was commenting on Tom Siebel’s recent comments about the maturity of the tech industry, he was recovering from an attack in the Serengeti by a 12,000 pound elephant.

From Deal Architect by Vinnie Mirchandani

Microsoft says it will have the definitive virtualized public/private/platform cloud solution ready to go in a “shrink wrap” package by 2010, and that, by the way, hosters that aren’t fully virtualized will go the way of the dodo. Of course, this may come as a surprise to all the hosters already going great guns with any variety of managed, virtualized and dedicated offerings, including cloud computing models.

From The Troposphere by Carl Brooks

Would you recommend Twitter be part of any CRM system after hundreds of pages of their documents ended up on TechCrunch?  Would you trust Twitter with just one of your credit cards, stored either on their internal servers or in the cloud right now?  Be honest. 

How about your customer data stored as Tweets on your sales cycles, or your sales reporting, even in the form of confidential Tweets only behind your firewall on an Intranet-based Twitter platform, even on internal servers?

From The Perfect Customer Experience by Louis Columbus

And there’s a pretty good chance you heard someone screaming that President Obama’s plan for national health insurance was “Socialism” or “Socialized medicine.” One woman, went so far as to say “I don’t want this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country.”

What you, and they, might have missed is that this is already happening in CRM….well, the “social” part anyway.

Social CRM has been a subject of discussion for more than a year now, promoted by consultants, analysts and social network experts eager to see their passion extend to the way companies deal with their customers.

More recently, the vendor community has taken heed of “socialized” CRM. To be sure, plenty of technology vendors have seen the importance and potential of uniting social networks and CRM strategy, notably Oracle, which rolled out a set of Social CRM applications more than a year ago (though it should be noted these are more collaboration tools for people using CRM applications in a “social” manner than fostering any social connection to the customer).

Yet in the last month or so, I’ve had a wave of pitches and product announcements flood into my inbox, with vendors proclaiming their new “Social CRM” application.

What follows is a rundown of some of those announcements.

• Marketo’s Social Sales: The SaaS-based marketing automation vendor released an application in June that lets sales reps create social networks of leads and contacts to follow, including things like a lead feed and activity tracking.
• Lithium released its Social CRM Platform in July. It includes the Tribal Knowledge Base, allowing Lithium customers to highlight content and answers from discussion forums into articles for support and promotion to others; the Social Web Connect, which includes Twitter integration and lets customers see what others are saying about their brand on the Web and within an internal customer network into a management console and the CRM Connect, integrating online community into workflows within a sales force automation and customer service system.
• Not to be outdone, Zendesk and Get Satisfaction released their own Social CRM application, integrating Zendesk’s help desk capabilities with Get Satisfaction’s customer community platform.
• Microsoft jumped aboard the Social CRM bandwagon in July as well with a Social Networking Accelerator allowing users to monitor conversations on social networking sites, notably Twitter.
• Integration with Twitter has been a staple of some of the early social CRM releases, Salesforce.com and RightNow both highlighted it as part of their recent updates.
• Co-Tweet, a Twitter monitoring software service and collaboration platform, launched in July with $1 million in venture funding and integration with Bit.ly.

That’s just a sampling of the vendors that have actually gone ahead and used Social CRM in the name of their product or in their pitches. There are many more integrating features or monitoring tools. More, no doubt, will emerge in the coming months.

And, I’m not a programmer, but I wonder how difficult some of this is, particularly something like feeding some Twitter search results into a CRM workflow. Judging from the pace at which that particular feature is being released, it would seem not very difficult. Indeed, it looks like the far more difficult part of the social CRM phenomenon would seem to be building the strategy around serving, marketing, selling and most importantly, engaging, customers.

The Helpstream blog touches on this in a recent post entitled: Twitter Is Not Enough For Social CRM, It’s Not Even a Start.

They write:

We’ve hit the “tack on this feature and you earn this label” stage in the Social CRM world. Specifically, having some kind of Twitter integration is letting vendors label their solutions as “social.”

The Trouble with Twitter, as John Ragsdale points out, is it’s problematic as a customer service tool because Twitter is primarily outbound communication and Tweets can come out of context.

So then, what tools do end users need? And, is the pace of development from the vendor community keeping up with the pace of development of the social networks themselves (hard to believe it could)?

So, how about it? What’s harder for you, getting some technology to help you leverage social networks or getting the strategy right to begin with? Or is it more basic than that? Maybe you’re struggling to figure out how to leverage social networks in a B2B world where there’s not a lot of conversation happening anyway.

In this podcast, SearchCRM.com sat down with Jill Dyché, partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting, a Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based consultancy to discuss the challenges of managing customer data. Dyché, a longtime expert in both CRM and data management issues discusses some of the challenges confronting organizations during CRM deployments and day-to-day management of CRM systems, including; data governance, data quality and data integration.

In this 16-minute podcast, Jill discusses:

Why dirty data has plagued CRM deployments historically and the issues organizations are facing now.

• How companies should approach managing customer data when launching CRM.
• How companies who are already running CRM can address their customer data challenges.
• Where organizations can find “quick wins” managing their customer data.
• How MDM and CDI fit into the CRM and corporate landscape.
• When and how companies need to address the rise of social media and unstructured content in the context of customer data.