Similar to its year-old integration with Twitter, reports focused on the integration between the customer service application with Facebook.

Yet it’s worth noting that the Facebook integration in Service Cloud 3, a part of the Spring ’11 release, really only addresses updates posted on a company’s corporate Facebook page. A message, complaint or request for service posted there can be pulled into the Salesforce.com CRM system where an agent can create a case.

Salesforce.com is also partnering with Radian6 to create an application on the AppExchange to monitor a wider array of social networks and present that material to customer service agents within the Service Cloud. That will be available in the third quarter of this year and include automatic case creation, according to Fergus Griffin, vice president of cloud product marketing.

However, the automatic case creation is based on some simple keyword searches that companies can set up, for example, product names and negative words.

“We’re not talking about sophisticated deep sentiment analysis,” Griffin said in an interview with SearchCRM.com

Additionally, a cloud service console allows agents to sort cases by social influence. That metric is based on follower numbers, a metric many of Salesforce.com’s telecomm and financial services track, according to Griffin. However, it’s also an imperfect metric and the subject of plenty of debate among the social networking crowd. I won’t delve into that now, but here’s a Harvard Business Review interview with the author of the Million Follower Fallacy, Meeyoung Cha, and a Google Group, the Social CRM Pioneers, has a discussion on the topic of whether companies should even factor in social influence into the customer experience.

Interestingly, a new report from Bruce Temkin at Experience Matters, finds that US consumers making more than $100,000 per year are most likely to tweet about an experience. From the executive summary:

Companies often discuss “word of mouth,” but how often and in what ways do consumers discuss their experiences? We surveyed 6,000 US consumers to find out. It turns out that the most common communication about good and bad experiences occurs between friends via email, phone, or in person. While few consumers share their experiences directly with the companies that pleased or displeased them, far fewer shared those experiences via social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and 3rd party ratings sites. Our analysis also uncovered differences by age, income, ethnicity, and educational levels.

Perhaps more interesting than some of the social CRM news from yesterday’s event was what Salesforce.com may have in store for Unified Communications. 

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting take on Salesforce.com’s plans to integrate VoIP and video conferencing, including Apple’s Facetime, and its acquisition of Dimdim earlier this year (a presence, messaging and screensharing application). It’s worth noting that Salesforce.com is also enabling chat from its acquisition of Activa in September.

 Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff already took a shot at IBM yesterday, calling its Lotus Notes antiquated as he promoted Salesforce.com’s Chatter collaboration tool.

“Lotus Notes was conceived before [Chief Executive] Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook,” he said. “With legacy software, it’s hard to be productive. Lotus Notes was great at the time, but Chatter makes everyone in a company more productive.”

Now, ReadWriteWeb suggests Salesforce.com is taking on Cisco.

Between presence, video conferencing, live chat and Chatter, Salesforce.com seems to be positioning itself for the long-awaited promise of Unified Communications (UC) in the contact center. The idea that a customer service agent who needs help responding to a customer can reach out to subject matter experts in the company through myriad channels and give them an answer right away has been a feature touted by UC vendors for years. The problem is in the implementing a strategy for unified communications in the call center.

How do you monitor, reward and incentivize those outside the call center to do customer service? How do you train them to interact with customers if that’s not their usual job function? How do you staff or route calls with a wider workforce involved?

There’s a lot of questions still about UC in the contact center. We’ll see if Salesforce.com has any answers and just how invested it will become.

He is now chief financial officer at Xactly Corp.

He talked with SearchCRM.com about his career, the trajectory of Software as a Service (SaaS) and the emerging market for sales performance management software.

In this 13-minute podcast, appropriate for both IT and business professionals (particularly those in finance), Cakebread discusses:

• CRM’s biggest surprise
• The attraction of SaaS for CFOs
• The drivers for sales performance management software
• How sales performance management software is being purchased and who’s paying
• Why customers aren’t necessarily getting those kinds of features from their core CRM or SFA vendors.

As he told SearchSAP.com, SAP will release SaaS-based business applications to augment customers’ existing Business One deployments. Additionally, the new SaaS apps (no word on when they’ll be released) will be multi-tenant, abandoning SAP’s earlier commitment to “isolated tenancy.”

The multi tenancy and SaaS debate has been ongoing for years, lead primarily by Salesforce.com, which contends that a SaaS application that is not multi-tenant is not truly SaaS.

Count Denis Pombriant among those questioning traditional premise-based software vendors suddenly offering on-demand options. He wrote in a recent blog (before the SAP announcement):

I’m thinking that the usual has happened.  After years of warning signs that the conventional software business model was increasingly misaligned for the future, SaaS solutions have become a threat to conventional vendors.  During those years of warnings, many conventional software vendors chose to do nothing to upgrade their offerings and businesses to the SaaS business model – including rewriting their code.  These vendors are now attempting to throw a Hail Mary pass.

Yet it’s an argument Joshua Greenbaum has little patience for. He wrote of the multitenancy debate back in April:

My curmudgeonly comment is this: Neither methodology will matter in a few short years, because the SaaS market is set to evolve beyond delivering a “faster-better-cheaper” version of on-premise enterprise software into delivering significant value above and beyond anything that on-premise can deliver today. And once that evolution truly sets in (and the market’s DNA is recombining constantly in the service of this ideal) these tenancy debates – which are basically about the cost-structure of competing with on-premise solutions – will cede their primacy to debates about the premiums that SaaS 2.0 solution providers will be able to charge their customers. At which point the basic cost issues that are fueling the great Debate 1.0 will be off the table.

Greenbaum makes an interesting point, that the next generation of SaaS applications will win not on price or ease of installation but on features and functions because they can aggregate data, processes and people in the cloud in a way that premise-based applications cannot.

However, at first blush, these new SAP applications do not sound like that next generation. As Vinnie Mirchandani wrote:

This sounds like a “moat” strategy – protect the core, on-premise product with a series of surrounding “best of breed” SaaS

Reconcile it against the integrated, wall-to-wall is better than best-of-breed argument SAP has been using for decades. Reconcile this with their BusinessByDesign – which is a fairly broad SaaS ERP/CRM solution set - and promises we heard at Sapphire just 4 weeks ago about that “bear coming out in the summer”

Meanwhile, we hear even less about SAP’s commitment to SaaS-based CRM than we do about its overall CRM message. That’s apparently good news for companies like NetSuite, who’s CEO Zach Nelson called the Wookey news his company’s “IBM moment.”