The cloud-based CRM software company announced Tuesday it would end its pursuit of a trademark on the phrase, as well as remove all references to the term in marketing materials.

Salesforce had tried to trademark “social enterprise” in the U.S., Australia, Europe and Jamaica. After the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Salesforce’s application, the company still forged ahead, appealing the decision.

But by Tuesday, the pressure and potential public relations mess became too big to ignore.

For one, the Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA), an organization of more than 1,000 members, started a website “to tell the stories of a global movement that began long before Salesforce.com began using the phrase to describe its cloud products.”  (On Tuesday, the organization said it was grateful for Salesforce’s reversal and now has to figure out what to do next with the website.)

And Salesforce’s potential ownership of the phrase not only irked businesses that sell social-based products, it also drew protests from non-profit organizations that work in the social sector. They claimed a business holding a trademark on a popular, generic term would cause confusion about groups that do work for no profit.

In a statement announcing the end of its chase of “social enterprise,” Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com CEO, wrote: “It was never our intention to create confusion in the social sector, which we have supported since our founding.”

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.