As always in January, we start to see a plethora of web predictions for the year. This year is not any different with the marked transition of mobile video, Android technology and geo mapping. In my estimation, the top technology to watch will be Social CRM.

We’ve seen the rise of Twitter and Facebook as social communication tools. This year, those modes of real-time communication will find their way deeper into the enterprise. Salesforce.com is set to launch Chatter, its real-time stream of enterprise data which interfaces with Twitter and Facebook and turn them into business tools. Startups like Yammer and Bantam Live are also making business more social.

As recently as last March, Jeremiah Owyang was blogging on The Future of Twitter: Social CRM. In that blog, Jeremiah inferred the various directions Twitter could go: create their own brand management system that they can resell to the world’s companies to monitor, alert, track, prioritize, triage, assign, follow-up, and report on the interactions with brands.

However, there is still one huge quandary – can CRM be ‘automated’ – that is, respond fast enough (daily, by the hour, by the minute) while still providing a personal touch to help and assist customers, continue to build relations and trust?

Again, Jeremiah Owyang presents and interesting blog on Matrix: The Four Social Support Strategies wherein he discusses the various ways in which to interact with customers – specifically the fourth strategy (automated social support) – companies will have the ability to quickly scale by responding to customers faster, and more accurately, using automated responses.

Bottom-line – whatever your social media strategies are for 2010, you’ll need to watch closely the rapidly changing landscape of Social CRM.

Best

Denice MacDonald

Sources:

10 Technologies That Will Rock 2010 by Erick Schonfeld, January, 2010

The Future of Twitter: Social CRM by Jeremiah Owyang, March, 2009

Matrix: The Four Social Support Strategies by Jeremiah Owyang, November, 2009