One of the current exciting developments in the area of social media is that of social CRM - where organisations are really embedding social media as part of their customer service programmes.

I am delighted to have been invited to speak at a breakfast meeting on 22 April hosted by gem - one of one of Europe's largest leading independent providers of outsourced multi lingual, multi channel customer contact solutions.

Here are the details of the event:

Date: Thursday 22 April 2010

Time: 7.30am-10am

Location: The Glencree Suite, Fitzwilliam Hall, Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2

Speakers: Play.com (a UK online entertainment retailer), gem and me!

Register for the event online: http://www.the-gem.com/events/gemevents.aspx

Are you starting to explore the integration of social media in your customer relationship management processes?

What other organisations are you aware of that are at the leading edge of social CRM?

Salesforce.com announced yesterday that it has extended the Salesforce Chatter private beta program to more than 500 companies.
Some interesting quotes in Yahoo News include:

"We are in the era of Cloud 2, where social networking use has surpassed e-mail, Facebook and YouTube use have outpaced search, and new mobile devices like the iPad are creating entirely new ways to interact with information," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "With today's announcement, salesforce.com is advancing the shift to Cloud 2, where productivity gains are going to come from real-time collaboration available on any device. We've seen the future of enterprise software, and it looks more like Facebook on the iPad than Yahoo on the PC."

"Saatchi & Saatchi is beta-testing Chatter and we love it," said Brand DuBose, management director, Saatchi & Saatchi. "Chatter revolutionizes the way our geographically dispersed teams can collaborate and boost productivity from anywhere. With Chatter, our people can change the game by sharing critical information, insights, and best practices to ensure that our biggest ideas and best work are implemented in real-time."

The Chatter beta program has been extended to more than 500 and later this year, all 72,500 salesforce.com customers will receive Chatter at no additional charge.

Chatter is reported to enable:

- Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates

- Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company

- Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster

- SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet

- Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer.

This will certainly bring the social web into the enterprise - the question is are organisations ready forthe implications this has for changing processes and up-skilling their people, or will SalesForce.com Chatter be a free feature that few use?