With nearly one-tenth of the world’s population sharing the high points of their lives on Facebook these days, it’s no wonder that the developers of software for the corporate sector were quick to react to this universal trend. Following the Web 2.0 wave, Enterprise 2.0 promises tighter integration with social media, business processes based on a customer-centric philosophy and customer relationships brought to a whole new level and generating an incessant flow of qualified leads. All of this also involves the use of the so-called Social CRM – and some leading CRM software developers, like SalesForce and SugarCRM, have already yielded to the temptation of adding social features to their flagship products.

SalesForce leads the way with its Chatter updates, including an ability to invite customers to the system, new document sharing tools and a new solution for building and maintaining social customer profiles. SugarCRM responded with its own arsenal of social tools available in Sugar 6, which included integrations with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social services. From now on, users of SugarCRM can monitor any number of online feeds, aggregate information about potential clients, interact with them, build a relationship with them and ultimately engage them with a business proposal. But do these features work as intended? Does the omnipresent social buzz have a solid foundation and a bright future? Although these ideas sound great initially, the reality in most occasions is a bit discouraging.

It seems to us that the real problem lies in the fact that unless companies change their attitude and business processes from sales-centric to customer-centric, the very concept of Social CRM will remain nothing more than another lead generation channel with efficiency comparable to that of conventional methods of promotion. The efficiency of the social approach will go down exponentially with the growth of the company and its need for easy-to-convert and quick leads, as the marketing and sales department will be physically unable to cope with the growing internal pressure and uncertainties related to measuring the “social KPI’s”. Another good question is “will potential customers want to be tracked down and approached in this way?” As a rule, when a need for a product or services really arises, the good old word-of-mouth marketing works best, so businesses just need to concentrate on creating and maintaining a positive image to see clients coming in. And that’s exactly why we wouldn’t prescribe social client relationship management against all business maladies and to all businesses considering a change of their marketing strategy.

Apparently, these are not all the reasons why the entire social CRM hype can be characterized as overheated and artificial, but will cover these topics in one of our future posts.