Social Collaboration and Community technologies are a hot topic. Steve Lohr’s recent article in the New York Times provides one example. In it, Lohr discusses how leveraging customer communities can reduce costs while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction. One of our cohorts in proving the value of online social collaboration, Lithium Technologies, is highlighted in the article, showing how carefully motivating and rewarding expert customers can benefit companies and their customers alike.

Of course, those of us here at Helpstream couldn’t agree more. Helpstream is all about community. Our customers have seen positive benefits from leveraging their customer communities to integrate social collaboration into their business processes. Integrating customer communities and social collaboration with business processes simply makes enterprises work better. Whether it’s deployed across multiple enterprise touch points (Socialtext and Jive) or tailored for specific business applications (Helpstream and Lithium), community-driven social collaboration has become a permanent part of the enterprise technology ecosystem.

This comes as absolutely no surprise to the analysts who have been covering this space for quite some time. Dr. Natalie Petouhoff at Forrester Research has been collecting and analyzing data from a variety of vendors and their customers to conclusively prove that community driven social collaboration delivers real ROI to the enterprise. Paul Greenberg has been out in front of this trend longer than anyone we know. Whether you call it Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM, or the Customer Centric Enterprise, it’s all about taking advantage of social collaboration to leverage assets that couldn’t be easily leveraged before. Michael Maoz at Gartner Group suggests that all of this is being accelerated by the bad economy and the priority being placed on retaining existing customers.

Our good friend Geoffrey Moore, who wrote the influential book Crossing the Chasm, sees all of this as proof that social technologies have come of age. The market is moving beyond the early adopters and into a much larger group of companies actively seeking real ROI and sustainable competitive advantage. So it’s no longer a question of if, but when. Community-driven business processes are here to stay.