Social service, an area Tony blogged about last week, is becoming increasingly important, as the changing world of social media continues to touch, transform and influence the (often archaic) customer service zone. Social business applications are built to confront this emerging area. We at Helpstream want to create products that support this.

Today we unveil our latest social business application - the spring product release of our social CRM platform. One of the highlights is Activity Stream. It's a Twitter- and Facebook-like feature that allows you to subscribe to or "follow" your favorite experts in the community to see what folks are working on, as well as their areas of expertise. Individual insights are gleaned together for the common purpose of true, holistic enterprise collaboration.

The ability to see people and not just particular conversation threads is probably the seminal contribution of the new era of social media that products like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others ushered in. It’s an incredibly natural way to go about finding the right information. We all know from our daily, personal lives that knowing who the experts are is critical to finding the answers, but how often has software really helped us to do that? Helpstream’s spring release brings that possibility to life like never before for customer service. If our pre-briefings are any indication of how popular this capability is going to be, you really can’t wait to try it out.

The spring release also introduces a classic example of a true enterprise mashup at work by seamlessly integrating Helpstream with Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM. You can stay connected to what you're working on in your CRM domain. And, instead of tossing your existing business processes out the door, you can incorporate a social, community element that produces crisper results (and makes "doing business" a whole lot easier!) all as part of the same experience. Agents go right on using the CRM platforms and suites they’re used to.

You aren't "losing" anything by adopting a social business app. In fact, you're gaining a clear competitive advantage on companies that practice one - or the other. Results from authentically aligning the social Web/community with the enterprise are astonishing and can not only lead to impactful ROI - but intangibles...spikes in communication, happier customers. And that can be real community with a purpose.

There’s a lot more exciting functionality in our Spring release, such as our new Best Practices Community, HelpExchange (more on that in my other post). Rather than have me drone on about it, sign up for one of our free workspaces to see firsthand, or if you already have an account, check out this article on our own Support Community for more details.