It's amazing to chart the progress of the CRM industry. In its annual CRM market share report, Gartner last week found that CRM revenue jumped 12.5 percent last year. Colin Beasty of CRM Outsiders blogged about it being an indication of businesses refocusing their attention on current customers (when it can be difficult to get fresh ones). Paul Greenberg recently "put a stake in the ground" for Social CRM in a formative post on his blog and said, "It's time to start figuring out and documenting the business models, policies, practices, processes, social characteristics, applications, and the methodologies that we need to actually carry it out.” Or, enough with the definitions, let's get on with it.

More and more folks are talking about Social CRM. Just read what analysts like Michael Maoz at Gartner or Natalie Petouhoff at Forrester, or other industry experts like Graham Hill, Denis Pombriant, and Brent Leary, are writing. Or look at the speaking topics at conferences like Oracle OpenWorld, Dreamforce, Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0. If you do, you will see case studies of real business value being driven, and real world advice on what it takes to be successful. This is not evangelizing the "why," this is describing the "how."

Another strong validation for the industry came from Lithium Technologies, which launched its foray into Social CRM just last week. We're excited to have a company like Lithium -- well-known for its pioneering work in building gaming communities and more recently general customer communities -- enter the market with their initial Social CRM release. Having other companies offer solutions to help companies build out the business models, best practices, and business processes only helps make Social CRM safe for companies to embrace and adopt.

At Helpstream, we're seeing strong uptake in Social CRM as well. We announced recently that more than 200 companies are actively using our solution and revenues for the second quarter were four times greater than any prior quarter in the company's history. And you know the market has shifted when unsolicited RFPs start landing on your doorstep!

Thanks Gartner for your research. Thanks Paul Greenberg for all of your work in getting us to where we are today. And thanks Lithium for jumping into the game -- we're all better off with you here.

Now, let's get on with it and continue building this space.