We've hit the "tack on this feature and you earn this label" stage in the Social CRM world. Specifically, having some kind of Twitter integration is letting vendors label their solutions as "social."

Being at the label stage is a good thing. It means labels matter because the market is starting to ask for the label. It means we've crossed, or nearly crossed, the chasm and the mainstream is starting to show some interest. The mainstream loves labels because it means they don't have to analyze it as much. It means they've accepted the label as denoting a “good thing,” maybe even a “necessary thing.”

But the downside is confusion and perhaps promising more than it can deliver.

At Helpstream, our world is all about customer service. As it turns out, Social CRM is particularly well suited to customer service and adds tremendous value. It works really well, to the point where customers wonder how they ever got along without it. As an example, see our blog post on how Eloqua, a leader in marketing automation software, benefited from a social approach to customer service with Helpstream. Customer service, in many ways, is the on-ramp that starts the Social CRM virtuous cycle. Until your customers are happy, it's pretty hard to be successfully social on the web. Once you have a community of happy customers, it's easy to leverage that community for marketing and sales. We have lots of customers doing exactly that with their Helpstream communities.

The customer service world understands this concept, so they want to apply the "social" label to their offerings, whether or not they really are social. They want to understand what the cheapest, easiest, and fastest way is to get to the social seal of approval so they can join this growing movement. Unfortunately, some are doing what other marketing strategies do, which is to look for “easy” on one axis and cross-reference that with “buzz” on the other and tell their engineers to build that. In this case, "easy" intersects "buzz" and we find Twitter. I've described Twitter as easy and buzzy myself at times, but I have also commented on how hard it can be to extract value from Twitter.

Don't get me wrong: I like Twitter and use it constantly, I just don't think it is an adequate indicator of whether a CRM application is social.

John Ragsdale has done a good job elucidating the pitfalls of Twitter as a customer support tool. It boils down to the difficulties of using Twitter to hold a conversation. Tweets are one-way and are focused on the outbound. If you do actually try to engage in a conversation, it’s darned hard to keep it straight because Tweets don't come to you threaded for conversation – they just stream along in whatever order they arrive. Sometimes you don't even see the whole conversation if you don't follow everyone involved, which makes it even more confusing. As John says, Twitter is excellent for brand monitoring.

I had coffee with Esteban Kolsky the other day and he was telling us about some ROI work he'd done around Twitter. Companies and customers love it, but it was requiring a huge amount of manual effort and delivering negative ROI. Getting anything to happen for customers required re-vectoring to a call center because Twitter is not sufficient for a conversation. In essence, all Twitter did was add an extra step to the process. People appeared to like it more for its novelty and trendiness.

Twitter is well suited for getting your feet wet. If you have no other social initiatives in your company, try Twitter. It's fast and easy. Just don't stop there or think that you've become social because you have a Twitter presence or because your customer service software happens to have Twitter integration but little else. In fact, unless you've already bought the software, I would ignore their Twitter capability for any decision-making – use it if you like it, ignore it if you don't.

But here is the main thing: Most of what you're going to learn from Twitter is that your customers are already a heck of a lot more social than you'd realized, and they like interacting with you on the Social Web.

It won't take you long to reach that conclusion. Once you do, go get a real Social CRM suite that has legs. Get one that can support customer service the way it should be done and the tools to integrate with your CRM software as well as delivering what you need for marketing. Look at anything that fits in this category because the Social Web is hugely important.

A shift is occurring in the way businesses engage with customers that is being driven by employee and customer demographic changes, increasing adoption by everyone on the web. It affects every aspect of daily life, as well as the way that web interaction changes the rules of communication between businesses and customers. The disciplines of customer service, marketing, and sales must increasingly come to grips with the idea that one-to-one communication between businesses and customers are no longer the only possibility. One-to-many and many-to-many communication via the web and social media is commonplace.

These changes in behavior are driving big changes in what customers demand from businesses, as well as creating huge new opportunities for businesses willing to embrace the brave new world. All of these events lead to a point in time where companies are re-tooling mission-critical software used for customer service, marketing, and sales. There's a lot more going on here than just a few Tweets. Make sure you're gearing up to deal with all of it.