It's an interesting time in the Social CRM world. I recently blogged about how we've reached the "label" stage in which everyone is casting around for the low hanging fruit that lets them declare victory for themselves on Social CRM. In this case, many are latching on to Twitter support as their claim for having embraced Social CRM. As I wrote, it's just too little to be critical mass.

Any time a developing market reaches the label stage, it's a sign of increasing momentum and crossing the chasm. It means people care enough to want to be labeled a part of the movement. We're past the early adopters and moving forward towards the mainstream. We have an excellent idea of what Social CRM is, thanks to folks like Paul Greenberg. There are some great tools out there, like Twitter and many others. Still, it’s easy to get cocky at this stage in the market’s development. The trough of disillusionment yawns directly ahead unless we play our cards carefully.

A popular re-tweet I did recently involved the thought that strategy was more important than tools. It's an important thought because the label stage is where tools are often mistaken for solutions. Without a good strategy for how they will be used, tools don’t provide a solution. Knowing how to use tools is absolutely essential to success.

That's why the next stage of product evolution is so essential to helping the mainstream succeed. That's the stage where the products grow beyond tools to become solutions in and of themselves. Enterprise software classically goes through this cycle:

- Some organization figures out a process that gives them a huge advantage. They build their own tools. Only a few organizations can pull off the transformation.

- Tools appear that are relevant to the process, but that miss the process themselves. A few more orgs transform, but there are still a lot of failures.

- The best practices discovered by the cutting edge thinkers get built into the products directly, thus making the products "solutions." Now, the mainstream can undergo the transformation simply by implementing and adopting the product.

That sounds simpler than it really is. No product ever fully captures the process, the process will need fine tuning, and organizations have to really want to adopt the change, but the idea is clear.

Making solutions and not just products has always been a core value at Helpstream. That’s why we focus just as much on process as we do on features or the latest social whiz bangs. That’s why we invest so much time studying exactly how customers extract value from our product and try to make it easier for new customers to get that value automatically.

We’ve introduced a number of innovative “solution” features including our waterfall ROI measurement and our automatic SLA’s for managing community escalation to cases. Expect a lot more solutions from Helpstream going forward!