The world of customer relationship management is getting a big Web 2.0 makeover this year. Companies such as Helpstream, Lithium, and others are remaking the staid corporate CRM into one in which much more value is mutually exchanged with the marketplace.

18 Emerging Topics at the Intersection of Business and IT in 2009
Dion Hinchcliffe, ebizQ, August 19th, 2009

Companies can no longer control how customers interact and share information about their products and services. This fundamental shift of power to the customer has profound implications for sales, marketing, and customer service.

Social CRM: Shifting power and rapid burn
Michael Krigsman, ZDNet, August 19th, 2009

Data quality is even more important with online customer communities now making way for social CRM, which brings together the digital community and combines it with crowdsourcing and customer service.

Data quality important with emergence of social CRM
QAS Ltd., August 19th, 2009

45% of HR professionals use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

45% of Employers Now Screen Social Media Profiles
Jennifer Van Grove, Mashable, August 19th, 2009

Social CRM will be a more predictable, reliable model for applying Web 2.0 to customer relationships using many of the strengths of the community model.

Using social software to reinvent the customer relationship
Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet, August 18th, 2009

According to the study, 54% of the Fortune 100 companies surveyed are active on Twitter. Another interesting stat is that 21 of the Fortune 100 companies use only Twitter or Facebook Pages or have a company blog. Of that 21%, 76% of those companies that only use one channel, use Twitter.

Fortune 100 companies embracing social media; especially Twitter
Mack Collier, August 18th, 2009

Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:
* 55% more visitors
* 97% more inbound links
* 434% more indexed pages

Study Shows Small Businesses That Blog Get 55% More Website Visitors
Rick Burnes, HubSpot, August 17th, 2009

This is a list of the top Twitter tools to manage your social media engagement with your customers. While it isn’t a comprehensive list of every available tool, it does cover the market leaders in each category.

Corporate Twitter Toolbox: Twitter Tools for the Enterprise
Sudha Jamthe, Mashable, August 17th, 2009

1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia (Wikipedia) you would earn $156.23 per hour 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.

30+ Impressive Social Media Stats Visualized [Video]
Adam Ostrow, Mashable, August 14th, 2009

No matter what industry term our technology falls under, at the end of the day we want our users to remember us as giving them the ‘right’ up-to-date information at the ‘right’ time.

Getting the lingo down – Social CRM, CRM 2.0, Sales 2.0
InsideView, August 14th, 2009

It looks like the far more difficult part of the social CRM phenomenon would seem to be building the strategy around serving, marketing, selling and most importantly, engaging, customers.

Social-ized CRM – Voices of CRM
Barney Beal, IT Knowledge Exchange, August 13th, 2009