Are you getting obsessed with tweets, uploads, and writing on your wall? See our checklist to be sure.

Here's a great article written by Kristin Burnham:

Answer these questions carefully (since denial is the first sign): Do you find yourself dreaming about status updates and friend requests? Does your TwitPic account chronicle your trips to the grocery store and cleaners?

In the search for truth, sometimes social media is its own worst enemy. With a self-credentialed guru waiting at every click, finding actionable, fact-based insight is tricky.

So, in a modest attempt to bring a dose of sanity to this intellectual frat party, I've reined my impulse to lob more "personal picks" into the fray. Instead, I'll follow the wisdom of an august data mining colleague to just "let the data speak."

Our process was to query data from hundreds of our brand clients to see what testable truths emerged -- and here's what we found: 10 rules that hold up across category and time.

Workbooks.com, the leading provider of CRM and Business applications delivered via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to the small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs), and InvisibleCRM, a technology provider of tools engineered to bridge the gap between enterprise and personal productivity applications, announced today that they have signed a partnership agreement. The two firms will jointly create a new Outlook integration offering for Workbooks.com based on InvisibleCRM’s InvisibleSync Bridge and OutlookBridge technology platform.
The new offering will allow users of Workbooks application suite to integrate contacts, appointments and emails with Microsoft Outlook increasing usability and productivity even when they are offline.

Additional enhancements will more fully integrate Workbooks CRM and Outlook, allowing Workbooks users to manage their core CRM data from within the Outlook client.
“By providing our users instant access to the CRM data and components of Workbooks from within the Microsoft Office suite, we can dramatically increase their productivity, data quality and adoption rate,” said John Cheney, Workbooks.com CEO. “By partnering with InvisibleCRM, we can deliver World class Outlook integration to our customers quickly and effectively.”
“We are proud to partner with Workbooks.com. They have a remarkable SaaS business suite that provides incredible value to the SME marketplace,” said Vlad Voskresensky, CEO of InvisibleCRM. “Our partnership focus is to extend that value by providing a single place to manage ALL of a client’s CRM data within Outlook and an elegant approach to melding customer information found in email into the Workbooks.com environment. Access offline means taking Workbooks.com with you anywhere and anytime.”

PlanMill PSA Cloud now serves a leading service business in Romania 

ICS Romania based in Bucharest is a regional geospatial solution provider for Romania’s public administration and large companies. It now answers the demands of burgeoning customer needs using PlanMill PSA (Professional Services Automation) on the Cloud.  

PlanMill's web-based PSA is handpicked by Marcel Foca, General Manager of ICS Romania to support its growing service business. After a thorough needs analysis conducted online with experienced PlanMill consultants followed by PlanMill Quick Deployment Model, PlanMill PSA Cloud was up and running in no time. 

According to Marcel, selecting  PlanMill's PSA solution is a straighforward solution. Being a regional market leader in information, circumstance analysis, and data usage, the company understands the benfits of a turnkey solution. Although PlanMill PSA was customized to some extent to fit local requirements, enhancing customer relationships and implementing project management systems was ready from day one.  

Chatter has the goal of bringing the best of the social media tools to the enterprise, making enterprise sales as easy to use as Facebook or Twitter. With all of the buzz around privacy and social networking tools, it's refreshing to hear that these tools use a the same security models that the rest of SalesForce has built in to its platform.

Chatter is a new module in the SalesForce architecture that takes advantage of the existing APIs and services, while providing rich collaboration features. "Collaboration as a Service" is now trending as a new category in the industry.

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There is a lot of talk out there about the integration of social media with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), so much that new solutions have been developed around this new social model. So what's really the definition of Social CRM? Paul Greenburg from ZDNET explains:

1. I’m conceding to “Social CRM” as the term of choice, rather than CRM 2.0. If ZDNET will let me, I’ll change the name of the blog to “Social CRM: The Conversation”  CRM 2.0 has been a placeholder at best and obscuring at worst - it doesn’t reflect the customer’s control of the business ecosystem all that well.  Social CRM is a better, though not great, reflection of what we’re talking about.  Let’s use the acronym of the Twitterverse group for it - SCRM or sCRM. I don’t care which.
2. The customer controls the business ecosystem and the conversation, but not the business a.k.a. company a.k.a. enterprise itself.  What that means is that while customers have much greater control over their destinies in how they interact with businesses, make no mistake about it, they don’t run the business, nor does the business have to concede everything to the customer.
3. What this means is that SCRM is an extension of CRM, not a replacement for CRM. Its a dramatic change in what it adds to the features, functions and characteristics of CRM but it is still based on the time honored principle that a business needs its customers and prefers them profitable and that same business needs to run itself effectively too.
4. The transformation that’s sparked the need for Social CRM seems to have occurred in 2004. It has been a social revolution in how we communicate, not a revolution in how we do business per se. All institutions that humans interact with have been affected by things like the cellphone/smartphone, the new social web tools and the instant availability of information in an aggregated and organized way that provides intelligence to the person on the street, not just the enterprise.
5. Part of that transformation affects how we trust and thus who we trust. Since 2004, “someone like me” is the most trusted source, not businesses, NGOs, government agencies or corporate leaders.  That means that peer trust is how influence and impact germinates and then propagates most effectively - at least as of now.
6. The lesson for business, in terms of Social CRM is that we are now at a point that the customers’ expectations are so great and their demands so empowered that our SCRM business strategy needs to be built around collaboration and customer engagement, not traditional operational customer management.
7. We’ve moved from the transaction to the interaction with customers, though we haven’t eliminated the transaction - or the data associated with it.
8. Businesses still need to run their operations, set goals that are cognizant of what the customer wants and needs, but not determined by that.  They need to map their goals and objectives to the customers’ goals and objectives  to make it work for all concerned.
9. That means that we need to recognize that there is an extended enterprise value chain which consists of the company, its suppliers, vendors and agencies that the enterprise has to deal with. There is a separate “personal value chain” which is the total greater than the sum of its parts of what an individual customer needs to achieve whatever their personal agenda is.
10. For the company to succeed, since they cannot control the personal value chain of the customer, nor should they want to, they can only provide what the customer needs to satisfy that part of the customer’s personal agenda that is associated with their enterprise.  That means products, services, tools and experiences that allow the customer that satisfying interaction.
11. The intersection of the extended enterprise value chain and the customer’s use of part of his personal value chain to satisfy that personal agenda creates the possibility for a collaborative value chain that engages the customer in the activities of the business sufficiently to provide each (the company and the customer) with what they need from the other to derive individual and mutually beneficial value.
12. That means that transparency and authenticity become more than buzzwords because in order for the customer to make intelligent decisions on how they are going to interact with the company and the level of that interaction, they need that visibility and honesty from the company.
13. That also means that the companies need to make the decision that its a good thing to allow the customer to have that increased level of knowledge, access and honesty - it can help the company immensely in their engagements with their customers. That’s a cultural issue that has to be resolved for Social CRM to work.
14. If these aforementioned conditions are met,  the customer is afforded the ability to co-create by the company. What that means is not all that pat. It can mean anything from customers and the company collaborating on product development, to customer suggestions on how to improve a company process, to customers helping other customers solve customer service issues, to even doing what gamers do and modifying game play using tools for scenario creation which adds value to the game. Co-creation is the ability of the company and customer to create additional value for each other - what form it takes is not always THE BIG THING.  But co-creation, mutually derived value, is at the core of SCRM.
15. SCRM differs from Enterprise 2.0 though is integrally related to it. Enterprise 2.0 is organized around increasing the productivity of the workforce in all that it does utilizing new collaborative tools to do so. It uses those tools to aggregate and organize information and systems.  However, though different, Enterprise 2.0 is integrally related because part of that improvement in productivity increases the effectiveness of employee-customer interactions.  It also increases the company’s ability to capture useful information and knowledge about customers, not just boatloads of data. But what it doesn’t do is provide avenues for the customers to engage themselves with the company. That’s not its purpose. That is the purpose of SCRM.
16. SCRM also changes the nature of what kind of customer is optimal for you. Rather than aiming at a satisfied customer (an increasingly useless metric) and even rather than thinking that a loyal customer is your best customer, your objective should be to create advocates and settle for loyal customers.
17. How you measure customer value changes when you’re thinking about SCRM. Rather than just Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) - which reflects the direct financial value of a customer to a company over the life of his relationship to that company, think too about Customer Referral Value (CRV) which measures how valuable influential customers are when they tell others about your company, not just promise to.
18. When you look at the SCRM applications out there - there are no actual SCRM suites, no matter what the claims of any company on either the CRM or social tools side.  What you do have are effective and important applications that increase the ability of employees to interact with customers - though they are not tools that facilitate the actual interaction.  You also have the integration of social media and community building tools with traditional CRM tools which are providing effective combinations which are leading toward SCRM.  I want to emphasize. These are all good tools. They are worthy of any company’s consideration. There is just no SCRM suite out there - as of yet or in the near future.  Which doesn’t matter one iota.