The largest market for new clients within CRM is Social Media; the only issue with this is that it is so undefined. Social media is so large that it includes those annoying Facebook updates from friends telling you they are having a drink in your favourite bar while you work through to the recent offer to buy a company, where a franchisor offered 10 franchisee coffee shop opportunities across Canada and received 600 applications, selling 8 in 3 months, 6 more than more traditional methods achieved in the same timescale.

Social Media is big business, the statistics are huge, LinkedIn’s last quarter revenue was $139.5m and despite still losing $1.6m a quarter it is still valued at over $3 billion Facebook has nearly a billion members, and Twitter exceeding 2 million tweets every hour.

The information from social media that makes up both Business Intelligence and Customer Intelligence is invaluable, but how do you keep tabs on this information, you could spend 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 monitoring the social media platforms but how do you assess what is useful and ultimately what is going to become a potential lead?

Monitoring social media is now a key business priority. Among firms surveyed by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers  72% are now “monitoring conversations about their brand” yet only 6% use tools to help with the monitoring.

More than 40% of the companies surveyed are using a specialist monitoring agency with the most popular in the UK being companies such as Brandwatch, Radian6 or Sysomos.

Brand managers recognise that social media has become not only too big to ignore but also integral to the marketing mix. When IBM ran a social media conference for their 2000 largest clients nearly 1400 marketing directors said they were underprepared for marketing in the social media space.

Social media has altered the way in which marketing can be done, the marketing issue is now that most social media users are not keen to receive marketing messages directly, preferring to receive recommendations from friends, and this has seen the trend in Klout scores becoming more important. The influence of the few far out ways the mass market scatter gun approach. It is therefore arguable that for companies to use social media to listen rather than to talk. Key influencers are targeted by companies such as Peer Influence who have been able to show some brands by utilising the right key influencers have the potential to receive as many as 40 000 inbound social media messages a week regarding their brand.

Having overcome the issue of how to be involved social media and becoming successful there is then the issue of how to segment the virtual treasure trove of information that the company now has. When you couple this with customer intelligence that can be garnered from the open nature of most social media tools and the ability to “monitor” chatter about competitors as a company you can only be involved in social media if you are able to convert social media leads to potential leads that your sales team can utilise in their conventional manner.

This utilisation is where Dynamics CRM steals a march on the competition. The value of the work that is done by those companies could be seen as invaluable, but given that the average price of monitoring the social media outlets for a small company is more than that of 15 Dynamics CRM licenses surely it is better for the monitoring to be done by those who know their brands best.

It is possible that until now Salesforce has jumped ahead of Dynamics CRM in terms of social media integration with Microsoft relying on the Radian6 tie in and a series of Add-Ons to deliver the social media integration. But whilst Salesforce have been able to deliver an efficient way of communicating brand messages to social media this is too little to be of consequence and the reason that only 6% of companies use tools for social media monitoring.

The remaining 94% companies are catching on slowly and the upgrades to Dynamics CRM 2011 that have been announced are in part the ability to assist in the delivery capability with micro-blogging the key element of this. However the biggest changes will be those of conversation, the ability for users to collaborate with those in their social network quickly and efficiently. This is coupled with the activity feed, the activity feed links social media to Dynamics CRM to ensure that posts can be linked to records to show how potential leads are becoming potential clients, the monitoring of this also allows for customer intelligence to monitor how leads produced in social media are developed.

Now is the time. Along with Business Intelligence and Customer Intelligence, the ability to utilise Social Intelligence is finally here. Dynamics CRM is uniquely positioned to deliver the success of this and ensure that data can indentify patterns, and therefore improve customer service and decision making.  With more than a million companies in Europe alone monitoring CRM without the tools to do so, it is a huge market.