Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy for managing a company's relationship with customers and prospects. It involves using technology to manage and synchronize business processes for sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. The underlying goal of CRM is to find, attract, and win over new customers; retain current customers; and potentially reduce costs for marketing and client management.

Social CRM is also a business strategy. It's one component that helps organizations evolve into a fully operational social business. It's a strategic business initiative that not only considers the social customer, but also requires collaboration, customized internal processes, and technology integration. With a successful social CRM initiative, organizations will know what to say to their customers and prospects, how to say it, where to say it, and when to say it, to provide a more relevant customer interaction.

Although the management of social CRM focuses internally on people, process, and technology, it is in direct response to the external social customer. Social customers use a variety of channels to express satisfaction or discontent about a product or service, so it's imperative that companies not only monitor these channels, but also be prepared to take action there. Additionally, prospects are simply "social customers" of other companies so an effective social CRM program will equip sales teams to engage with them at the right time.

To learn more about some new trends in CRM for 2011, you can download this free ebook. Contributors include JD Lasica, David Brock, Charles H. Green, Cheryl Hanna, Esteban Kolsky, Ben Bradley and David Tyner.

I talk in depth about Social CRM in Chapter 2 "In Response to the Social Customer: Social CRM" in my upcoming book, Smart Business, Social Business: A Playbook for Social Media in Your Organization scheduled to be released in July 2011.