Check the stats: 845 million people have signed up for Facebook worldwide, 152 million of them in the U.S.--nearly half the U.S. population. No wonder consumer-oriented businesses are obsessed with how to get more out of social media, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

For business technology organizations, the challenge is figuring out the intersection between social and everything under the customer relationship management sun. CRM broadly covers the software systems companies use to serve customers, generate sales leads, manage marketing campaigns, and analyze and segment customer data. Making the connection between the people in CRM databases and their social media personas will require companies to build a new level of trust with their customers, based on the promise of better service and value. This social connection is the key to unlocking a deeper understanding of customers and making more cost-effective use of sales, service, marketing, and IT resources.

Marketing, sales, and customer service execs often start experimenting in the social sphere without IT's help. But companies eventually need to link these efforts to on-premises CRM and marketing campaign management systems and customer data warehouses. IT groups also bring experience in data security and compliance with privacy polices and regulations. And IT can bring a much-needed process rigor: Just 17% of companies polled in our 2012 Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey have a formal process for responding to customer complaints on Facebook, despite two-thirds having a Facebook presence.

Startups Get It

Plenty of well-established companies are just beginning to embrace social: Only 19% of companies have had an external presence on Facebook for more than two years, our survey finds. So there's much to learn from Internet startups such as Adaptu that are born with the assumption of social-savvy service, sales, and ...