As mentioned by Steve Reeves, two new terms are literally “exploding” in the social media sphere – Personal CRM and Social CRM.

You’ll find these concepts heavily discussed on Twitter and Linkedin, inspiring expert reports like the one published by the Altimeter Group.

And the world got even crazier when Gartner released a study presenting social media as a disruptive force in the CRM market and predicting over 80% growth in enterprise use of social networking tools, driven by customer engagement projects.

No wonder Erick Schonfeld included Social Media in TechCrunch Ten Technologies that will rock 2010…

But what exactly are Social CRM and Personal CRM?

Like Frédérique Garzon I think the concept is too immature to be generalized and precisely defined, altough I like Paul Greenberg’s tweetable definition “The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation”, which is vague enough to let everyone have their own interpretation.

Everything that more or less refers to the notion of dealing with customers, managing contacts and leads, having and listening to conversations, all on social media channels, can be considered as Social CRM.

As a result, new services are released every day, all of them claiming to be “social CRM” solutions although they address a great variety of requirements, as illustrated by Jeremy Owyang’s list of companies providing social CRM offerings. Jeremy identified not less than 8 different categories of social CRM companies! Needless to say it must be very very hard for social media rookies to pick which solution is for best them…

And the difference is…?

IMHO the difference  refers to the ultimate end-user: is the service used by just one individual to manage their personal relationships (Personal CRM), or by multiple users at a single organization on a shared network (Social CRM)? But even that is not totally satisfactory, as you can imagine some crossover between the two. There seems to be two segments arising in the marketplace today: one focused on servicing professionals and small teams/businesses, as opposed to the classic CRM vendors targeting larger organizations. But both are providing the ability to listen, monitor and engage contacts/customers on social networks, as well as other forms of communication. It will be interesting to see how the space shakes out and becomes further defined moving forward.

So, what is at stake?

Social/Personal CRM usage is meant to soar, due to a number of converging trends, and not only because of social media rising as a powerful acquisition, branding and support channel. Other accelerating factors are:

• Consumerization of technology: business applications are more affordable, easier to use, and to adopt.
• Increasing individual buy-in: in February, Gartner claimed that business-led social media initiatives had a greater chance of succeeding than those spearheaded by IT departments,  because the latter doesn’t currently have the right skill set in place to design and deliver such offerings, combined with a lack of suitable methodologies, technologies and tools to help them.
• Cloud and Mobility: personal data is now available on multiple devices: netbook, laptop, slate, tablet, phone, console, etc.
• People as a Platform: people have multiple profiles, and belong to formal as well as virtual groups.

But both providers and users of Social CRM need to be careful in their strategy: like Michael Maoz of Gartner says “Social CRM is more like marriage than dating”.

Very interesting changes in the way businesses interact with their customers, prospects and partners are happening, maybe even a fundamental shift from a “transaction” to a “relationship” approach. Looking forward to seeing how all this plays out.

One of the great things about social networks vs. email is that you normally get a photo of your contacts alongside their messages. It just makes it that much easier to quickly recognise who you’re talking to.

But not all contact lists are created equal, some of them are missing a profile picture, either because people want to remain anonymous or they just didn’t upload a photo.

Some of your contacts also possess multiple online personas, using serious portaits on professional networks, fun shots on social networks, cartoons, corporate logos and even sometimes a scene from a holiday snap!

A sample of my Facebook friends... Guess who's who?

And avatars can frequently change for events or causes, like adding a pink ribbon for the Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or turning green to show support for the Iranian protesters during the elections.

Choosing the best illustration to represent yourself has become a national sport, and you can find many articles on the net helping you avoid a taste mistake at best, and social suicide at worst, such as these posts on: How to Choose a Social Media Profile Picture and Avatar Importance.

Silentale builds your contacts’ profiles automatically from the people you’ve exchanged messages with, which means that in some cases, the profile pic initially retrieved is not always the one you’d most like to have in place. You don’t want to see your friend’s professional headshot, you’d rather have their smiling face from Facebook. Or you simply can’t stand someone’s avatar and have to change it.

Many of our users have requested the ability to choose the right photo from all the sources available to go along with the name.

So now you can! Simply select “Edit” on any contact and choose the “Change profile picture” option. All the various picture selections will be displayed, and you just click to choose your favorite.

It’s as easy as that! All your contacts, with the photos you choose.

Keep telling us what new features and functionality you’d like in Silentale by sending your feedback to support@silentale.com. We’re listening, so look out for more requested features coming soon!

Hunting down that elusive message or finding a contact, especially with only partial information, is always a time-consuming pain-in-the-neck. Silentale helps speed things up by searching across all your conversations and contacts at once (see our previous post), so at least you don’t have to remember whether the message was via Twitter, email, Facebook, etc.

But you can make your searches on Silentale even more efficient by using the following handy                                                                           operators:

We plan to add more search operators in future, so email any favorites you’d like us to add to support@silentale.com.

Another useful tip: when you remember who you had a conversation with, but just not where, you can narrow your search by messages exchanged with just one contact. Simply go to your People Book, search for and select the correct contact, click on the messages exchanged, and enter your search term in the box on the right.

Then you can view those messages in the side bar, or click to view full-screen.

So there you have it – some search tips to help you find what you need faster on Silentale. You might also want to check out our Search Plugin to enable quick searches directly from your browser bar. Next up at your request: searching by message source!

Highrise is the popular online CRM for small businesses made by 37Signals that helps SMEs organize the avalanche of information related to their customers and partners. It offers a straight-forward contact manager, the ability to create notes, provides tools for reminders, collaboration and follow-up. We’re very fond of everything 37signals and are avid Highrise users because of its emphasis on simplicity and ease-of-use.

More and more, business conversations are taking place across a huge variety of communication platforms, including professional but also personal channels. The number of small businesses actively using social media to attract new customers has doubled from 12 to 24% in the last year (Small Business Success Index, Feb 16, 2010). Today, it’s simply impossible to limit interactions to email only! Companies are increasingly using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other networks to promote their brand and products, and to manage relationships with existing customers.

So, we’re especially excited to announce that we’re adding Highrise Contacts to Silentale. It demonstrates our commitment to integrate with business solutions, and will provide professionals and small businesses with a unique tool to track their communications and relationships with prospects, customers and partners.

Thanks to all our beta users who have taken the time to give us great quality feedback via our surveys, Tweets, support tickets etc. We really appreciate all your suggestions about how to improve Silentale to make it even more useful, and we’re busy working on rolling out the most requested features as fast as we can.

One of your top requests was to automatically present your contacts by categories in the People Book, so that you can view your contacts grouped by how you’re connected to them, as well as see how to reach them. So we’ve reorganized the People Book into 3 columns:

The left column organizes your contacts by the different sources you’ve connected.

“My Contacts” is a consolidated view of your:

• LinkedIn Connections = first-degree connections from your Linkedin account(s)
• Facebook Friends = friends from your Facebook account(s)
• Twitter Contacts = followers, followees and recipients (of @ direct messages and replies) of your twitter account(s)
• Google Contacts = contacts from your Google Contact address book(s)
• Email Recipients  = people to whom you sent a message/reply at least once by email

“Uncategorized” are the people who have sent you a message, but don’t fit in any of the other “My Contacts” categories, mostly “the noise” made up of newsletters, spam, automated or service emails, etc. We split your Email contacts into these 2 categories so you can better find who you’ve actually communicated with.

The middle column lists the contacts in that category, and displays a preview including their name, picture (when available), and small icons that now indicate which contact details have been captured, for instance, their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles as well as email addresses.

And finally, the right colum provides details for a highlighted individual contact, including a digest of their different profiles. You can click on any of the hyperlinked contact details to go directly to their profile page or compose a message. You can also click to see all the archived messages you’ve exchanged with them.

We hope those changes will streamline your use of your Silentale Contacts. This is just the first step in reorganizing the functionality of the site, including adding filters for messages, so stay tuned for more improvements coming soon!

After loads of requests, we’re happy to announce the release of our LinkedIn contacts connector, thanks to their recent API release.

From now on, you can see your contacts’ LinkedIn profiles next to their email addresses, phone numbers, Facebook and Twitter profiles, all in one unified and constantly updated view.

To add your LinkedIn contacts, just go to your Connectors page, click on “Add” next to LinkedIn contacts under the “Add a Connector” section on the right, and authorise your LinkedIn account (via Oauth), or just click here to go directly there.

Then go to your Silentale Contacts and check out all your contacts with the LinkedIn icon!

Plus you can find all the information you’ve tracked about your Linkedin connections by entering his/her name in the “search everything” field.

This should be particularly useful for those of you who interact with a large business network. You no longer have to browse your address book, hunt through your email folders, or explore the twitter galaxy to check if or how you know this Linkedin person. With Silentale, you’ll know it instantly.

And another bonus is you no longer have a tedious search or synchronization process to consolidate your contacts’ details with their Linkedin profile. Silentale does it automatically for you.

Let us know what you think, and feel free to spread the word.

p.s. we know you also want LinkedIn messages, please lobby LinkedIn to open their API!