Ray Wang, partner with the enterprise strategy group with the San Mateo, Calif.-based research firm, said many organizations build CRM strategies on the premise that customer communication channels will happen by e-mail or phone. "But in the social Web, things move much more quickly," said Wang. "One little incident could spread like rapid fire."

Wang is the co-author of recently released research entitled Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. The paper aims to provide organizations with guidance regarding social CRM through 18 use cases and vendors in the space.

Social CRM should tie back to an existing customer relationship strategy, not outright replace it, said Wang. Moreover, organizations must contend with the new behaviours associated with social channels -- Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and others -- and the lack of technologies in what is still an emerging market, he said.

Organizations must also know how and with whom to engage through social channels, and how to take the conversation into private channels, said Wang. "In many cases, people are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing budgets and the customers aren't even in these channels," he said.

Altimeter identifies 18 use cases: social customer insight, social marketing insight, rapid social marketing response, social campaign tracking, social event management, social sales insight, rapid social sales response, proactive social lead generation, social support insight, rapid social response, p2p unpaid armies, innovation insight, crowdsourced R&D, collaboration insight, enterprise collaboration, extended collaboration, seamless customer experience, and VIP experience.