As social media monitoring and analytics become increasingly popular and valuable corporate services, there’s a growing need for them to “talk” with other kinds of software used to do business so that employees can be more efficient and productive.

One of the most exciting areas is social CRM, which combines social media with the power of CRM software, which provides a company’s employees with the data and information to drive sales and serve the needs of existing and potential customers.

This marriage is being propelled by the fact that more employees are using social media tools. A few years ago, a single employee may have used social media tools. Then, social media teams were created, and now social media tools are being used by employees across marketing, sales, customer service and communications departments.

Heartbeat, our social media monitoring and measurement service, features a built-in mini CRM with collaboration features and alert notifications. Many employees, however, are already using separate CRM software so they need an integrated platform without replicating the functionality.

As a result, it makes sense to provide them with ways to enhance their existing CRM with the conversations and relationships created by social media services. At the same time, combining CRM with social media will make it easier for employees to collaborate and share information, specially those part of large teams.

For Sysomos, this is an exciting opportunity that we have been focused on addressing. As a result, we’re excited to announce that Salesforce.com, one of the leading CRM providers, has been integrated into Sysomos Heartbeat, which offers robust and user-friendly features such as sentiment, geo-demographics and the ability to identify and engage with key influencers.

This integration, which was implemented hrough the development of Heartbeat Engagement API, means that social media conversations monitored by Heartbeat can be easily and quickly sent to a CRM. If a marketing employee sees something on Twitter about someone interested in buying a particular product or service, this sales lead can be sent to Salesforce.com and tagged so that a salesperson can quickly follow up.

For example, well-known blogger and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki posted a tweet recently in which he mentioned “Mercedes-Benz”. If someone from another luxury car maker saw that tweet, they could enter the information into Salesforce.com as a lead with click of a button so that a sales or public relations person could approach Kawasaki about his interest in a demo.

Another good use of Heartbeat and Salesforce.com is customer service in which “cases” that appear on social media services can be quickly identified and logged by anyone within an organization so that problems and issues can be effectively addressed and resolved.

We’re also excited that Heartbeat can now be accessed and used within Salesforce.com. This means Salesforce.com users don’t need to go back and forth between the two services. All social media metrics can be pulled within the Salesforce.com user interface.

We plan to add more leading CRM systems in the future, and expand into other kinds of corporate software to evolve Sysomos Heartbeat into an enterprise platform.