I wondered how long before I saw someone pull these together in a single entity. I picked this posting by Jamie Grenney off Google Alerts. Others out there?

To me Social Media is a great set of tools and techiques to get Customer Engagement and start the conversation. Instead of Marketing spending big budgets and relying on Focus Groups or User Satisfaction Surveys or HR working on employee engagement programmes why not use 365/24 (days/hours) tools? Having spent a large part of my career in marketing and internal employee communications and then consulting in CRM deployment I can see how organisations are desperate to engage the customer, build a relationship and develop a brand personality and voice as well as engage and motivate employees. 

There has been a raft of announcements recently by IBM (Lotus), Microsoft and others on the integration of social media tools in their software products. Implementations designed to make deployment across a company IT infrastructure easier.

The next 12 - 24 months are going to be very interesting.