If you're going to build social networking into your company's customer strategy, what better place to put it than under the umbrella of customer relationship management?

CRM is where social networking has landed, and its beneficiaries – companies such as Jive Software, Oracle and Salesforce.com (News - Alert) others – are fueling growth in the social customer relationship management market, which is expected to top $1 billion through 2012, eWeek is reporting.

That figure of $1 billion through 2012 tops analyst group Gartner's (News - Alert) social CRM projection of $820 million through 2011, up from $625 million in 2010.

The phenomenon is called “social CRM” and it involves monitoring social networks such as Facebook (News - Alert), LinkedIn and Twitter to keep abreast of how a company is being discussed and represented in social networking (or how its competitors are being discussed and represented). The viral nature of social networking means that it carries a lot of weight among consumers, and no company can afford to ignore it and skip this kind of analysis.

Most of the CRM companies didn't grow their solutions natively, of course: a lot of the solutions offered by larger companies are the result of acquisitions of smaller companies. Salesforce.com acquired social media monitor Radian6 for $326 million, and is stitching Radian6 technology into its Chatter corporate social network tool, reports eWeek. Jive acquired social CRM capabilities through the acquisition of Filtrbox. These type of acquisitions will continue in the near future, says Gartner, as larger companies try to fill in any gaps in their social networking strategy. 

The capabilities are hot, and some analysts believe the market is still incredibly untapped. 

Said Gartner analyst Adam Sarner, “Use by consumers accounts for over 90 percent of spending on social CRM, but spending on business to business (B2B) use is growing faster and will account for 30 percent of total social CRM spending by 2015.”

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