The long recession and the rise of social CRM were not simply coincidental. I believe they happened together. That’s not to say that social CRM happened for some cosmic reason; I neither subscribe to the belief that all things happen for a reason nor do I believe I am qualified to hold forth beyond what I’ve just written. I think social CRM — the roots of which precede the recession — became important during the recession because it represents a good and inexpensive way to keep tabs on existing customers and possibly capture some new ones at low cost.

Tablet vendors at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas had a coming out party. Driven by the wild success of the iPad, they introduced something like eighty — that’s 8-oh, my goodness — tablet PCs to the world. Now, by itself, that’s significant, especially for CRM, and something hard to miss even if you’re a proverbial blind horse. But let’s not stop there; to understand the significance for CRM, we can analyze more information. For instance, it was widely reported last year that for the first time social media out-competed email for our attention.