By now, it is obvious social media will affect CRM—but questions remain as to how to process the largely unfiltered data, and how to build meaningful relationships through the various platforms. Many companies are having success with social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, but mining the information is still difficult, mostly because these services didn’t originate as business tools.

Small businesses have a definite advantage when it comes to using social media as CRM tool; since their customer bases are smaller and more refined, SMBs have an easier time understanding these people, and how they use these social devices. Large businesses expect CRM methods to be scalable, and social networks are difficult to scale. Messages must specifically target an audience, and unstructured data is much more difficult to sift through when it’s coming from a large number of people.

Another advantage small businesses have in the social media game is that they are more likely to have trusted relationships with their customers—not that their products are necessarily better, just that the numbers they deal with are more manageable than the ones large enterprises handle. Small businesses are therefore strengthening existing customer relationships while larger ones flounder a bit to build similar intimate connections.

Yet another problem with focusing on social feeds for information: a lot of the customer conversations businesses would like to see are under wraps, or simply don’t take place. Many companies are building presences on Facebook (and shifting mostly to brand pages), but the conversations there regarding their brands are pretty sparse. This is partly because a lot of Facebook conversations are private, but also partly because just as business managers are having trouble using these social tools for business, customers are not entirely willing to let these leisure sites be about business.

This isn’t to say information gathered from social media is useless, but it will be interesting to see how CRM vendors cope with and manage it—especially since the general consensus is that social networks are here to stay.

Microsoft has been aggressively courting CRM users this week. First, they announced price cuts to their online productivity suite, and yesterday they lowered prices on their Dynamics CRM Online product. In addition to slashing prices, Microsoft is offering six months of free Dynamics CRM usage to Salesforce.com’s and Oracle’s CRM users.

The Business Productivity Suite, a SaaS offering, adopted a new pricing model and is now at $10 per user instead of $15 per user; Microsoft executives are attributing the discount to the recent increase in users. The suite includes Exchange Online (a messaging service), SharePoint Online, Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online, and was updated this month to increase mailbox storage space to 25 GB. In addition to price cuts, the Business Productivity Suite’s availability will be extended to Brazil, Hungary, Israel, and Mexico, to name a few.

The fight for the cloud application space doesn’t stop there: from now until the end of the year, customers of Salesforce.com and Oracle CRM can sign up for a free, six-month trial of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Before announcing the offering, Microsoft also combined their two CRM Online offerings—Professional and Professional Plus—into one version that has all the features of the latter, but the price of the former: $44 per user per month. There are some stipulations with the free-trial offer: users must be in the US or Canada, and have a minimum of five seats and a maximum of two-times the number of seats subscribed to under Salesforce or Oracle. When the six-month pilot lapses, subscribers will be charged $44 per user per month.

Sweetening the deal a bit, Microsoft has also given Dynamics CRM Online a service update this month (its third in 18 months), featuring enhanced data import and free mobile access. It will be interesting to see how Salesforce and Oracle respond, and especially if the trial and price cuts will indeed draw customers from those companies.

Small businesses tend to manage customer relationships through a number of different applications—documents, contact managers, spreadsheets, etc.—and it is those companies that have the most to gain from implementing a unified CRM system. To help quell some of the apprehensions and concerns small businesses may have with CRM, CRM Buyer recently outlined some tips to help SMBs get the most out of the service.

When introducing a CRM system to employees unaccustomed to using one, the most important step is get them to buy into the system. Without employee support and faith in the product, the product will have little worth and SMBs won’t see the ROI they hoped for. Also, every employee must be encouraged to use the platform, because some will likely eschew the system in favor of familiar methods they know have previously yielded success. It is therefore important to stress the benefits of CRM implementation will give the company, rather than the system’s features.

Training is also important for proselytizing employees. Ideally, training will be included with the purchase or subscription chosen, and online documentation, videos, and tutorials are also helpful. For teaching non-technical people, sometimes it is most effective to familiarize them with certain features that are most relevant to their role. Ongoing training for the office is necessary for keeping up with the system’s innovations.  CRM Buyer also recommends training users in groups—training at intervals will allow those first familiar with the system to help others.

Lastly, it is important to choose the right CRM platform. For small businesses, this often means a simple system. Managers should outline the company’s needs and then select a system based on those requisites, and not by the bells and whistles certain vendors may offer.