Mike Anderson is Area Director at Meltwater Group, news and social media monitoring provider who have recently acquired Social CRM provider, JitterJam.

How many times have you taken to the realms of social media to vent your frustration at being let down by something or someone, or because you’ve received a lesser service?

A lot of us do it. It makes us feel better. You might even have gone to your Twitter account to sing the praises of a particularly efficient business that’s gone above and beyond, and made a lasting impression. From here often follows comments or re-tweets from like minded people, but, we don’t always get a response from those that we were actually talking about. Would your business be taking advantage of the opportunity to start a valuable conversation?

Monitoring social media to identify what is being said about you online is essential when building a complete picture of the online consumer sentiment surrounding your business or brand. Using Social CRM to take it a step further however, allows you to identify and engage with those individuals who are talking about you via social media, be it in a positive or negative light, and to join discussions within the community that you serve. By conversing or collaborating with consumers through social media, and feeding back to sales, marketing or customer service teams, businesses can build and develop a trusting relationship with social contacts, taking the relationship lifecycle between an organisation and a social user from the moment that individual is discovered, through to advocacy, all the while harvesting priceless information which enables a more intelligent and targeted service.

Validated in 2010, and continuing to grow in importance in 2011, Social CRM is enriching the social media knowledge of established and start-up businesses alike, and allowing them to monetize social contacts. Predicted by the Gartner to have a $1 billion dollar spend by 2013, it’s clear that businesses who haven’t yet done so, need to get to grips with Social CRM and the benefits that this powerful tool has to offer.

There are many tools out there that businesses can use to ensure that their Social CRM strategy is successfully executed, and the Meltwater Group is also able to offer this, having recently acquired Social CRM provider, JitterJam to bolster the company’s social media monitoring and analysis tool, Meltwater Buzz. We will be at Social Media World Forum 2011 on 29 – 30 March in London (Stand 45, 46) if you would like talk more about the value of Social CRM.

Meltwater are sponsors of this year’s Social Media World Forum Europe 2011, click here to arrange a meeting with them at the event.