With more than 100 vendors offering integrated discussion forum/wiki/news feed apps, Gartner has produced its report of this marketplace, calling it Social CRM. "Most vendors remain relatively small and unprofitable," says the report authored by Adam Sarner and others called Magic Quadrant for Social CRM. (You can't really look at the report unless you are a Gartner customer, though.)

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Gartner's magic quadrants are legion: this one has Jive, Salesforce, and Lithium as leaders, with Attensity and Telligent as Visionaries, and a dozen other players whose names will be familiar to RWW readers.

Four key factors besides how these vendors will host private communities and how they share their data repositories will differentiate the players:

• Seamless operation between public social networks and internal collaborative communities,
  
• Integration of processes with traditional, operational CRM applications, such as multichannel campaign management, a customer service knowledge base or a sales lead application,
  
• Application-specific analytics to help prove the ROI of the social CRM application, and
  
• Partnerships with global system integrators, or digital or interactive agencies and consultants, to promote and deploy the applications.
  

"Social CRM vendors will increasingly have to show examples of how their social data is used in core business processes, not just provide an API," the analysts say.