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Whether you're Microsoft or Mel's Meat Market, the true power of social media and its impact on brands is really only beginning to be felt. As futurologist Ian Pearson stated in Gartner's Customer Relationship Management Summit earlier this year, the rapid pace of change in technology means that companies need to focus on agility instead of just optimization when it comes to integrating social media and CRM applications.

With improvements to email integration and a new marketing campaign, SaaS productivity vendor Zoho is aiming its sights openly at Salesforce.com, the dominant Web-based CRM today.

The "Zwitch to Zoho" name might be cheesy marketing, but the cheaper subscription price is no joke. If you want more than 5 users, Salesforce.com will cost you $65/user/month. As of today, Zoho is offering an unlimited use CRM subscription for just $12.

After being in beta for a year, Smibs has launched their SaaS business software into full production mode. The initial series of applications, with more planned for the future, include a Web-based CRM called Doorbell, and the Smibs Network, a business networking service.

LinkedIn has largely wasted its potential to be anything other than personal promotion, and Salesforce.com CRM focuses almost solely on internal collaboration. While it has a long way to go to truly compete with either, the way that Smibs bridges the gap between public business networking and in-group workflows makes it a serious future contender.

Bob Nanna of Threadless, the online superpower that capitalizes brilliantly on hipster T-shirt culture, takes a moment at the company's Chicago, Illinois, headquarters to talk about how employees have used social media to build and grow "brand love," a bleeding-edge, white-hot marketing term I just invented.

From CRM via Twitter to Facebook live video contests, the folks at Threadless have knocked online engagement out of the park and created a community around a brand while building a great reputation for responsiveness. Watch on and be schooled.

This morning my home wifi was having trouble and I posted a message to Twitter saying, "My wife has decided to start the day with a call to Comcast customer service, I should have offered to poke her in the eye with a spoon. Would have been more fun for her." Within minutes a man named Bill (@ComcastBill, really) publicly replied to ask if he could help.

I didn't think much of it, I assumed he was camped on a search.twitter results page for the word "Comcast" or maybe had subscribed to an RSS feed for the search. It turns out though, that far more than that was happening behind the scenes. An extensive machinery of tracking, delegation and analysis stood between Bill and my little Tweet. Maybe it has to be that way, maybe it's a good thing - but there's something deeply disturbing about it too.

About 6 months ago, I switched from Outlook to Gmail and wrote about the experience. It was a move I haven't regretted, and I've never been tempted to return to Outlook. Despite a few glitches in the matrix that occur when Gmail goes down, the service is as close to "free, perfect, and now" as it gets. So, why am I spending time switching to an email service by an unknown start-up called Relenta?

Revenue growth is priority #1 for most businesses today. So, good salespeople are in demand, and management wants to give them the best possible tools to make them productive. Selling is a numbers game. As long as you do reasonably sensible things, the time invested tends to corelate to revenue earned. Therefore, productivity really does matter. This is not an area to skimp on. If you can make somebody who brings in $1 million in revenue 10% more productive, that would mean an additional $100,000. So, what is happening in the market with tools for those who hustle on the front lines of business, the people who sell the products and services, who get capital for your business and sell it when the time comes, who hire the people who can grow your business? What will they be using in future?

These are reflections from having spent a few days at the annual Salesforce.com event, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce.

At first glance, it seems like SkyData is trying to do too much. This mobile app mashes up data from your email contacts, your social network contacts, your business contacts, as well as business data from CRM applications like Salesforce.com, location-based info from sites like Yelp, travel info, news and RSS feeds, and even Google Maps. Is this a case of info overload or is this an app every business user will want to have?

There was a time when only technically-savvy people knew how to create content and publish it to the internet, but the rise of easy-to-use blogging and CMS systems changed that. Today, everyone can be a publisher. Now, Iceberg wants to bring that same democratization to programming. In fact, that's their vision for Web 3.0 - the web where everyone is a programmer.