
Some background on the alphabet soup: Social CRM is the intersection between lead management and social media, think sourcing and tracking sales leads and engaged customers in the same system that can capture and uncover revenue associated with each of them. This allows you to forecast critical metrics like lifetime customer value associated with individual leads within social media. Once customer lifetime value predictions are available, further optimization may become possible.
In plain language: you could filter and prioritize conversations with your brand on Twitter or other social channels by their predicted resulting direct revenue. This is likely most valuable for B2B clients, but has potential implications across a wide variety of companies.
How deep is the integration going to be? The release indicates that Radian6 will remain separate, but deep integration between the engagement console and Salesforce would be a compelling offering. I expect to quickly see API hooks that will allow operations within Salesforce from the social media monitoring console – the first step in an efficient cross platform work flow.