On the back-end, we’ve already noted how Salesforce.com’s electronic commerce cloud (EC2) has been integrated with Twitter, Cisco and even Google Wave to support better tracking of activity over multiple channels.

Yesterday, the list of “social CRM” offerings got longer with newly assembled alliances bringing Kana together with Baynote and Lithium Technologies stepping up promotion of the term “social CRM” with a Virtual Seminar that includes sponsors like Genesys Labs, LivePerson and Cognizant, as well as Lithium.

But “Social CRM” is but a link in an evolutionary step away from one-sided vendor- or brand-driven management of customer activities. “Sessions” often start with a call to an interactive voice response (IVR) system which gives a limited set of options for routing a call or retrieving information. It’s like a voting machine where the candidates or propositions are all pre-defined and all one can do is choose among little-known candidates or indicate “yes” or “no” on an unclear proposition.

Adding Baynote, Lithium, HiveLive or other peer-to-peer resources adds multiple dimensions to a traditionally one-sided, one-to-one interaction. It may start with monitoring multiple social networks, but quickly supports cultivation of networks of customers who ideally serve as sources of collective intelligence and feedback. In the best cases they can emerge as product or brand advocates, but at a minimum they can respond to customer queries or complaints in real time.

Success is predicated on customers building confidence in their own power over Web based resources. The next evolutionary step will be awareness raising – no so much among vendors – but among customers themselves. For social CRM to work customers must build a sense of trust in the feedback and query results they get regarding the retailers, companies and service providers with whom they carry out business.

For those of you who have not seen the Wave “home screen” before, the video gives you a glimpse. Warning: It involves learning a new set of terminology where interactions among “buddies”, “friends”, or “associates” are organized into “Waves” and each Wave is composed of a number of “blips.” In the SalesForce video, you see the Wave “home screen”. It resembles a Web-based email client but has several attributes of a social network, IM client and conferencing utility.

In the use case illustrated in the SalesForce.com demo, we’re looking at the home screen of a wireless customer seeking technical support by initiating a “Wave” with a ‘bot that is operated by the carrier. This is a glimpse of the future of Web-based, multi-modal self service, illustrating the benefits of tight integration between self-service logic and “cloud-based” CRM resources. Bear in mind that the business logic and “dialogues” generated by the system to support the “robot” could also be rendered as spoken words in an IVR, which is a capability that SalesForce.com has already demonstrated in conjunction with “voice-in-the-cloud” specialists like this offer from Angel.com.

Wave’s roll out is a signal moment in Recombinant Telephony. So far it has been received with very mixed reviews, with one luminary (Robert Scoble) calling it “the worst of email and IM rolled into one.” I disagree. While the “Preview” has a number of flaws — discovering new contacts and cool extensions is difficult, and it is hard to tell when you are actively engaged with a fellow collaborator — it has inspired a tremendous amount of creativity and will, over the next few years, prove valuable for collaborative communications, customer care and combinations of the two.