Lithium was a major presence at our Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) last February. Its executives and one of its customers (FICO) described the power of promoting conversations between (or among) employees in marketing, customer care or other departments and individuals with specific questions or issues that they need to resolve. At the time, we saw Lithium tackling issues that were largely internal for companies who had to sort out tensions between the Marketing Department (with “brand” and “message” top of mind) and Customer Care or Contact Center personnel who saw themselves often play the role of customer advocate.

Lithium bridges the gaps by creating a social communications platforms where customers, prospects and enterprise employees can join in forums to resolve the issues that originate directly from customers or prospects, rather than alpha bloggers or angry Twitterers. The additional investment (which brings Lithium’s total capitalization from outsiders to $101 million) will fuel new hiring and investment to enable global expansion. According to Lawler’s report, the company plans to double its 200 current employee count and expand its global reach beyond North America and Western Europe, targeting Asia and the Pacific Rim.

As the saying goes, “Money talks!” and Lithium’s message in the social business domain has been that “customers don’t want to ‘Friend’ you, they want to get something done.” Opus Research would add that it starts with a genuine conversation, not a someone railing or whining on Twitter or Facebook. Lithium recognized this fact from the beginning and it is being rewarded by investors who see the concept’s global potential.

As described, the new service lets Lithium customers choose the page to monitor, select phrases to “listen” for and conduct analytics regarding the frequency of mentions or use of the selected phrases. The service makes use of the Facebooks FQL API which means, as Ms. Franciso points out, the bulk of the information in Facebook remains private.

A video that illustrates the new service is available here.

As Sean sees it few, if any, companies companies are unaware of social media. Research that we’re conducting here at opus confirms that. Yet just as few have moved beyond Experimentation, largely because there are genuine cultural and technical challenges to putting plans into effect, integrating internal resources and ultimately fully engaging with customers. As he put it, “Believe me, your customers don’t want to ‘friend’ you, they want to get something done.”

Sean was followed by Barry Paperno, who launched and now nurtures the community of people using MyFICO (the community tool of the company that maintains your FICO credit score). Barry was able to describe some of the cultural and operational barriers that he encountered while fostering his community in what he termed “a very conservative company.”

My take-away, which is a theme Opus Research will be analyzing more thoroughly in the coming months, is the challenge of dealing with a natural tension between “Marketing” and “Support” as companies define their transformation to an engagement model. We see profound opportunity to leverage existing self-service and agent assisted services infrastructure by defining work flows that transcend the lines of demarcation between Web sites, IVRs, live agents, mobile networks and even face-to-face, in store conversations.

The point that Lithium and its guest speakers exposed is that every company that, thanks to high-profile implementers like Zappos or highly-successful low-profile community developments by the likes of FICO, the pendulum of power is swinging toward the customer. It’s going to take years, but the path to useful engagement models is becoming better beaten and both technical and cultural challenges are better defined.

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.