How's that Social Media strategy of yours shaping up? Feeling like you're playing catchup with customers? Have you integrated it yet with your customer relationship management systems? No? Well, take a tip from the experts.

Last year, Maytag learned the hard way that irate consumers wielding Twitter accounts can be more devastating than disappointing Wall Street. Heather Armstrong, who writes the personal blog Dooce was burned only once by the company last year, but she left a stain on the appliance maker with a swath of statements to her more than 1 million followers.

Maytag has since cleaned up its mess.

Similarly, the makers of children's medication such as Motrin endured the wrath of mothers everywhere when response to a recall of some of the products was not met with swift action.

In both cases, the companies had brilliant CRM systems and had been dabbling in social media to interact with customers. But neither saw the benefit of linking the two together.

This is why more enterprises need to adopt social CRM. And by social CRM, let's take consultant Esteban Kolsky's definition that it is about strategically setting long-term goals for working better with your clients and/or customers, and improving your organization in the process.

Knexus CEO Graeme Foux says the impact of outlets like Twitter, Yelp, Facebook, and others has been to cut organizations out of the loop, losing control of the customer relationship.

"Consumers have tasted freedom to connect, share and talk, benefiting from more timely, relevant and trusted interactions," Foux said in a recent post. "This is a profound change, leaving companies with little (or more likely no) hope of wrestling back control and re-establishing previous levels of influence. No wonder social media monitoring tools are red-hot, as companies scramble to re-engage with the disparate conversations taking place on the Web about them, but not with them."

Instead, Foux says, social CRM should be about companies attempting to get back into the conversations controlled by the customer, through listening and engaging to build trust and value.

So what's an enterprise to do? Jeremiah Owyang, analyst and partner at the Altimeter Group, says most organizations start their initiatives by building out the "Five M's" (monitoring, mapping, management, middleware, measurement) and deploying a customer insight program. But real-time is not fast enough. Enterprises instead need to be able to anticipate what customers are going to say and do in order to keep up.

"Companies are unable to scale to meet the needs of social," Owyang said in a recent blog post. "No matter how many community managers Dell and Comcast Cares hires to support, they'll never be able to match the number of active customers. They need tools, and they need them now."

The graphic below shows 18 different points where Owyang suggests companies focus their efforts in engaging and integrating their social networking strategy with their current CRM systems.

The main takeaway here is reducing risk means that enterprises need to master one thing at a time and then layer in more advanced capabilities. Starting out could be as easy as mapping the biggest pain points in the company and prioritizing use cases based on business value.

Given that the average consumer has had a few years headstart in using and communicating through social networks, it could be argued that getting a better handle on social CRM is mission-critical.

— Michael Singer, Senior Editor at Internet Evolution, is focused on executive (Executive Clan) and midmarket (Midmarket Clan) issues.