When Salesforce bought Assistly last week, it proved the growing importance of social media channels for customer service and highlighted the further blending of customer relationship management (CRM), customer experience management and Enterprise 2.0 when it comes to social functionality.

All three of these disciplines are increasingly about understanding your customers better and communicating with them wherever they are--whether that's the website, social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter or the good-old fashioned phone call.

As we've seen over the last year or two, CRM has become increasingly social as Salesforce has shown, developing Chatter and recently expanding it to allow it to be integrated with other enterprise software using an open API. And, most recently, by purchasing Assistly, which integrates content from social media services into help desk applications. Assistly isn't the company's only social purchase; last spring Salesforce bought Radian 6.

Salesforce, of course, isn't alone in making CRM social.

Meanwhile we are seeing Web Content Management take a turn toward customer experience management. While this often has to do with providing more customized content when users come to the company website, it also is about understanding your customers better and that includes what they're saying about you in social channels.

This brings us to Enterprise 2.0 software, which is increasingly moving from just providing an internal social communications outlet to offering channels to communicate externally on social networks and providing ways for your customers, suppliers and partners to communicate with you.

If this all sounds to you like it is beginning to overlap, it does to me too. It got me thinking that perhaps the three technology areas, which up to now have been mostly separate, are beginning to blend or at a minimum that the lines between them are beginning to blur--at least where customer engagement on social channels is concerned.

At its core, CRM is about managing the customer relationship. Up until the development of the social variety, that meant recording engagements with the customer, such as a phone call or visit, or keeping a record of basic information about the company, contacts, type of customer and so forth.

Web content management is about managing website content, increasingly within a marketing context. As the focus shifts to marketing, it's natural that there would be some overlap with CRM, which after all is a tool for sales. Sales and marketing usually work hand in glove inside organizations (or at least they should).

Finally, Enterprise 2.0 has mostly involved providing social channels inside the enterprise--a way for companies to allow their employees to collaborate in a similar fashion as they have traditionally done on the open web. More recently, this has shifted to include two-way communication outside of the company firewall as well.

While the three areas clearly cover different aspects of a customer relationship, it's also clear that there are increasingly areas of overlap as social communication grows in importance across all three areas. And as that happens, the lines between these applications are getting more hazy. - Ron