When your new sales leads come in, how do you qualify how valuable a prospect they are?

Do you simply rely on what you are told in emails or telephone conversations with the individual and believe their self-promoting hype about how they own the company, hold the purse strings and how their company is a multi-million pound global company? Or do you do a little detective work and find out that they are actually the cleaner for a local start-up?

Bill Greenhead "Stik" (@Stiktoonz), creator of the World of Cow cartoons has drawn a cowtoon, especially for our Movember efforts.

If you are thinking about leaving Salesforce.com, you may be in for more than you bargained for when they try to keep your custom, as a current Salesforce customer recently found out.

Social media is not just about advertising who you are and what you do. Neither is it about telling people, complete with photographic evidence, what you ate for lunch (as some Twitter users seems to try to convince otherwise).

It's about engaging with your contacts (whether they be friends, customers, prospective customers, vendors, suppliers etc.) in another manner. In the same way that Email revolutionised communication back in the 80s and 90s, so Social Media and Social Networking is giving us yet another way of reaching our audience, whether using Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or any other of the myriad of Social paltforms.

But how often do you try to make what you do on those stand out from the crowd? Or are you just adding to the "noise" with postings like "I've just got on the bus - I hope it gets me to work on time"?

This time of year gives you the chance to practice for one of the biggest seasons of the year in the social networking calendar.

Now that CRM is going Social and your activities are being streamed live into people's work lives, it's even more important to remember that you don't have to (and in some cases definitely shouldn't) share everything in your social media streams. For years we have been told Information Exchange is great and that knowledge shared is power. Whether it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ or any of the other online social systems, sometimes less is more. This not only reduces the amount of "noise", or social spam, which will blast across your friends, followers and connections screens, it also helps to protect your reputation, personal 'brand' and, sometimes, your job.

We all know that our CRM systems contain all the relationship information about who you are dealing with, what actvities you have done to date with them, what communications have been made between your organisation and theirs, as well as how they connect and relate to other individuals' records within your CRM system. But relationships aren't just about how pieces of information connect to other pieces of information.

Relationships are, at the most basic level, a joining of two "things", whether pieces of information, pieces of an object/building/machine, or even people.

With the upcoming version of SugarCRM being focussed heavily towards SocialCRM, the TLA, (that's Three Letter Acronym), looks set to make an appearance into everyday business life more than ever before.

While TLAs can be useful to save typing long-winded descriptions such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), they can also throw confusion at the uninitiated.

They've been with us for years already and you may have already come across some or all of the following:

In my recent post "It's on the Menu....", I touched on my loathing of 'Under Construction' as a page content. I guess I should now take the time to explain why I get so annoyed when I come across it on websites (and believe me, it appears more frequently than you may think!).

A recent chance visit to the 'CRM Blog' website drew me toward one of their header tabs - "What is CRM?"

Whilst we all have our own ideas as to what CRM means to US, what it does for US and how WE use it, I thought it would be interesting to get someone else's insight into how THEY perceive it. The fact that their entire site is called CRM Blog made me think that what I was about to find was going to be a revelation and open my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about CRM.

In reality, what I found left me disappointed and feeling somewhat cheated.