The enterprise application that has the most potential to benefit from the rise of social media is customer relationship management software.

That's the conclusion of a study conducted across 541 IT organizations by Coleman Parkes Research on behalf of Avanade, a global IT consulting company that specializes in Microsoft technologies.

The core observation of the study is that most CRM implementations don't reveal any hierarchy of relationships within the customer base. By integrating social media tools with a CRM application, corporations could first begin to see how deep a relationship they have with the people in a particular organization and the secondly generate more business by better leveraging the relationships that customers have created on various social media platforms.

To that end, Avanade is paying close attention to efforts such as the Open Social framework that not only promise to create open interfaces between social networks but also provide a means for applications to integrate with a wide variety of social networks such as FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Right now the study finds that only 18 percent of the people surveyed have any real strategy for in place to integrate social networks within their business processes. Key barriers to adoption include concerns about security, lack of support from upper management and concerns that social networks deployment might actually sap rather than enhance productivity.

But two-thirds of the organizations surveyed also said social networks provide an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction while 64 percent said social networks would improve the reputation of their companies in the overall marketplace.

While all this comes down to is the simple fact that users of CRM software want to get more value out of all the time they spend in front of a CRM system. For the most part, the time and energy put into a CRM system benefits the company a lot more than the individual user. By integrating CRM systems with social networks, working in the CRM system will seem a lot less like doing a chore that actually reduces the amount of time people actually spend selling. And if that happens, potential for the CRM systems to become the gateway to driving more revenue could become unlimited.