Just like Dorothy Gale coming to realize, upon her return to Kansas, that she didn’t have to go beyond her own backyard to find everything she could ever want, I had one of those moments yesterday with my email inbox.

Being somewhat new to the CRM industry, I had an inkling that the Salesforce.com acquisition of Radian6 was a pretty big deal when I came across the press release on Wednesday morning (it came as part of one of several  RSS feeds I get every day in my—you guessed it—email inbox). In writing my story, I spoke to Paul Greenberg and Denis Pombriant, and they both told me it was huge news, but it wasn’t until after I posted the story and tweeted about it that I came to realize the magnitude of the deal. It didn’t take long for my email inbox to start filling up with requests to weigh in, unsolicited comments, and random musings from industry experts, pundits, competitors, and partners of Salesforce.com and Radian6.

Here’s just a sampling of the comments I received throughout the day:

“The acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com demonstrates the real value of social media and social media monitoring to the broader market. It will accelerate awareness of social media’s business value and the need for social media monitoring solutions to deliver improved business outcomes.”

— Kelly Pennock, CEO of Visible Technologies.

“This move makes sense: Social media is playing an increasingly large part in how organizations listen to and engage with their customers. In addition to enhancing the Service cloud, Radian6 will also help enhance Chatter by adding real-time insights from across the social Web to the activity happening within the company. It will also add more social listening capabilities inside the Force.com platform.”

— Jon Miller, chief marketing officer of Marketo.

“Salesforce.com has built from its base in the cloud and expanded into mobile and social. Marc Benioff’s strategy reflects bets on the five pillars of consumer tech entering the enterprise. While this acquisition does not solve the lack of a good analytics platform in Salesforce.com today, a Radian6 acquisition delivers social analytics or socialytics for Salesforce.com customers.  The only key pillar missing in its acquisition strategy is unified communications and video.  One can expect this pillar to be hot on the medium-term acquisition short list.”

— Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research.

“Today’s Salesforce.com acquisition announcement further validates the explosive nature of the SCRM marketplace and the growing importance of companies not only monitoring what is being said about their brands, products, and services, but being able to actively engage with customers over their preferred social channels. From Meltwater’s perspective, helping companies convert social conversations into lasting, trusted customer relationships is the natural way to move from being a business into being a social business.”

— Jorn Lyseggen, CEO and founder of Meltwater.

If you have something to add, drop me an email at lklie@infotoday.com. I like staying within the confines of my email inbox, safe from the tornadoes, flying monkeys, green men, and wicked witches.

This just in: Salesforce is taking over the world.

Okay, maybe that’s an overstatement. However, since I started at CRM magazine last month, Marc Benioff’s company has made some big moves and I’m impressed.

As our news editor Leonard Klie reported this morning, Salesforce announced that it has officially acquired Radian6, a top social media platform designed to help businesses track and engage in conversations over the Web. The acquisition came with a hefty price tag, $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock.

Even though I’m still a newcomer to the magazine and the industry as a whole, I can see that Salesforce is establishing itself as a major player. Just four days into the job, I attended Cloudforce 2011 in New York City, where Salesforce unveiled Service Cloud 3, a tool available for computers, smartphones, and tablet devices that allows organizations to communicate with customers while managing a higher volume on a variety of social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Sure the 3,000 plus-member crowd, bass-pumping music, and flashing florescent lights were impressive, but it was also clear that Salesforce had plans for a few additional game changers like the one today.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have also completed a demo of the software with Scott Holden, senior director of product marketing at Salesforce, and wrote a story for an upcoming issue of CRM about a small tile company in California that credits the platform for much of its recent success. The energy, growth, and customer reviews prove that Salesforce is now a threat to much older companies like Microsoft and SAP. Sure, prospering organizations are exciting to follow and stockholders get a kick out of watching their investments soar. But as a journalist, I am a more interested in Benioff’s story.

After 13 years with Oracle and a stint at Apple, Benioff started Salesforce in 1999 out of a rental apartment in San Francisco. His mission? Put an end to clunky software CRM solutions. Five years later, Salesforce went public (under the stock symbol CRM) and it wasn’t long until the acquisitions began. Today, Benioff and his fortress have been recognized by Forrester and other notable organizations (including CRM magazine) for its excellence while racking in some major revenue along the way. Benioff also set up the Salesforce.com Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the company that contributes 1 percent of the company’s resources to supporting organizations that it deems as making the world a better place.

As a young, and perhaps idealistic, 20-something, Salesforce is truly a pleasure to write about.

Howard Schultz, the president and CEO of Starbucks, has a new book out entitled Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul about his efforts to revamp the franchise in 2008. According to this review by NPR, the gist of the book seems to be that Schultz took it upon himself to bring Starbucks back to it’s core commitment of excellence despite having grown so much as a company. Schultz temporarily closed 7,000 stores while retraining his employees, changing the steaming of milk, and the baking of breakfast sandwiches — all small things that, the book reviewer notes, a customer may not notice but were still important.

In his book, Schultz advocates how much “intimacy” is a part of the Starbucks brand, recognizing how customers have come to view the chain:

“Not unlike the English pub in the U.K.,” he says, Starbucks serves as a “third space between home and work, an extension between people’s lives, at a time when people have no place to go.”

Free wifi and comfy couches certainly drive this notion home.

In the course of doing my research for a story about social CRM for the June issue, I came across a bit of information that doesn’t fit into the direction my story is taking, but still is worthy of mention. Martin Schneider, senior director of communications at SugarCRM, turned me on to a Portuguese gas and oil firm that is using social media in a socially responsible way.

Oil companies have typically been viewed as eco-destroyers, not eco-promoters, and the last thing you would think an oil company would want to do is promote fewer cars on the road, but  Galp Energia is doing just that. The company created Galpshare, a carpooling site that uses maps, users’ interest, and direction to connect commuters and their fellow travelers. Visitors to the site type in their points of origin and their destinations and the application matches them with other drivers who are going that way.

This may not seem like customer service, but in many ways it is. Many of the site visitors are likely Galp customers, and this is providing them with a service. And, by better caring for the environment, the company is taking better care of everyone, whether or not they are customers.

OK, so maybe I’m grasping for straws a little there, but as a bit of an eco-nut myself, I had to commend Galp for this endeavor. And I commend SugarCRM for spreading the word about it.

My friends and family would probably say I have an addiction.

I swore off caffeine back in college and I reserve alcohol consumption for semi-special occasions. I don’t smoke cigarettes and I wouldn’t even think about trying an illegal drug. So, you can rule out the usual suspects.

Instead, when the clock strikes 5 p.m., I have one thing on my mind: I need to lace up my running shoes.

I haven’t always been a runner. In fact, I despised most cardio activity until my early 20s. However, I was in need of some serious endorphins after a less-than-amicable break-up a few years ago so I started to join my mom on her daily power walks. While they seemed to do the trick at first, I soon wanted more of a challenge and solo long distance runs became part of my work-out regimen. My ex-boyfriend blues dissolved over time, but my addiction to those runner’s highs was here to stay. Between my college, grad school, and job geographical moves, I have experienced my fair share of gyms. As a result, my e-mail and voicemail inboxes are bombarded with events, specials, and announcements from gym locations I have left behind, leaving me to wonder about their outdated customer databases. I have even replied to the pesky messages without any luck, the customer contact centers seem to be nonexistent.

Last month, Bally Total Fitness announced that it selected Sword Ciboodle as its lead contact center technology provider. Sword Ciboodle rolled out Ciboodle One, a platform designed specifically for the fitness giant, in order to improve member experience when contacting the gym’s member service center. The system has reduced average handle time by 12 percent, increased first call resolution, and reduced call idle time. Sword Ciboodle is also working on several future projects that include offering multi-channel contact points such as e-mail, virtual chat, and kiosks in the fitness clubs.

“We are at the beginning of an exciting time here at Bally,” said Guy Thier, CIO of Bally Total Fitness, shortly after the announcement. “Our success is based on providing excellent service to our members, and we are focused on being the best in member service across all touch points.”

Endorphins and customer service. Now that’s a winning combination.