Enterprises may be late adopters of social media, but a new effort by Salesforce aims to make it easier for companies to tap into the trend for customer service.

The company today announced a Twitter extension to its Service Cloud, the company's customer service solution.

The news marks the Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) CRM giant's most recent foray into social media. Last year, the company began showing off Force.com for Facebook, an application that lets enterprises build applications in Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) that take advantage of Facebook's social features and massive audience.

But there's demand in particular for customer service solutions because there's pain in the call center, said Alexandre Dayon, senior vice president of the customer service and support division at Salesforce.

Customers no longer go to companies to solve problems because the existing tools prevent it: Automated phone help is often seen as confusing, while Web knowledge bases are filled with irrelevant information and e-mail takes too long.

Instead, customers frequently abandon the telephone and the corporate support infrastructure and go to Google, Facebook, Twitter and to community message boards to get their answers. In response, companies are aiming to follow them to the Web, and some already have.

"We've been on Twitter since last April," said Comcast's director of digital care Frank Eliason, who is participating in Salesforce's press and analyst day in New York today. He said that the company has a team of four people for social media, with at least one of them is online at any time.

Eliason himself had 12,732 followers on Twitter and was following 13,516 at press time.

A database of Tweets

Salesforce said it's doing more than put companies on Twitter. At the core of every Salesforce offering is a database, and in the case of Twitter, the database can store tweets, track threads, and even help agents deliver useful answers. If the agent cannot find an answer to a problem posed on Twitter, the database can help the agent track the thread and store the solution at the end of the thread, if one is found.

The ideal, said Kraig Swensrud, vice president of marketing at Salesforce, is that companies can now go to customers and find them where they are instead of expecting customers to come to them.

But companies can also expect to squeeze more from social media -- for instance, scouring the Web for risks to their brands.

That's according to a recent report by research firm The Conference Board, which found that only 44 percent of executives interviewed use software to track their company's reputation, and that they are virtually ignoring social media: 33 percent of executives monitor social media sites and only 10 percent participate in them, the survey found.

Instead, businesses should integrate reputation risk management into the processes of their risk management software, the Conference Board report concluded.

The report added that employees should be encouraged to become a company's ambassadors, because "engaged employees are a company's greatest asset for establishing its credibility and enhancing its reputation with external stakeholders."

That's the same line of thinking powering Salesforce.com's new efforts with Twitter and its earlier work in connection with Facebook -- helping companies to turn employees into ambassadors.

The Twitter add-on is free to Service Cloud subscribers. Service Cloud subscriptions start at $995 per month for up to 250 customers and up to five agents.