A key trend to track this year is social mining - the intelligent collation and cross-referencing of machine accessible data on your social graph and personal content. It is a controversial area and you can be sure the trouble will only escalate once the general public really understands how powerful these new data matching tools have become. Leaving aside the privacy issues for now - I’d advise you to spend some time thinking about how these technologies can be integrated into your business - and in particular your sales cycle.
Here are three tools to start with:

1. Connected
Connected is a Cloud based address book that connects and syncs with all of your potential sources contacts and leads. Once the system identifies duplicates and merges records you are left with a new contact database gleaned from your email address book, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even your mobile phone directory. Where Connected is smart - is that it begins monitoring these connections and sends you a daily email with useful communication triggers like job changes or impending birthdays.

2. Tout
If you currently use Mailchimp or a similar advanced newsletter distribution platform - you would be familiar with concepts like open rates, click throughs ratios and bounce reports. Tout takes these reporting concepts and combines it with web based templates. Connecting your web based CRM tool to it (e.g HighRise, Batchbook, CapsuleCRM) imports all of your sales leads as contacts. You can then begin firing off business development or follow up emails from your template list and then track which versions are the most successful. The team edition is particularly useful, as you can monitor how many of the emails your team are sending out are generating positive responses.

3. Rapportive
Rapportive is a magical addition to the Gmail experience. It uses social data from Rapleaf to automatically identify the people you are communicating with. If you are already connected with them on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn it will load up their picture and recent status updates in a right hand column - or alternatively will prompt you to connect with them. In a sense - it creates the kind of information rich, business focused social network from your email inbox that Google+ should be doing for you.