Salesforce.com unveiled a series of important enhancements to its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) service-desk management capabilities this week aimed at helping businesses more effectively track and respond to the escalating volume of data feeds from Facebook and Twitter.

The company’s Service Cloud 3.0 announcement coincided with its CloudForce 2011 event at the Javits Center in NYC, in the backyard of ‘Corporate America’, the financial services sector and the traditional media world to maximize its attention.

The new round of enhancements were primarily focused on enabling users of Salesforce.com’s service-desk management platform to better monitor Facebook and Twitter feeds, and track their response to comments, complaints and other service requests via these increasingly important social networks.

Salesforce.com made sure to brand each feature as a separate offer to ensure it gained as much attention as possible, including Salesforce.com for Facebook and Salesforce.com for Twitter.

The new monitoring capabilities are actually enabled by a third-party company, called Radian6, which is now selling its solution on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange as well. By coincidence, people I know at SAP also use Radian6 to track Facebook and Twitter data feeds. So, don’t be surprised to see Radian6 acquired quickly by one of the two companies if Google, Microsoft or another suitor doesn’t swoop in sooner.

Despite the fact that most of the enhancements unveiled by Salesforce.com this week won’t be available for another quarter or two, its announcement overshadowed SAP’s own attempt to assert itself in the SaaS and social networking arena by previewing a new portfolio of on-demand business applications at CeBit aimed at responding to Salesforce.com’s growing success and the overall acceptance of SaaS/Cloud-based alternatives to legacy, on-premise applications.

I had an opportunity to get a private briefing re: SAP’s new offerings before this past week’s announcement (as I did for Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 3.0 announcement) and was impressed with their functional and social networking capabilities, as well as the company’s intensifying efforts to deliver cost-effective SaaS solutions. However, it still has a long way to go to convince customers and the broader marketplace that it can succeed in the SaaS marketplace after numerous false-starts.

Meanwhile, Salesforce.com isn’t taking its foot off the gas pedal as it extends its lead as an innovator, and market/mindshare leader.

Disclosure: Salesforce.com and SAP are THINKstrategies clients.

cloud computing Radian6 SaaS Salesforce.com SAP Software-as-a-Service