Just back from the Conversational Commerce Conference (C3) in San Francisco. I congratulate Dan Miller and Greg Sterling at Opus Research for pulling together a strong set of speakers on the real meat of social media (not just the buzzwords — as several speakers mentioned, “social media consultant” is currently of the most overserved titles in the world).

The most important takeaways?

1. Social CRM is the new CRM — at least for any consumer-facing business.
2. VCs are validating this — BuddyMedia recently raised a C round of $28 million.
3. The next big step for Social CRM is VRM — and 2011 will mark it moving from theory to practice.

Yes, I’m biased, but ask anyone who attended and I think they’ll tell you the highest energy panels were about the pending shift to VRM and what it will mean for the whole “social space”. And there was other validation last week of how VRM is getting real. Even though Doc Searls wasn’t there himself (though other VRM stalwarts were, including Dean Landsman, Chris Carfi, Sean Bohan, and Kaliya Hamlin), on the VRM mailing list he published news about Jeremie Miller‘s new company Sing.ly and open source Locker Project. (Both ReadWriteWeb and Gigaom covered the news.) And Doc also published an excellent post about how customers matter more than data about them, which includes an excerpt from a post by Jonathan Yarmis writing first about “social ennui” and then VRM.

Add that to the $7M raised last month by Personal.com and the Swedish-backed MyCube and you can start to connect the dots.

In the next few weeks I’ll have another dot for you to connect…