Who should "own" social CRM? Sales? Customer Service? Someone else?

The whole team should "own" it, if by own you are referring to the sense of responsibility for getting answers, getting solutions to the customer, and improving the system. Customer service doesn't seem to me to be a point-to-point solution as much as it is an ecosystem of content, ideas, responsibilities, teamwork and self-improvement on a collective scale. It is what makes the enterprise function, because it is essentially the storytelling of the organization in real time.
@Douglascrets on Twitter.

I think anything "social" should be "owned" by the marketing department.
On the front part of the deal, developing prospects, social blogging and forum participation and the like just takes up way too much time and leaves little time for the sales person to sell. Whereas one of marketing's functions is to bring a qualified lead to sales.
On the backside, social CRM, which I consider customer satisfaction and follow up, should also be owned by marketing. It will allow marketing to gather info needed to sharpen brand awareness, get testimonials, case studies, white papers, and fine tune future campaigns.
Of course I am in sales and cringe everytime I hear "social something" but that's just me!
Plus to do social on the internet you should be not only a good writer but a quick one too and those are more so qualities of a marketing person versus sales.

All of the above - the entire idea of 'CRM' is to be the system of record for all customer data and the coordination point for all customer-facing and customer-related activities - so ownership needs to be shared among (at least) Sales, Marketing and Customer Service.

Social adds a new and very important element to CRM, but it does not change the fact that it touches the entire organization, and that ALL customer-facing operations need to be actively involved in owning and managing it.

Everyone in your company owns CRM. The message must be clear and driven from the top down to the front liners. All departments should have their say. The implementation is probably best handled with a Customer Relations Department.

The most success I have had with this is when IT owned the system. Many different departments want to make improvements in the system and IT could work all of those together. IT had on staff a person to customize the system and that person knew what each department was doing and was great at meeting the many requirements. For all but small companies, if multiple departments are going to be using the CRM, I strongly recommend having someone dedicated to maintaining and improving the system. There is always enough valuable work to keep that person busy.

Caty,

really a good question and likely one that does not have a single right answer; similar to Brian I would argue that the right owner depends on the maturity state of the organization. In an early stage I'd argue that the ownership is with the department that started the "programme". At some point in time SCRM needs to be treated strategically, in order to avoid wild growth and departmental activities that are counter productive for further success.

Latest at this point in time it is necessary to start thinking of organizational and cultural changes of the overall organization. This is an all encompassing step that needs to involve the whole organization and thus at this point in time SCRM as a strategy (as opposed to the tool) needs to be owned at a very high and central organizational level. I'd argue for the COO or even the CEO; else we run the severe risk of getting into departmental strategies again.

Once this has been achieved and collaboration and networked organization and work schemes are in place we can think about decentralization again. What stays important is that the various partial strategies stay in synch with the overall strategy while their owners are empowered enough to drive them.

Definitely not a simple thing to do ...

Rgds
Thomas

Shared, of course. However, as nothing ever happens until somebody sells something ....

How philosophical shall we get? ;-)
"Ownership" is an interesting concept when it comes to discussing elements of business strategy, daily operations, and results.
(and, to reveal my "bias": I do speak almost exclusively from a B2B perspective )-
Aren't we really talking about "customer knowledge management"?
While many people seem to discuss this alphabet soup of CRM and CEM and SCRM and SCM and other groups of initials ad infinitum , I can't help but believe that this is strategy we are discussing. Ownership belongs in a cross-functional role, a boundary position (if you will, cf., Frank Cespedes book Concurrent Marketing) and at the highest levels of the organization.
Successfully weaving this new thread of information, business results, customer insight, and attitudes into the daily management of a business will necessitate training, communications, incentives, and metrics designed to propel the organization to new behaviors. Coordination and cooperation between and among all functional areas will become even more essential than before.
The difficulties from "before" will remain, however, in that virtually all functional areas within a company are optimized for their individual success and not for cooperation and coordination across the company. Hence, I would suggest a Chief Customer Officer or someone with vision, organizational clout and respect to drive actions and outcomes.