Salesforce’s Social Media Play
Salesforce.com is a cloud computing company with a customer base of 70,000 across myriad of industries and geographies. They held an annual conference this past week in San Francisco – optimistically named Dreamforce – that boasted a staggering 19,000 attendees.
During the keynote, the company announced Chatter, a social platform that includes profiles, status updates with real time activity feeds from it’s customer relationship management software and integration with Facebook and Twitter.
I typically don’t spend much time thinking about enterprise apps, but this is interesting because, though it’s not the first to talk about bringing social networking for business use into a secure enterprise environment, the size and clout of salesforce.com is enough to warrant significant attention. At a time when it seems every company is asking how do I integrate social media marketing, here is Salesforce saying, we’ll change the way business works.
That said, the company was exceptionally careful to refer to Chatter as a collaboration tool rather than a social media capability, as Ian Lamont’s blog for CIO pointed out. CEO Mark Benioff says the choice of words is all about accessing pursestrings, rather than avoiding social media terminology.
“We really want to talk about collaboration, because that really is a budget item for our customers,” Benioff said.
Until the product rolls out, we won’t know if it’s primarily a collaboration tool for sharing business documents with some light social features, or truly a social networking tool with some enterprise features. Whether Salesforce refers to it as enterprise social, realtime enterprise, social collaboration, or any other combination, it doesn’t matter.
Certainly, as Enterprise Irregulars so rightly pointed out in their post, the product announcement won’t address the cultural issues that hamper adoption of social networking. Even so, I believe the announcement pushes the conversation about the need to integrate and adopt social networking forward. CMOs and marketing departments wrestling with how to roll out and integrate social media marketing have another example to point to, and depending on the success of the rollout, potentially many more internal advocates to champion the cause.
That’s my take. What’s yours?
It all comes down to adoption – if Chatter becomes widely-used it’s an important endorsement for and validation of Social Media/Collaboration in the Enterprise. It’s by no means a sure thing that will happen, but Salesforce.com is certainly going to put the full weight of their marketing machine behind it.
Since the product doesn’t ’ship’ for a few months, we have plenty of time to debate it in the meantime.
Adding Chatter to SalesForce legitimizes Social CRM to the client base and opens up TPD for further value.
It’s likely too light to be very useful compared to other dedicated SMM cloud platforms/tools like Lithium or Awareness -but it opens the doors.
We are already woking with 4 SMM platform developers which are supported on the AppEx on SalesForce.com so if you are waiting for Chatter to be a single play you may be “Waiting for Godot”…
I would argue that if Enterprise customers are looking for validation in SMM at this stage of the game they are crazy to wait – it’s like deciding if you should wear pants- you put them on with the understanding that there would be ramifications if you don’t..
Also, people need to understand the difference between Social Media Marketing or Inbound Marketing and Social Networking.
Hi Chris – I agree that adoption is sign of success, but my take it that the announcement alone is enough to move the chains forward towards a first down and you need those first downs to make the next downfield play. In the meantime, I’m with you. We debate. @Chris Selland
Craig – Thanks for your comments. I don’t know that Chatter is promising to be the be-all, end-all, nor do I think companies should wait. I’d be interested to know what you think of the 4 SMM platform developers you are already working with on SalesForce.com.
Re SMM and Inbound Marketing and Social Networking, good suggestion for another post. We tend to use the terms interchangeably and yet they are different things. @Craig Stark