Bermel Interactive

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?