Category: MarketingAI

MarketingAI

Toyota Friend, Salesforce Take Social Media to the Street

Is driving the car the best time to engage in social media? Probably not, but what if the car helped with these tasks, reducing the “need” for mobile device use while driving? Would a car that’s social media savvy appeal to today’s drivers?

That’s what Toyota wants to find out, and thanks to their partnership with Salesforce.com, consumers will be able to find out, as well. The partnership was made to power the “Toyota Friend” program, a social network designed to engage other Toyota drivers/owners. According to the release, Toyota Friend is a social network that connects Toyota owners to their car, the dealership, and with the Toyota company, providing things like maintenance tips and other service-related information. An example used in the announcement introduces the concept of Toyota Friend informing hybrid owners if their battery isn’t sufficiently charged.

Powered by the Salesforce Chatter network, which is described as a “private social network for business,” Toyota Friend will issue “tweet-like” notifications to the owner’s mobile device, which seems to ignore the elephant in the room. Aren’t we in a time of informing people about the dangers involved in mobile device use during vehicular operation? Doesn’t such a service bring the temptation of driving while playing with a mobile device? Questions for another day, I suppose.

While the Toyota Friend social network will be a private one, members can connect to their friends on other social networks like Twitter and Facebook, an idea that seems to court the potentially deadly combination of mobile device use while operating a vehicle even further. Killjoy reactions aside, Toyota President Akio Toyoda likes where the partnership is going:

“Social networking services are transforming human interaction and modes of communication. The automobile needs to evolve in step with that transformation. I am always calling for Toyota to make ever-better cars. The alliance that we announce today is an important step forward in achieving that goal.”

Unfortunately, it’s doubtful Mark Schaefer will approve of this latest social network capability. How about you? Does the idea of a socially-networked vehicle, one that let’s you connect with other social networks, appeal to you? Could you see yourself driving a socially networked vehicle, one that issues messages about the condition of your car? As for the service, will you be able to “friend” other Toyota drivers you see out and about? Something like, “hey, did you see that babe in the Camry? Send her a friend request, dude!”

If so, Toyota Friend’s potential just increased a great deal.

The service is scheduled to debut in 2012, and will be initially offered in Japan to hybrid and electrical Toyota owners.

May 23, 2011
Salesforce Acquisition of Radian6 Complete

In late March, Salesforce announced it was acquiring Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock with the founders also getting $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash. Today, the company announced that the acquisition is complete.

Salesforce had already been utilizing Radian6. The company recently unveiled its Service Cloud 3 initiative, which involves Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network support via Radian6, so the acquisition makes a great deal of sense. Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka told us back then that they were shooting for general availability by August.

“Radian6 adds huge value to salesforce.com by delivering the public, social web across all our products,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “Giving customers the social intelligence they want with the business context they need will further differentiate our products and accelerate our growth.”

“Radian6 brings the voice of the customer into the enterprise, helping to transform way a business operates,” said Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBrun. “We look forward to working with salesforce.com’s customers to show them the power of listening to, and engaging with, the social web.”

According to Salesforce, Radian6 is used by over half of the Fortune 100, and companies like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversation.

The deal was expected to be closed before the end of July, so it appears that no time was wasted. Salesforce intends to integrate Radian6 across its product offerings.

May 2, 2011
Salesforce Acquires Radian6, Social Platform It Was Already Using

Salesforce announced that it is acquiring social media monitoring platform Radian6 for $276 million in cash and $50 million in stock. Founders will also get $10 million in stock and $4 million in cash.

According to Salesforce, Radian6 is used by over half of the Fortune 100, and companies like AAA, Dell, GE, Kodak, Molson Coors, Pepsico, and UPS to monitor, analyze and engage in social media conversation.

“With Radian6, salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring,” said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.”

“Social media has made every business recognize the value of paying attention to the voice of the customer,” added Radian6 CEO Marcel LeBru. “Radian6’s technology is built for the new norm of customer engagement – real time, two way conversations that includes social channels. Joining the salesforce.com team will allow Radian6 to grow faster to meet the demands of our rapidly expanding customer base.”

Salesforce says the acquisition will accelerate the enterprise’s shift to “Cloud 2” by helping companies better manage the social interactions taking place both inside and outside their companies.

Salesforce has already been utilizing Radian6. The company recently unveiled its Service Cloud 3 initiative, which involves Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network support via Radian6, so the acquisition makes a great deal of sense. Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka told us they were shooting for general availability by August.

The deal is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal second quarter ending July 31, so it sounds like it should be done in time for that. It’s already been approved by Radian6’s board of directors and stockholders.

March 30, 2011
Salesforce Service Cloud 3 Unveiled, Social Customer Interaction Emphasized

It seems like only yesterday that Salesforce was talking up Cloud 2. Now, today, they’ve unveiled Service Cloud 3, the company’s next-generation social contact centers, which will let companies interact with customers on “any social community”. That means Facebook, Twitter, and any other social network via social media monitoring software Radian6. However, it’s just supporting Twitter out of the box, from the sound of it.

“The explosion of social technologies has changed the game for customer service,” said Alex Dayon, executive vice president of CRM at Salesforce. “Facebook and Twitter taught consumers to expect social customer service in real time.”

The product also has built-in social analytics. Companies can monitor and manage customer interactions across social channels with real-time reports and customizable dashboards. Salesforce says these things will help agents identify trends and alert managers of issues that are impacting the business.

The emerging tablet market should play into the always-on social customer interaction approach. Salesforce seems to be pretty hyped up for the iPad 2.

Service Cloud 3 is generally available today with Twitter support. Salesforce for Facebook is scheduled for the first quarter of fiscal year 2012. Radian6 for Salesforce is scheduled the third quarter of fiscal year 2012. Update: Radian6 product manager Ryan Strynatka says in the comments, “Radian6 for Salesforce – we are shooting for general availability by August (in time for Dreamforce) and will be including support for Facebook as well.”

March 3, 2011
Yammer CEO Slams Salesforce’s New Chatter.com

It would appear that Yammer is not thrilled with Salesforce’s latest foray into social media-based productivity. Yesterday, Salesforce announced the launch of chatter.com, a free way for any business with its own email address to create a private social network for their company.

David Sacks, CEO of Yammer (and former COO of PayPal) had some things to say about chatter.com, as it is a direct competitor to Yammer. "Chatter is Yammer circa 2009," he tells WebProNews. "There are no features we didn’t have two years ago. Obviously we’re on to Yammer 2011, so they’re pretty far behind. From an innovation standpoint, the launch of Chatter.com is a total non-event."

Yammer launched back in 2008 at the TechCrunch50 event, where Sacks says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff was a judge. "Benioff having been a judge at TC50 is the reason there is a Chatter," Sacks tells us. "He raved about Yammer at the time and now he’s trying to copy it."

He also tells us that Yammer has approximately 2 million users, and is in 80% of the Fortune 500 and more than 100,000 companies.

Salesforce has an ad campaign for Chatter.com set to launch on Super Bowl Sunday, with ad spots directed by will.i.am.

A representative for Yammer told us in a previous email, "If there was any kind of innovation or newness, the product would be able to stand on its own and Salesforce wouldn’t have to invest in SuperBowl ads with will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas."

So, yeah, there seems to be a little animosity there. Yammer is claiming better functionality to back up its position, however. For example, the rep said, "Chatter.com gives the first person to sign up on the network the power to moderate it, including deleting both posts and users. With Yammer, this function is fully decentralized — all users can police the network, which is also valuable in the event that the moderator suddenly leaves the company."

It’s still going to be hard to compete with a Super Bowl spot as far as getting people to take notice, but Yammer certainly seems up for the challenge.

February 1, 2011
Salesforce Launches Chatter.com For Any Business With Company Email Addresses

Salesforce has launched Chatter.com as a way for businesses to create free, private social networks for their companies.

Chatter, the product, has been around for a while now, and is often described as a "Facebook for the enterprise", but it has been part of the company’s Salesforce CRM and Force.com offerings. Now chatter.com is free to anyone with a company email address.

"Now with Chatter.com, any company can do impossible things as a team," said Salesforce Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. According to the company, that means: connecting with experts, collaborating with remote employees, easily sharing large files, preparing for sales presentations, managing team projects, discussing confidential topics, getting answers, sharing important info with co-workers, solving customer issues, and brainstorming marketing ideas.

Salesforce will start a TV ad campaign for Chattter.com on Sunday. This will be the company’s first broadcast ads. The ads were directed and produced by will.i.am, who collaborated with the company’s marketing team using the service itself.

"During the production of the two commercial spots, we were collaborating on documents, scripts, artwork, downloading, uploading – all securely in the cloud using Chatter," said will.i.am. "Any task can be solved when you have a team working cohesively."

Since launching Chatter, Salesforce has launched various incarnations, such as Chatter Mobile and Chatter Mobile for Blackberry. Still, Chatter.com is likely to push Chatter into more mainstream business use.

January 31, 2011
Salesforce Buys Dimdim for $31 Million

Salesforce.com announced that it has acquired Dimdim for $31 million. The acquisition will help Salesforce expand its Chatter line of products, often described as a "Facebook for the enterprise", with real-time communication technologies.

The company says the move follows the proven Facebook model of combining real-time collaboration.

"Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives," said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce. "The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular Internet site."

"From our start, Dimdim has focused on enabling real-time communication in the cloud, with no software," said DD Ganguly, CEO, Dimdim. "Salesforce.com gives us the opportunity to apply our expertise and align our vision of real-time, social enterprise software in the cloud – at a scale that wouldn’t have been otherwise possible."

DimDim was founded in 2007. Its current offerings let users host or attend live online meetings, demos and webinars using a web browser.

Salesforce says that with the acquisition, it is following Facebook’s lead again. The company really seems to want people to think of its products in Facebook terms.

January 6, 2011
Salesforce Chatter Mobile Goes to BlackBerry

Salesforce released Chatter Mobile for Blackberry. Chatter, if you’re not familiar with it, is the company’s social product, that’s often been referred to as a "Facebook for the enterprise."

"This new Chatter Mobile client gives you access to Chatter from your BlackBerry," says Salesforce’s Jason McDowall. "Salesforce’s Chatter Mobile will allow your users to stay on the pulse of their teams, accounts, and other important data in your organization."

Features include:

– View updates about the people, groups, and records you follow

– Create posts (with photos) and add comments

– View documents and links shared by others

– View your coworkers’ profiles, and email them directly

This version does not include people or group search, and there are no record detail views or administrative controls. You can’t restrict access from a BlackBerry device, nor can you impose a passcode.

Also, the version is only optimized for the BlackBerry Bold 9700, though it does work on some other models. It requires OS v5.0 or higher.

December 23, 2010
Salesforce Continues Big Week of Announcements

Salesforce continues to make big announcements as it hosts its Dreamforce event. So far, the company announced Database.com, Chatter Free, and the pending acquisition of Ruby platform Heroku. Now, the company has introduced Force.com 2 with five new services for building apps.

These services are Appforce, Siteforce, VMforce, ISVforce and Heroku. Appforce is designed to help companies deliver departmental apps, build forms, customize reports, design business processes, and make sure they’re all measurable.

Siteforce is for drawing pages, managing content, reusing pre-built website components. "Building websites today is slow and painful, with continual requests for new landing pages, new products and new campaigns," the company explains. "Additionally, website developers have no easy path to adding the social, mobile and real-time features required by enterprises today. Siteforce gives business users the tools to make simple changes and gives web developers the means to deliver powerful sites quickly."

VMforce is the result of a partnership with VMware, which is designed to help Java developers utilize the cloud more efficiently. Heroku is for Ruby-based apps, as discussed here. Finally, ISVforce is for building "multi-tenant cloud apps".

"ISVs are in a new world of opportunity, with more devices to support, rapid application development and update cycle demands, and a shift to the cloud development and delivery model," Salesforce says in a release. "ISVforce provides ISVs comprehensive application development services, trials and provisioning, automatic upgrade capabilities, the AppExchange cloud app marketplace, and a real-time console for monitoring customer usage and adoption. ISVforce puts all of these services, and the full power of multi-tenancy and salesforce.com’s trusted global service infrastructure behind every ISV app."

"With these five new services for building Cloud 2 apps, companies can quickly and easily accelerate every application development project on their backlog," said Salesforce EVP platform, marketing and corporate development, George Hu. "Force.com 2 is the enterprise cloud platform of choice because it delivers the fastest path to proven success for business, IT and ISVs."

Force.com costs businesses $25 per user per month. All of the new services will run on the recently announced Database.com service.

December 8, 2010
Salesforce Acquiring Heroku – Major Platform for Social Apps

It’s only Wednesday, but it’s already been a huge week for Salesforce. The company is hosting its Dreamforce conference, and has already introduced a free version of its "Facebook for the Enterprise" Chatter product, and launched Database.com to go head to head in the Database space with Oracle.

Now, Salesforce has announced that it is acquiring Heroku for about $212 million. Heroku is a cloud application platform powered by Ruby. In fact, according to Salesforce, it’s the fastest growing platform of its type.

The acquisition would make perfect sense for the company given its increased focus on social cloud-based enterprise apps. The platform powers over 106,000 social and mobile cloud apps. In fact, the company claims that developers added 2,600 new apps to the platform last week alone.

The company points out that there are over a million developers developing on Ruby, and that the language was used to write things like Groupon, Hulu, and Twitter.

"The next era of cloud computing is social, mobile and real-time. I call it Cloud 2," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "Ruby is the language of Cloud 2, and Heroku is the leading Ruby application platform-as-a-service for Cloud 2 that is fueling this growing community. We think this acquisition will uniquely position salesforce.com as the cornerstone for the next generation of app developers."

"We have a service that developers really love, and salesforce.com has the trust and credibility the most demanding customers expect," added Heroku CEO Byron Sebastian. "Together, we will provide the best place to run and deploy Cloud 2 apps. We believe this is the winning combination to bring cloud application platforms into the mainstream of the enterprise."

The acquisition is expected to be completed by the end of January, and is subject to customary closing conditions.

December 8, 2010
Salesforce Launches Chatter Free, Announces Database.com

Back in the summer, Salesforce announced the general availability of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s cloud-based enterprise "social collaboration" app and platform, which a representative for the company once called "Facebook for the Enterprise."

In September, the company released Chatter Mobile, and announced Chatter 2, which includes a desktop app. Now, Salesforce has announced Chatter Free, which the company says will accelerate adoption of social collaboration throughout the enterprise.

With Chatter Free, any Salesforce user can invite colleagues to collaborate with Salesforce Chatter. "The industry’s reception of Salesforce Chatter has blown away our expectations," said CEO Marc Benioff. "The fact that more than 60,000 enterprises have deployed Chatter within the first five months is amazing and the Chatter Free social invites are going to take Chatter enterprise-wide."

"With Chatter Free, salesforce.com is using the same social invitation model popularized by Facebook," the company says. "Now any Salesforce user can invite any colleague — even those who aren’t already Salesforce users — to collaborate with Chatter. By its nature, this social invitation creates a network effect, as the pool of Chatter users widens and deepens across a company."

With Chatter, employees can follow documents, people, business processes, and application data. Features of Chatter Free include: profiles, status Updates, realtime feeds, file sharing, groups, filters, invitations, Chatter Mobile, and Chatter Desktop.

Chatter is included for free with all paying user licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter Free is available to all employees of paying salesforce.com customers.

Also today, Salesforce revealed a new attempt to take on Oracle in the database market with Database.com, which includes a social data model, file storage, user management, authentication, and development tools. In the video above, SoftwareAdvice CEO Don Fornes interviews Salesforce’s Senior Director of Product Marketing Eric Stahl about database.com.

December 7, 2010
Facebook Said To Rent Space On Madison Avenue

Google and Facebook are often mentioned in the same breath these days, and now it seems that Facebook, like Google, may be interested in the New York real estate market. Rumor has it Facebook’s leased some space at 335 Madison Avenue.

This isn’t quite as impressive as Google’s $1.9 billion purchase of an entire office building, but Owen Thomas reported this afternoon, "Facebook has leased two floors at 335 Madison Avenue, according to a source in the real-estate industry familiar with the company’s plans."

As a result, Facebook should have a considerable presence in the same structure as big, well-respected companies like Bank of America, GE, and Salesforce.com. And Starbucks, for that matter, although the Starbucks listing we found seems to correspond to a standard coffee shop, not any sort of corporate office.

Plus, Thomas continued, "[Facebook] could expand to as much as 150,000 square feet in the building, our source estimates."

That sort of move would likely signal a huge advertising push on the social network’s part. Which might in turn be part of the process of taking the company public, if you’re willing to look farther down the figurative road.

It should be interesting to see what happens here.

December 3, 2010
Salesforce Announces Chatter 2 with Adobe-Powered Chatter Desktop

Salesforce has just announced Chatter 2, the next generation of its Chatter product, which has often been referred to as "Facebook for the enterprise". The new version includes a number of new features, including a desktop app.

Salesforce’s Chatter Desktop is powered by Adobe AIR, and lets employees post updates, comments, files and links without opening a web browser, and displays pop-up alerts to instantly notify employees of important updates. It was built with Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com. Adobe tells WebProNews it was chosen by salesforce because its cross-platform runtime (it works across Mac, PC, desktops, and laptops) as well as AIR’s ability to provide a rich experience.

We asked about plans to take Chatter Desktop mobile, and while there is no announcement yet, Adobe says it’s "conceivable for the future" and that it would be "fairly easy to make mobile".

AIR itself currently supports iOS and will be shipping Android support shortly. Adobe plans to expand to additional mobile operating systems in the future, but would not get into specifics about that.

Of course Chatter Desktop is not the only thing new with Chatter 2. Other features include: Chatter Filters, Chatter Topics, Chatter Recommendations, Chatter Analytics, Chatter Files, Dashboard Chatter, Report Chatter, Activity Chatter, Chatter Central, Chatter Search, Chatter Email Manager, and Chatter Email Digest.

With these features, employees can quickly find and focus on relevant posts, associate updates with other posts and comments on the same topic, receive automatic suggestions of colleagues to fllow and groups to join, create reports and dashboards for analytics, store, update, and share documents, presentations, photos, and media files, follow and get dashboard updates in realtime feeds, follow reports, track progress of tasks, search across chatter feeds, and more.

Since launching Chatter into general availability three months ago, over 20,000 companies have deployed it. Chatter 2 features will be available with the Winter ’11 release, which is currently scheduled to be generally available October, 2010.

September 22, 2010
Salesforce Announces Chatter Mobile

Salesforce has announced a mobile version of Chatter, its enterprise social networking platform. The product will be available for the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android and Blackberry.

The company points out that people who use Facebook through a mobile device are twice as active on the site than non-mobile users (according to IDC), and that mobile devices are beconing "the new enterprise desktop" for over 50% of the workforce. With these things in mind, Chatter Mobile should be a significant part of Chatter’s future.

"Chatter Mobile means you can know what is happening in your entire enterprise, wherever you are," said Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. "The combination of devices like the iPad or the new iPod touch with mobile apps like Chatter that push information to you in real-time are making the desktop obsolete."

Salesforce launched Chatter in June and there are already about 20,000 companies using it, according to Salesforce. In addition to that, Salesforce has already had 250,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and 100,000 from BlackBerry App World for its CRM apps.

Chatter Mobile is free to Salesforce CRM and Force.com subscribers. The apps will be available later this year for BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. The Android app will be out in early 2011.

September 8, 2010
Salesforce Announces Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM

Salesforce.com has announced the arrival of Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM. This is a new crowd-sourced business data service for Salesforce CRM customers.

A spokesperson for Salesforce tells WebProNews today’s announcement is significant for the following reasons:

– Breadth: With Jigsaw Inside, sales and marketing professionals will get real-time access to the world’s largest socially generated database, including 22 million business contacts and 4 million company profiles.

– Depth: Jigsaw Inside for Salesforce integrates Jigsaw deeply into Salesforce Chatter for social collaboration and delivery of highly accurate information in real-time.

– Immediacy: Sales and marketing professionals can get real-time updates pushed to them whenever the business data they care about changes.

– Resolution: Companies spend more than $3 billion a year struggling to keep pace with changes across sales and marketing operations by augmenting legacy data services and data management. Jigsaw Inside will solve marketers’ pain points around decayed, duplicated and dead data by delivering relevant, accurate business information in the cloud without the need for hardware or software.

"CRM systems are only as good as the information inside them," said Kevin Akeroyd, general manager, Jigsaw. "With Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM, customers can be alerted to changes in contacts through Chatter in real-time. This degree of operational agility is only possible with Jigsaw’s data in the cloud."

Jigsaw for Salesforce CRM is now generally available and starts at $29 per user per month.

Salesforce bought Jigsaw for $142 million earlier this year.

September 1, 2010
Microsoft and Salesforce Settle Patent Dispute

Microsoft announced that it has settled the patent infringement cases it brought against Salesforce.com, and that the two companies have reached a patent agreement in which Salesforce will receive broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for tis products and services. This will also apply to Salesforce’s back-end server infrastructure.

In addition, Microsoft gets coverage under Salesforce’s patent portfolio for Microsoft’s products and services.

"We are pleased to reach this agreement with Salesforce.com to put an end to the litigation between our two companies," said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft. "Microsoft’s patent portfolio is the strongest in the software industry and is the result of decades of software innovation. Today’s agreement is an example of how companies can compete vigorously in the marketplace while respecting each other’s intellectual property rights."

Details of the agreement haven’t been disclosed, but Microsoft indicates that it’s being compensated by Salesforce, based on the strength of Microsoft’s patent portfolio in the areas of operating systems, cloud services and CRM software.

August 4, 2010
Salesforce.com Provides Its Own Example of an Employee Social Media Policy

This week has been a big week for social media as the world’s most popular social network announced that it reached 500 million users. Salesforce.com is just as excited about it as anybody.

"Facebook’s stunning growth is pushing the entire IT industry to think social," the company’s Chief Marketing Officer tells WebProNews. "At salesforce.com, Facebook inspired us to bring technologies like profiles, groups and real-time feeds to the enterprise with Salesforce Chatter, leading enterprise collaboration into the modern age."

Salesforce.com has also posted its own social media policy to the public domain so other companies might be able to us it to formulate a policy and training program of their own.

"With the rise of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter, virtually every employee is engaged in some form of social media," the company says. "And regardless of the activity, the line between your personal identity and your professional identity is blurring, especially when you publish something in the public domain. "

Salesforce’s policy encourages employee participation, but also setting clear rules about what is "in bounds" and what is "out of bounds". The policy includes five basic rules:

1. Don’t share company or financial secrets
2. Be honest and transparent
3. Be respectful
4. Don’t make forward looking statements
5. Don’t register channels without consent

There are more details outlined within each of these, as well as other tips for posting online in a slideshow presentation featured here.

What do you think of Salesforce’s social media policy? Good guidelines? Share your thoughts.

July 22, 2010
Salesforce Chatter Now Available to Everyone

Salesforce.com has announced the general availability of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s cloud-based enterprise "social collaboration" app and platform.

Chatter was introduced in November, launched in private beta back in February to 100 companies, and eventually expanded to over 5,000 customers.

"Salesforce Chatter is the most exciting thing I’ve worked on in my career," says Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. "Delivering Chatter is a seminal moment and one that marks the arrival of Cloud 2."

A representative for Salesforce once called Chatter "Facebook for the Enterprise."In April, I spoke with Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president, product marketing, who told me, "Chatter is at the center of our entire strategy moving forward."

Naturally, this would then mark a very significant day for the company.

There is a new Chatter license, which Salesforce says unlocks the market potential for its technologies to be used by every customer employee. Features include:

– Profiles
– Status Updates
– Real-Time Feeds
– Content and File-Sharing
– Groups
– Ideas
– Read-only Access to Accounts and Contacts
– Limited Access to the Force.com Enterprise Cloud Computing Platform

Salesforce Chatter is free with all paying user licenses of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Chatter-only user licenses are available for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition for $15 per user, per month.

June 22, 2010
SalesForce Launches ChatterExchange, Centers “Entire Strategy” Around Chatter

Back in November, Salesforce announced its Chatter product, which it referred to as Facebook for the Enterprise. It launched in private beta in February, and now Chatter is set to become integral to the very core of what Salesforce has to offer. I spoke with Kraig Swensrud, senior vice president, product marketing at Salesforce.com ahead of the announcement, who tells WebProNews, "Chatter is at the center of our entire strategy moving forward."

Cloud 2

Swensrud explained this concept of "Cloud 2", which is an internal term the company has been using, and basically refers to the next generation of cloud computing, which stems from the rise in general social media use and mobile/smartphone use, where people are accessing the Internet more from their pocket, as opposed to their desktop. Salesforce sees its strategy as "accelerating the market shift" to Cloud 2, which it says is "inherently social, collaborative and delivers real-time access to data and information across new mobile devices."

Swensrud tells us that since the company formed in 1999, they’ve been taking many of the leading trends on the web and applying them to the enterprise. Chatter is simply an extension of this. In fact, Swensrud says the company’s mantra now is along the lines of "Why doesn’t all enterprise software work like Facebook?"

Milestone

One announcement Salesforce is making today is that Chatter has achieved a new milestone of 500 companies in its private beta, with another 1,000 companies on the waiting list, and it will be coming to all customers later this year.

With the Force.com platform, users began using Facebook-style collaboration technology, Swensrud says, and users started thinking, "why don’t we have the same-style collaboration in all business apps – not just CRM app – basically, anything that runs inside of a company?"

That’s why Salesforce is allowing companies to build Cloud 2 apps with Force.com, Swensrud says. It will run all over the web and have all the features of Chatter. Companies can "Chatterize" any app they build with Force.com – Cloud 2 apps.

20 companies are going live with such apps right away.

AppExchange2 and ChatterExchange

Salesforce today is also introducing AppExchange2, a new version of its market place for cloud business apps, with a new category of social enterprise apps – the ChatterExchange, which will include the apps from the 20 companies and others that get built in the future. This can be found at appexchange.com/chatter

Service Cloud Goes Chatter

A big part of Salesforce’s announcement is that Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2 is going Social with Chatter. The company has extended the Chatter private beta to more than 250 Service Cloud 2 customers. Salesforce says that in combining the Service Cloud and Chatter, companies can boost productivity gains by empowering service agents with new capabilities for:

– Monitoring Priority Cases: Service agents can stay on top of high priority cases, updates to critical knowledge articles, and the latest product updates

– Locating Expertise: Service agents can follow experts across their organization and instantly get help from other agents, other departments, or from across the company

– Real-Time Case Collaboration: For high priority cases, service supervisors can assemble the best expertise and information to close complex cases faster

– SLA Management: Salesforce Chatter proactively can alert service agents of upcoming service level agreement milestones that they must meet

– Sales-Service Alignment: Service agents and sales reps can share the latest case and opportunity updates for their customer to ensure good service means good business

Swensrud says the companies in this private beta range in all sizes and across industries, with the largest being in the Fortune 500. ServiceCloud2, he says allows companies to not only communicate with customers via social networks and search engines, but when they receive customer inquiries, they can now use Chatter to work with all the departments within the company to sort things out.

Salesforce Chatter will be included in all paid editions of Salesforce CRM and Force.com. Service Cloud 2 is available now and pricing starts at $65 per user per month. AppExchange 2 and ChatterExchange are live today, and customers should contact partners for pricing and availability of their applications.

April 8, 2010
Twitter “Contributors” Feature Spotted on Salesforce Account

Back in December, Twitter announced that it began beta testing a new feature called Contributors. The feature is aimed at businesses, and gives them a way to allow multiple users to tweet under the company account, while displaying exactly who from the company is doing the tweeting, with a clickable name that directs the reader to that person’s own Twitter account.

"The feature appends the contributor’s username to the tweet byline, making the business to consumer communication more personal; e.g. if @Twitter invites @Biz to tweet on its behalf, then a tweet from @Twitter would include @Biz in the byline so that users know more about the real people behind organizations," explained Twitter’s Anamitra Banerji in the announcement.

It appears that the feature is being rolled out to more businesses. MG Siegler spotted it on Salesforce’s Twitter account within the last day.

As I’ve written about before, businesses have already been finding different ways to personalize accounts. For example, the WebProNews Twitter account (feel free to follow it) utilizes "@cotags" to sign Tweets. However, this practice requires adding characters to tweets, and sometimes every character counts. If you’re trying to optimize your tweets for maximum retweeting (which can in turn drive traffic to your site), you want to leave as much space as possible for followers to add their own information.

Businesses have also been utilizing services like CoTweet, which lets users manage multiple Twitter accounts from a single dashboard. Through this, companies can manage the main account and employee accounts from one place. Salesforce appears to be using both CoTweet and Contributors at the same time.

There has been a great need to make Twitter a more usable platform for businesses, given the service’s obvious potential in a number of key business areas. This is probably why email marketing firm ExactTarget acquired CoTweet earlier this month.

Twitter has hinted at providing businesses with more useful tools for quite some time, and once it gives all users access to such tools, there may be a more unified format for how businesses use Twitter to engage with customers. Right now, it’s kind of all over the board. Due to Twitter’s openness (through APIs) and businesses’ hesitance to change habits, Twitter’s own tools may or may not become the standard. Keep in mind that many Twitter users never even go to Twitter.com, but access the site through third-party platforms. That said, I’m sure plenty of third-party apps will integrate the Contributors feature.

March 24, 2010