Salesforce Launches Chatter: Full-Scale Social Media For SMB/Enterprise
If Pink Floyd ran an enterprise software company, it would be Salesforce. If Pink Floyd’s crazed fans ran a social sales and customer service platform, it probably look something like Salesforce Chatter. At about 11:30 a.m. this morning, Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff announced Chatter, a social collaboration platform. It’s likely that the product will ship with the Salesforce February release (a July delay is unlikely).
Benioff started off his keynote talking BIG – he introduced the conference coasting sheerly on magnitude: 19,000 visitors, 60-plus countries, and the 300-plus sessions made up the conference. The core of the keynote examined three of the four core areas of the Salesforce.com platform – the “old classics” (the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud) and the new “Mystery Cloud” – Chatter .
San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom joined Benioff (perhaps impromptu – a handheld microphone for Newsom?) around the twenty-minute mark, and the two sparred extensively about the Salesforce Foundation’s numerous initiatives.
The gist of Chatter is this: in addition to all of the new, smoother user-interface changes that Salesforce promises in their next release, the product simply looks a lot more like what Oracle CRM 2.0 promised in their last release – something that looks a hell of a lot like Facebook and CNN, and has actually been proven to make happier customers and close more deals.
Reasons for a mid-market or enterprise consumer brand would want to implement Chatter, upon it’s 2010 release:
- Sales and marketing teams know more about their friends on Facebook, and you probably want them knowing 1/10th as much (or more) about your products, services and customers
- To bridge the “Trifurcation of content, apps, and people” to develop super freakin’ fast customer-centric solutions
- To share knowledge across the enterprise on a minute-to-minute basis, with the express purpose of closing deals and making customers happy
- It might actually keep your employees off Facebook because it touches the same neural receptors
To get a full briefing on how Chatter will likely affect your Q2/Q3/Q4 sales and marketing, feel free to hit us directly , and we’ll get your Salesforce corporate account manager on a Webex to give your executive team a full briefing.
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Adam Metz, on Nov 26, 04:12 PM, wrote:
For a more in-depth read of the ramifications of this announcement in the greater CRM world, see Paul Greenberg’s <A HREF=“http://blogs.zdnet.com/crm/?p=1167&tag=col1;post-1167”>great post</A> on ZDNet from 11/23.