What Happened at Cloudforce 2012 - San Francisco
03/28/2012
by
Larry Salvatoriello
Did you miss the big Cloudforce San Francisco event? Here is our recap of what happened.
On March 15th, 2012 over 10,000 people swarmed the Moscone Center for Cloudforce San Francisco to hear Marc Benioff talk about the Social Revolution. As we have heard Marc state many many times before, the social revolution is growing faster and broader than anything we have ever witnessed. He asks, how will your enterprise bridge the social divide? Among the typical story of how we got here, the Microsoft digs, and a little focus on SAP integration, Salesforce did a wonderful job outlining the Social Enterprise and how you can achieve it with the Salesforce Platform. They broke it down into 3 key components, gave some new and old customer stories, and then unveiled of a few new products to help complete the trifecta.
Here is a breakdown of those 3 components.
Employee Social Network
The first is the employee social network which is the concept of creating a “Facebook” like network within the enterprise. Chatter, which Marc calls the “Facebook for the Enterprise”, brings collaboration like tools from all of our personal lives right into the workplace. Chatter provides the ability to share and communicate information with clients and colleagues on any type of device anywhere in the world leveraging the easy to use functionality. Salesforce has more than 150,000 active networks and that number will only grow. The second part of the employee social network is a new technology called Rypple, the HR application for the social enterprise. In the past, performance reviews were deployed to manage compliance and not performance. With Rypple, employers can provide performance motivation and not just once or twice a year. This technology takes the “badge” achievement concept we have all adopted by the social networks we use at home and applies it to performance reviews in real time.
Customer Social Network
The second piece is the customer social network which focuses on how we do business today. Today it is about “Social” selling and customer service. Nowadays, sales needs to be in real-time and mobile. With Force.com and chatter, enterprises can provide their employees and customers the tools to be connected all the time. This increases customer and employee engagement. As for the service side, Salesforce allows you to build your own self service community which not only gives your customers a voice but it also can drive innovation and more sales. The feedback you will receive will be real-time and from the people that know your products the best, the customer.
Public Social Network
The third piece and maybe the most interesting is the public social network. This focuses on how to bring in the customer social networks and listen. There are three areas of importance here, the ability to market quickly, listen, and engage. Salesforce offers tools like Radian6 that allows you to pull/filter data from the popular social networking sites into Salesforce and easily integrate it with either your sales or customer service teams. In addition, Salesforce unveiled Site.com which is a Web CMS in the cloud. Site.com gives you the tools to easily build quick social sites, websites, and mobile sites. A great example was ePrint from HP where they were able to with a matter of clicks build a social page for a marketing campaign. Take that to the next level and all the data flows back into the top CRM system to see the entire lifecycle.
Salesforce always puts on a good show and Marc is one of the best in engaging an audience and getting them excited. This keynote was up there as one of the best. I really saw Marc’s vision for the Social Enterprise and believed it. Organizations need to not only be listening to the social networks but must build them and provide the tools for your employees to keep up with them. Now the only challenge is for Salesforce to actually let us get our hands on them (Wink Wink Radian6).
If you would like to reach out to me and discuss this in more detail please feel free to comment on our Facebook page, or tweet at me at www.twitter.com/Salvatoriello.
