Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

  1. Home
  2. Networking
  3. Salesforce-pushes-social-enterprise-dreamforce-conference
  4. Page
  5. Salesforce Pushes The "Social Enterprise" At Dreamforce Conference: Page 2 of 2
Networking

Salesforce Pushes The "Social Enterprise" At Dreamforce Conference: Page 2 of 2

Software-as-a-service vendor Salesforce.com is introducing a number of new services to enable companies to use social networks to understand their customers and their employees, as well as to improve their businesses. The "social enterprise" was a big theme pushed at this week’s Dreamforce 2011 conference in San Francisco. While the company is developing new services to use social networking tools in order for companies to be competitive, a survey of attendees shows that some still have re
September 02, 2011

Today Salesforce customers use Chatter to socially network with employees and partners, but enhancements will also allow customers to be invited into an employee Chatter group to serve as a sounding board for company decisions. In addition, customer service operations could be enhanced with a social media option so customers could tweet their questions and customer service reps could tweet back responses.

Salesforce demonstrated how a wide range of companies--Groupon, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, NBCUniversal, Verizon and others--are using Salesforce-based SaaS offerings to become a social enterprise.

A survey of some of the 45,000 people registered to attended Dreamforce 2011 showed that Salesforce was preaching to the choir, although not everyone is on the same page of the hymnal.

The survey, conducted by a company called Appirio, revealed the following: 42% of respondents defined the social enterprise as "engaging and marketing to customers on public social networks"; 38% said Chatter is the social app they used most often at work, while Facebook and LinkedIn came in second and third, respectively; 67% said they’d like Chatter integrated with Facebook or LinkedIn, while 24% said e-mail; and, when asked where they would rank their company on a scale of 1 to 5 on its social enterprise strategy, 50% responded, "Somewhere in the middle."

A recent survey by the consulting firm Bluewolf--not directly related to Dreamforce--showed a mixture of appreciation for and reservations about social networking as a business strategy.

Sixty percent of those surveyed by Bluewolf believe that "every business" needs to be social, while 61% of respondents list social media strategy as a "high priority." But concerns businesses have about social media revolve around management and ownership of social media (58%), employing the proper metrics and proving value (54%) and a loss in productivity from spending too much time on social media (27%).

See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Collaboration Imperative (subscription required).

Tags:

News
Networking