Social Business Goes Mainstream

No one puts on a better user event than Salesforce. Part customer event, part revival meeting, Salesforce brought together 90,000 people in San Francisco last week to learn and share experiences. Although significant products were introduced, the most interesting aspect was the relentless focus on social, social, social. Of course, we’re strong believers in the transformative nature of social in the way we do business. However, hearing that message so strongly and convincingly from a “traditional disruptive” vendor was surprising. As has been the case with Salesforce throughout its history, the company has mixed a heavy dose of disruptive with a strong amount of traditional to produce a platform that enables users to take safe and measured steps forward in approaching disruptive trends. Although we might question the depth of Salesforce’s vision here, there’s no questioning that they’ve targeted the sweet spot of the social market, offering solutions for marketers and HR organizations, the two largest early adopters of disruptive social business approaches.

If you’re an existing Salesforce customer, these new offerings will likely prove very attractive if not compelling. If you’re not an existing Salesforce customer, we think the new and enhanced offerings are sufficiently interesting that they merit further consideration, particularly in the marketing context. For service providers, the expanded Salesforce platform creates new and exciting integration opportunities. Although Salesforce loves to tout the plug-and-play nature of the platform, we all know that to deliver the full promise of an expanded platform, a lot of heavy lifting is required. Coming out of Dreamforce, we expect to see a continued series of expanded relationships between Salesforce and service providers across a wide range of industries. Salesforce serves only a limited geographic footprint, but as the company gets into more global platform solutions, we expect to learn about geographic expansion in the coming months.