In a rather superficial Q&A in Computer Business Review (CBR), late last year, Parker Harris (executive VP of Technology, and co-founder of salesforce.com) identifies what salesforce.com will be concentrating on in 2010.
The majority of the article focuses on Cloud Computing gaining acceptance, salesforce.com competitors, and [Cloud] Security. Then, in the final paragraph, Parker not surprisingly states that the Service Cloud, to which he is actually referring to salesforce.com’s Service Cloud 2, “will be the next billion dollar business”, but, then there’s no surprise there. Similarly, and maybe more significantly, he acknowledges that Collaboration (Wikipedia: “a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals”) is not fully understood by business. Here Parker is referring to salesforce.com’s pending collaborative layer/tool Chatter. Parker, or Janine Milne the author of the Q&A, then slip into verbal melt down and end the Q&A with “instead of being data-driven your data will come alive … the whole concept of viral communication will take off.” Now, I’m familiar with the phrase Viral Marketing, and one of my favourites (below) is the Cadbury’s (should that now be Kraft?) Gorilla Advert of 2007, but viral communication? With definition’s like “is the dissemination of information (either true facts or plain rumours) between individuals by self replication” (Behavioral Finance Group) – Oh, come on!
As a stark comparison in the same edition of CBR there’s another related Q&A. Rob Howard, founder and CTO of enterprise collaboration firm Telligent (“a pioneer of social media platforms”) explains how social media is becoming the established way for businesses to communicate – Rob also has a blog Enterprise 2.0 and social computing. Rob’s reply to “will 2010 be year of social media?“, is that he doesn’t think we are there yet, and that we have some 12 to 18 months for the market to mature. More pertinently he warns against the misguided belief that Social media replaces the way business work – and that it’s all about “integration”.
As an act of due diligence I searched for the phrase “viral communication”. For your amusement here are some of the references I found: from the MIT Media Lab of 2005 a disturbing claim that “Viral Communications focuses on constructing agile, scalable, collaborative systems that permit uncontrolled growth, minimal power use, and maximum ability to intercommunicate, with viral architectures moving the intelligence from the trunk to the leaves.” [Aargh!] And, in Changeworksblog, written by Sue Tupling, you’ll find several posts listed against the keyword/s “viral communication” – but only one post, from 2008, includes the phrase. And, finally in an Abstract of the IIW Institute of Information Management, “The paradigm of viral communication” (published in 2002!), which apparently identifies “… viral messages as a new paradigm of communication …” So, now you know.
