Chatter: chat⋅ter (from Wiktionary)

Noun – chatter

• talk, especially meaningless or unimportant talk
• …

There’s a lot of talk at the moment on the web about salesforce.com’s new social media offering: Chatter. Marc, once again, has skilfully used his salesforce.com playbook (see Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry) …

Chatter, when it becomes available next year, should provide a social media layer across salesforce.com Sales, Service and Custom clouds.  It is also planned to integrate with other market social computing platforms – see my earlier post

Below are my selection of five posts relating to Chatter.

They cover:

1. Chatter is only 20% of the enterprise social web …
2. Salesforce.com has, again, confused it’s customers, partners, analysts, press, as well as its own salespeople
3. People will become the platform of the new social business
4. That Chatter alone will not create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information
5. That clients might see your social network site … !

In his Post “Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone” Jeremiah Owyang (“a Web Strategist”) praises salesforce.com for taking the lead in the CRM vendors pack in providing tools that connect the enterprise with the social web.  But, rightly states that technology alone is not sufficient to “truly embrace customers in the social web.”  That “80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change.”

Meanwhile, Jeffrey M. Kaplan (a Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies) in his Post “Salesforce.com: The Double-Edged Sword of Iterative Marketing” states that he admires salesforce.com for “genuinely enhanced its offerings and expanded its capabilities” with Chatter.  However, he claims that many of the attendees he interviewed (following the keynote introduction of Chatter at Dreamforce 2009 – see my earlier post) “were confused about Chatter.”  He claims that “salesforce.com has also succeeded in confusing its customers, partners, analysts and the press, as well as its own salespeople …”

In a more enthusiast post Michael Fauscette, in “Salesforce.com introduces the world to the Collaboration Cloud”, states that “Chatter moves from the app itself …[to focus] on the people…people become the platform of the new social business.”

Steve Hodgkinson (of Ovum, part of the Datamonitor Group – “a premium business information and market analysis company“) in his Post “Salesforce: chattering its way to social integration in the cloud” (an extract taken from Ovum’s Straight Talk service) correctly states that chatter “will provide a means to stimulate collaborative information flows between the users at the enterprise’s sales and service front line.”  But then Steve is rightfully concerned that technology alone doesn’t “create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information.”

Finally, in “Has Your Organization Thought Through its Social Media Policy?” Dee Albritton, of Fast Forward, in a Post on The Nonprofit Technology Network site NTEN, warns non-profits that their “clients could see their social network site.”  Whilst there is no explicit reference to Chatter, Dee goes on to say, “it is hard to turn down a client for services when they saw the picture of the big check on your site.”  Dee references the results of a survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 plus employees:

• 54% now completely block social networking by employees
• 90% restrict usage to business purposes only, and
• 8% of employers reported firing employees as a result of social networking use

Interesting times …