Salesforce.com has a philanthropic 1:1:1 model.

In his book “Behind the Cloud“, Marc Benioff’s (co-founder 1999, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com), Part 6: The Corporate Philanthropy Playbook, starts with Play#64: “The Business of Business is more than Business” – a quote widely attributed to the American economist, statistician, and a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics; Milton Friedman (and here).  In the book Marc states that the co-founders of salesforce.com shared his philosophy that “the value of a corporation should be distributed not only to its leadership but also to the communities in which it operates and to the world.”  Suzanne DiBianca (Executive Director and co-founder of the Salesforce.com Foundation) officially joined salesforce.com in 2000 to establish the Foundation – now a decade ago!  So what is the 1:1:1 model?

1% time, 1% product, 1% equity

• 1% time: salesforce.com employees spend six paid volunteer days per year responding to community needs around the globe – employees have, so far, donated 178,000 hours
• 1% product: Salesforce donate CRM licenses to non-profits organisations – to 8,000 non-profits, in some 70 countries.  The Foundation offer 10 subscriptions for free, and the rest at 80 percent discounts
• 1% equity: Founding stock from salesforce.com provides funds for grants, with a specific focus on  supporting youth, technology innovation and employee-inspired volunteer projects – including some $20 million in grants to non-profit organisations

The case presented by Marc for Corporate Philanthropy (Play #68:  Share the Model) is:

1. It’s the right thing to do – for the community and the company
2. It builds your brand
3. It attracts and retains employees – a competitive advantage
4. It’s fun – honest

The model has also been adopted by many of salesforce.com’s third-party suppliers.  Most of the suppliers listed in salesforce.com’s AppExchange (the marketplace of 1000+ applications and services that extend Salesforce’s CRM) offer free, or significantly discount applications, or services to non-profit organisations.

I acknowledge that I have an interest in salesforce.com – I am a qualified salesforce.com administrator, and I have supported a number of charities, some pro bono, with their implementation and configuration of the non-profit instance of saleforce.com (Brian Green Consultancy CIC).

It’s official: “Salesforce Chatter accelerates the demise of Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus” – so claim’s salesforce.com in their press release of 17th February 2010.

The SaaS leader buys time with the launch of this beta that offers real-time feeds from consumer services “Facebook, Twitter, and Google Buzz” (though, in a ZDNet post, this is clarified by salesforce.com: “Chatter at this time doesn’t integrate with Google Buzz.  Google Buzz was used in the press release as an example of a popular social consumer network.”)

There will be 100 companies in this private beta program, including Reed Exhibitions, Schumacher Group, and TransUnion.  Chatter should be delivered sometime in 2010.

For more on Chatter see my earlier post “You won’t be able to get too much Chatter.”

This has been a title for a post since well before January – I’ll now delete the draft!  Enjoy …

Charityhowto.com have further video training guides for nonprofits on YouTube (here)

Today (Tuesday 2 Feb.) an enterprise collaboration tool from SAP, that is based on Google Wave, will enter public beta.  With the informative beta name 12Sprints, the application will allow “users to collaborate on solving business problems in real time.”

Being dependent on Google Wave, SAP will be following Google’s classic approach with 12Sprints having a beta period that will “never end.”  In acknowledgement of this, David Meyer (senior vice president of emerging technologies, SAP) has stated that the “… whole idea is to learn from [its] usage.”

Why is this interesting?  Software giant SAP have plans to launch web-based sales management software (i.e. SaaS) in the middle of 2010 – they will be competing directly with their long term rival salesforce.com.

Of course, there’s the obligatory YouTube video’s (there are 13 in all) for 12Sprints:

And, you can become a friend on Facebook, and follow the beta on Twitter …

12Sprints is an example of an Enterprise 2.0 tool – a tool that enables decisions based on the response from multiply persons within the organisation.  But, essentially it employs the same tools used to make a decision as “normal” business group might.  However, SAP appear to be taking Enterprise 2.0 serious.  Below is a brief video of part of a round-table held by SAP titled “Enterprise 2.0 – A Look into the Crystal Ball” (this video is about Gravity a forerunner of 12Sprints).

Observe, 12Sprints is an excellent example of the use of Google’s Wave within the organisation, but it’s not a replacement for Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, etc (i.e. unlike salesforce.com’s Chatter – which is yet to become available in the wild.  In beta, or otherwise!).

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.

This week in GOOGLE #23, “What Should Google Do?“

This week in GOOGLE, or TWig, is a podcast covering Google and all thing cloud computing.  Hosted by Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and Jeff Jarvis.  Jeff Jarvis, in particular, is the author of What Would Google Do?, blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com, and is associate professor and director of the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism.

This being the first TWig episode of 2010 the discussion is about the future and “what should Google do?”

The team agree that Google doesn’t yet feel professional enough, yet it must expand into the Enterprise area in 2010 as there’s nothing left for it to do but create an Enterprise revenue stream.  But is Google ready for the Enterprise?  The team compare Google with Amazon, and salesforce.com, and decide Google is not as trustworthy (Marc Benioff, CEO salesforce.com, will be absolutely delighted to know he’s being compared with Amazon – Amazon being Marc’s inspiration when formulating salesforce.com …)  Jeff  then celebrates salesforce.com, “salesforce really knows how to serve business … ,” and “knows what a business needs.”  So, Google is going to have to prove that it’s more than merely search and advertising in 2010.

Another programme on worth tracking down is CNBCs “Inside The Mind of Google”

Dell launched Storm Sessions in December 2009.

Background: Dell’s IdeaStorm was launched in early 2007 “as a way to talk directly to our customers“, and “to have on-line brainstorm sessions to allow you the customer to share ideas and collaborate with one another and Dell.”

The model is a simple one: users of the Direct2Dell site post suggestions and requests.  As these posts are promoted, by other users of the site, their score is increased.  Dell then uses this ranking to identify which ideas are the most important.  It has proven to be a very successful model with some “2,000 ideas submitted within the first few weeks,“  and, over the three intervening years of use, Dell claim to have “implemented almost 400 ideas.”

IdeaStorm is therefore an extremely successful example of crowdsourcing (and what a horrendous term that is!) – which Wikipedia (another model of crowdsourcing!) insightfully defines as “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community.”

So why has Dell changed this successful formula?  What does Storm Sessions bringing to the equation?

Vida Killian‘s (VidaK: Twitter Bio “Idea girl at Dell“) in her Direct2Dell blog post “Storm Sessions Launch on IdeaStorm” suggests that Storm Sessions is the “next level“.  Essentially, Dell will now be choosing the topics!  Driven by Dell’s current business needs Dell will post “targeted, relevant, and time bound ideas” and seek the users comments.  Dell even offer to provide, when the “time bound” is up, feedback on “how and when the idea will be put into action.”

Now this sounds like something worth monitoring …

IdeaStorm and Storm Sessions are powered by salesforce.com

See salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange.  On the IdeaExchange site salesforce.com users can “suggest new products, promote favorite enhancements, interact with product managers and customers.”  Similarly, all editions of salesforce.com CRM come with an in-house “on-line suggestion box” called Ideas – where “a community of users [can] post, vote for, and comment on ideas.“

In the foreword to Clara Shih book The Facebook Era … (Mar 2009), Marc Benioff (Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com) states “more than ever before, the lines are blurring between the consumer and enterprise worlds … bringing together social networking and enterprise applications represents the next phase in this evolution”

Email is failing.  It was never envisaged to do what we now expect of it.  Email messages grow too long, too difficult to follow, too difficult to track, get lost, and attachments go backwards and forwards with no version control.  Should I read the email where I’m only cc’d?  Can I remember which internal group I’ve just emailed that grumble to? Why do we still use it?  Is there no alternative?

Let’s take a blank page.  Take the best of Facebook.  The best of Twitter.  The number of users of these communication tools,  after all, is growing astronomically.  Something must be right.  Merge all that functionality into one place, sprinkle in filters, user controlled groups, and let it inherit all the robust and proven user control and security of an enterprise system.  Then give it away – free!

This is what salesforce.com’s Chatter is all about.  Expect it to be disruptive.  Expect to see it cloned … every organisation is going to need it to stay competitive.  Everybody in the enterprise is going to use it – it will enable networking, it will encourage collaboration, and, be warned, it will ignore the existing hierarchy.  All you need do is Activate it, nurture it, and wait until it reaches that critical mass of users …

Salesforce.com’s User Profiles (a collection of settings and permissions that defines a user) will be extended to include the users Chatter settings – including a current photo (user controlled, of course), and status: “Working on major marketing campaign, anybody have any experience of using VerticalResponse?”.  Twitter like status updates will appear on the users home page – in real-time: “there’s a new vacancy in the London office“,  “the printer on third floor is now working“, – but also, from salesforce.com Workflow triggers, and alerts: “Major donor not been contacted for 90 days!“, and “Large donation made by Corporate Sponsor“.  The user will have full control over the feeds (however, there’s some ambiguity from what I’ve read and seen as to whether email will be included in this – it aught to be), groups (small, and large – added instantly by the user; both public and private; and even secret groups: where that discussion on the “up and coming merger” can continue with confidence), the display can be filtered to show just Object (a salesforce.com term!  Think of Record), a team, Tweets on that competitor you’re following,  …

Better still, when it’s made available in Spring 2010 to all salesforce.com editions for free, all existing applications including those developed by third parties (or, downloaded from the AppExchange), will automatically acquire all this Chatter functionality.  And, of course, it will be on your mobile.  And, of course, it will come with a Desktop app (for when your not logged in to salesforce.com).  And, of course, it comes with a full set of APIs. And, …

Oh, these are interesting times

Working on Setting Your Social Media Strategy?  Then this video, from salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2009 (the “Global Gathering” of nearly 16,000 people in San Francisco – http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/), is a must

The presenters are Jamie Grenney (Sr. Director of Social Media at salesforce.com), and Vida Killian (Social Media and Community Technology Manager at Dell – with some 10 years experience of Social Media at Dell).  Dell are a salesforce.com user

In the video Jamie presents a slide showing some quite astronomic growth in Social Media usage.  This includes:

• Facebook: 124 million “actual users” with 202% growth rate year on year
• Twitter: 26 million “actual users” with 660% growth rate year on year

(source: complete.com 2009, growth rate Oct. 2008- Oct. 2009)
Continue reading…

OK.  It is another salesforce.com video – but it’s good about explain SaaS … enjoy.