In the foreword to Clara Shih book The Facebook Era …
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
I’d read early this year that Dell was experience great success with its marketing program on twitter, and the other day I received a link to their entry in Facebook. Dell have also provided, based on their experience of “conversations with customers” a series of “Social Media Guides” for small business. They can be found here: 