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11
Companies like Dell, Coca-Cola and
Burberry’s have put social media at
the heart of their business and Benioff
advises other businesses to do the
same. “Embrace cloud 2.0: the world
is going social, mobile, real-time,” he
said. “Companies that have adopted it
are doing well: companies that haven’t
aren’t.”
Fragmented approach
Most organisations today recognise the
importance of social media to sales, but
few have joined up the dots in the way
that salesforce.com advocates.
In a salesforce.com-sponsored survey
of 150 UK CEOs and managing directors
by Coleman Parkes, 68% said that they
had a social media strategy but only 11%
run it as a cross-departmental initiative.
In the vast majority of cases, the strategy
is owned by individual departments led
by marketing (40%), then IT (28%) and
HR (20%).
According to salesforce.com, this
fragmented approach is preventing
businesses from making the most of social
media’s possibilities. To evolve into a true
‘social enterprise’, it says, businesses must
take the following three steps:
1.
Create a ‘Social Customer Profle’ that
includes information on a customer’s
connections, likes and dislikes from
their own Facebook profles, Twitter
conversations and LinkedIn pages;
2.
Create a Social Network for
Employees so that staff always have
Cloudforce
On September 14, salesforce.com
founder and CEO Marc Benioff
outlined his vision of the ‘social
enterprise’ to customers and prospects
at the London leg of the company’s
Cloudforce exhibition and conference.
By a happy coincidence, on the same
day Topman was forced to withdraw two
‘sexist’ T-shirts from its stores after after
an outcry from Twitter users.Whether
this was a genuine mistake or, as some
have suggested, a publicity stunt, the
news coverage it generated underlines
the extraordinary infuence wielded by
the narrow demographic of Twitter users.
Benioff could not have hoped for
more timely evidence of the need for
businesses to develop a social strategy.
However, his vision of the ‘social
enterprise’ goes beyond mere frefghting
to include proactive use of social media
to enhance decision-making, customer
relationships and the sales process –
including the ability to engage with
customers and colleagues across all
applications and devices from PCs to
tablets and smartphones.
Examples of the sorts of activities
a ‘social enterprise’ might undertake
include bringing information posted
by contacts on the public web into a
company’s own CRM system; monitoring
Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and
Twitter for references to a company or
its products; building a social network
for users of certain products; or
crowdsourcing solutions to problems
encountered by customers.
How salesforce.com is helping businesses harness the power of social
networks to drive sales and improve customer service
Marc Benioff
Improve your social standing
access to the right information and
in-house expertise; and
3.
Build a Social Network for Customers
and Products so that you can interact
with customers in new ways.
New products
At Cloudforce, salesforce.com
demonstrated a number of new products
– many obtained through acquisition
– that can be used to integrate social
networks with applications built on
the Force.com platform and its own
SalesCloud, ServiceCloud and Chatter
internal social network solution
(Chatter itself is being enhanced with
collaboration features including Presence,
Instant Messaging, screen sharing, the
ability to invite suppliers and customers
into groups and integration with third-
party applications via Chatter Connect).
These include:
n
Data.com, which automatically
populates customer profles with up-
to-date information available from the
public web and Dun & Bradstreet –
ideal for quickly creating social profles
of customers;
n
the Heroku development platform –
ideal for creating consumer-oriented
marketing and social web applications;
n
Radian6, a social media monitoring
and engagement platform used
by more than half of Fortune 100
companies to collect all tweets and
social media conversations relating
to user-specifed terms, such as a
company or product name – ideal
for monitoring customer reaction to
products and marketing initiatives; and
n
Touch.salesforce.com, which uses
HTML5 to deliver all salesforce.com
and Force.com apps to any mobile
touch device in a fashion that looks as
though its native to that device.
To make it easier for customers to
become social enterprises, salesforce.com
has introduced a Salesforce Enterprise
Licensing Agreement giving customers
unlimited use of its products for a fxed
cost. At Cloudforce Benioff announced
that Coca-Cola had become the frst
company to acquire its entire product
portfolio in this way.
Like or dislike?
As an example of how social enterprises
operate, salesforce.com showed a flm
of the KLM Surprise initiative. The
Dutch airline monitored Tweets sent by
passengers and at check-in surprised a
lucky few with personalised gifts chosen
according to likes and dislikes gleaned
from their social media profles.
In the past only a business’s most
Continued...
“We were
born cloud
and have
been
re-born
social”