Feature

Salesforce.com Turning Toward Social

2 minute read
Steve Sechrist avatar
SAVED

At this point, it's growing beyond hints in the wind, as word on the street is that the Salesforce.com CRM behemoth will soon offer social network technology to include data sifting of tweets and other filters to gain meaning from real-time social network traffic. 

The rumor, from a talk given by Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami, in Munich, Germany, comes on the heels of Salesforce.com's agreement to purchase Rypple and its social performance management application. Salesforce.com is moving this largest seller of online customer-management software toward the social space.

Creating Filters

In a Bloomberg report, the group quoted Rangaswami saying, "Lots of devices, lots of people on the network means lots of noise. The next generation of value is, what is the smartest way to create filters? How do you know which of all these tweets to listen to?"

The concept was confirmed by Salesforce.com's head of platform research, VP Peter Coffee, who said the CRM world is entering "...a new age of visibility and discoverability of information." He spoke about the new age of CRM earlier this month and trends driving the move, such as using social communities to find product opinions and pricing details, concluding that the "old basis of competition such as price, are not sustainable as the [social] community grows. ...Businesses will need to redesign and re-engineer their electronic presence to get to those conversations."  

Learning Opportunities

The Trend Toward Social

This move toward social networks is part of a larger "enterprise scale" trend where CRM companies could find themselves "tripped up in the coming year as corporations demand that social business offerings deliver to the same standards as other accepted enterprise-scale offerings." 

In mid-December, Saleforce.com announced it will acquire and re-brand Rypple's social HCM (human capital management) app targeting the social enterprise. Holston call this knitting the organizations social fabric into the basic work process at the enterprise level. 

Meanwhile the company said Rypple’s next generation social performance management app is to be re-launched as “Successforce.”

About the Author

Steve Sechrist

Steve Sechrist is a technology analyst and writer, with industry experience in both software and hardware and network product development. He has been writing about technology professionally for seven years, is a member of the National Press Club, Society of Professional Journalists, Internet Press Guild, and Society for Information Display. Connect with Steve Sechrist: