Salesforce.com's Chatter Brings Social to the Business World
Salesforce.com has spent the last decade revolutionizing customer relationship management (CRM) and pioneering the software as a service (SaaS) model for enterprise applications. The company’s latest offering, Chatter, brings social media to the business world with the intention of driving collaboration and awareness across corporate teams in a private and secure environment.
Chatter is available for free to existing Salesforce.com customers and as a standalone service for those looking to take advantage of the platform without the CRM component.
How does it work?
Chatter utilizes a number of familiar social media and Web concepts.
Profile: Much as with Facebook each employee has a profile featuring his experience, skills and vital stats. The employee also has a wall that features status updates, questions and other Chatter activity. Profiles are searchable from within a company’s Chatter service.
Status Updates: Think tweets or Facebook updates; an employee can talk about what she’s working on, which clients she is interacting with and solicit advice or help from her peers in the same way users take advantage of LinkedIn’s Q&A functionality.
Following: Chatter users can choose to follow other employees, sales opportunities, specific client accounts and even documents. Users receive a centralized feed of updates and activities for everything they follow a la Facebook’s news feed.
Groups: Chatter allows the quick creation of public or private groups, a way for users to team up to handle important projects or opportunities. Group members can share documents, insights and links, and actively work to accomplish specific goals in a shared space.
How would I use it as a marketer?
Marketers can utilize Chatter to get a better look at the results of campaigns and lead-generation efforts, as well as keep tabs on their key external accounts and clients. The visibility Chatter engenders also provides a great avenue for closing the gap between marketing and sales. Here are a couple of examples:
1. Elect to follow key customer accounts to gain visibility into fresh opportunities, client interaction across the company and even to monitor what those clients are saying on Facebook and Twitter via Chatter’s extensible integration framework.
2. Join and participate in a group dedicated to closing a large opportunity with a key client. Marketers can provide key client insights, develop and share collateral, and work directly with their sales counterparts via Chatter’s group sharing framework.
Chatter, like anything in the Salesforce.com portfolio, will evolve and grow in the coming years based on customer feedback and experience. Salesforce.com has already released mobile versions of the service for the iPhone, Android and Blackberry, and a recently announced integration with Seesmic promises to close the gap between internal corporate and external social media worlds.
