Browsing social networking
Chattering about Salesforce.com
November 18, 2009
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As usual, my patented, trademarked, hermetically sealed and hypoallergenic live coverage of this morning’s event (Dreamforce 09) will be appearing in the Twitter stream to your right. Follow @Lager if you don’t already, and I will be adding my analysis afterward in this space.
If you’re wondering why I don’t just liveblog it here, the answer is simple: I like words, and the temptation to editorialize is much easier to manage at 140 characters a pop.
UPDATE 11:40 am PST: Tweetdeck just crapped out on me, with the “recipient not following you” error message. I’m over my limit.
11:44 am PST: Generally speaking, Salesforce Chatter looks a whole lot like Facebook. There’s also Twitter embedded. It’s a secure social business interface. I want a lot of demo time with this.
11:48 am PST: Marc is wrapping up now. Force.com has been modified so you can build collaboration apps. Chatter collaboration cloud is an attempt to change the way we work and make it more like … well, how we kill time at work when we should be working. Your coworkers are now your community, with the closer contact that implies. The biz apps, dashboards, and workflows are still there, but social networking is now built in instead of layered on.
11:53 am PST: For those of you who are worried about security, Chatter is as secure as Salesforce.com in general. You can pull in info and interactions from outside the enterprise, but I assume that once it’s there it is shielded from malfeasance.
11:55 am PST: Sales Cloud 2 is built on Chatter. Service Cloud 2 has been rebuilt for Chatter (that two rebuilds of Service Cloud). It’s all mobile capable.
12:01 pm PST: True to social form, content can be followed or broadcast automatically–you don’t have to go into a group and post to it. Your content, your apps, and your people are all talking to you. And, to judge by this demo, they’re all talking about how bad Sharepoint is.
12:04 pm PST: Demo is over, now announcing pricing. Available early 2010 in all editions of Salesforce.com and Force.com–standard in all editions. If you want to bring outsiders into Chatter, there’s a $50/user/month product. Very nice, and a welcome departure. We’ve got Jason Goldman, from the board of directors of Twitter. @goldman if you want to know.
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All Quiet on the Social Front
August 6, 2009
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I had some other topics lined up for today—my thoughts on what applications like Scanaroo are doing for social CRM, for one—but it looks like there’s some breaking news on broken social tools that must take precedence.
Today saw a massive denial-of-service (DOS) attack against popular social networking sites, most notably Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I won’t link to them directly right now—they’re the Big Three so you know how to find them, and they also have enough traffic trouble at the moment—but I’ll cheap out and give you the New York Times coverage here.
Social media like these have quickly changed the way we go about our daily lives, so it’s all the more painful when we info addicts get cut off at the source. I was really looking forward to seeing what was happening in my personal Twitosphere today, not to mention driving some traffic to my site and those of my allies. Twitter has been hit hardest, and despite claims that the problems have been fixed, many users (myself included) still have no access. Facebook has been unreliable as well, so my Mafia Wars conquests are on hold for now. LinkedIn is more of a tactical asset for me—I use it when I need it, but don’t stay connected for long—so I haven’t seen the extent of the damage there, but you can be sure that some important business connections didn’t get made today.
The optimist in me says that when irresponsible scriptkiddies with a surplus of free time and a dearth of creativity launch attacks like this, it ultimately strengthens the sites they attack. But the inner optimist is very small, and not nearly as vocal as the rage-filled monster who wants to make an example of these jackholes with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers, Marcellus Wallace-style. I suppose I’ll have to settle for the criminal justice system, but that will do.
This moment of Ahab-vs.-Moby-Fail also reminds us that social networking and customer engagement aren’t new phenomena. We still have phones, and the ability to go to bricks-and-mortar establishments. Most of the Internet still works, too, so it’s not like the engines of enterprise have shut down altogether. Social CRM is a strategy, and the online component is not the only component.
/rant
In other news, I’ll be guest-blogging for my friends Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary, the CRM Playaz. My piece isn’t live yet, but when it is I’ll have the honor of being their first post. Along with that, I’ll also be chatting with them on their next podcast, recording tomorrow. I can’t get enough of these guys—they combine insight with humor, whether separately or working together. They also show exceptional taste in guests. 
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Social media or high society?
June 29, 2009
1 comment.
Thanks to Metafilter (by way of my girlfriend), I found out about a case involving the apparent power of social media. I would have missed it entirely because of the other recent social media event surrounding Michael Jackson’s death. It involves another celebrity, Adam Savage of MythBusters.
Briefly, the situation as reported in the Vancouver Sun is this: Savage got hit with $11,000 in connectivity charges from AT&T for what amounted to a few hours of use over a period of five days. The company shut off his phone as a result. Savage turned an assistant loose on the provider to try and straighten out the charges, but it appears that the real work was accomplished with a few tweets. (No disrespect intended to the assistant, of course.)
Your first reaction to this story might be, “Aha, the power of social media in action!” (It was my second, right after, “Those guys have the best job ever, and I love that show.”) But if you look deeper—not just in the MeFi comments but read Adam’s own words—you’ll see another thing at work: the power of celebrity.
“A lot of people on Twitter are saying, ‘Well it’s great that it worked for you, because you’ve got 50,000 followers, but what about the rest of us?’ ” Savage said. “And I totally agree with them.”
The fact is that the power of massed customer voices is mostly a sea-change thing for the moment. One tweet, one blog, or one Facebook group typically has little power of its own; as they accumulate, they exert pressure on businesses that want to maintain good public opinion. It’s like emailing your senator or congressperson to ask them to put their weight behind a certain bill—no matter how awesome and right I think I am, my note is almost useless by itself. It’s going to take a lot of constituents to shift a legislator’s opinion, or get one to make it a pet project instead of just something to vote on.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and Adam Savage is capable of a much louder squeak than most of us. Kudos to him for acknowledging this. The typical customer would have spent days or weeks sorting this mess out, or might just eat the charge if it was small enough. You’d better believe that if AT&T hit me with $11-grand in charges I’d become an instant sensation on Cursebird (NSFW).
The change we’re all hoping for is that businesses don’t just use social media as an alarm system directing them to fires which must be put out. If somebody goes to the trouble of starting a social networking group founded on the premise that your company is run by thieves and/or morons, or makes a public-message complaint that is echoed by others, it doesn’t just mean some customers are unhappy—it means you’re doing something wrong. Fix the damage first, put out the fire, but if your next step isn’t taking a hard look at the policies that caused the fire, you’re missing the point of listening and are a fire hazard.
Also, congratulations to MythBusters cohost Kari Byron (no, she doesn’t know me) on successfully completing her pregnancy internship. Good luck in your new role as Doctor of Momology.