If there’s one word we would use to summarize Dreamforce 2012, it’s “social.” Similar to Hubspot’s Inbound ’12, Dreamforce ’12 has been showing attendees groundbreaking ways to utilize the social enterprise in a variety of industries. CEO Mark Benioff acted as emcee yesterday, using his 3-hour long keynote to bring executives from around the world onstage –ranging from Burberry, to Coca-Cola, to Mr.Coffee. There were several huge developments released by Salesforce, but here are those we at Eustace found most newsworthy:
- Salesforce Data.com Social Key: Set to be available in the second half of 2012, this sfdc tie-in will link a CRM contact’s social media details to their standard entry, allowing basic contact data (such as phone number and company) to be enhanced with updates from social sites. According to SFDC, this will allow users to have, “the data perspective necessary to develop deeper connections with customers.”
- SFDC Touch Available on iPad: A touch-screen compatible, HTML5 version of the Salesforce app is now available for mobile devices! In the words of Salesforce, the app will allow Salesforce to be accessed on, “Any device, Anywhere,” regardless of platform. This means last-minute Chatter updates with coworkers, important mobile file shares, and more can all happen from your tablet or smartphone.
- Chatterbox: As we previously released, Chatterbox is Salesforce’s answer to the community of cloud file storage sites, like Dropbox. It will be integrated with Chatter for Communities, and is according to Benioff a “critical” development for the sfdc platform. Virgin America CEO David Cush unveiled Virgin Airlines’ plans to add touchscreens loaded with Chatter and Chatterbox to its planes’ seatbacks, letting users access files from the cloud while…in the clouds.
- Marketing Cloud: The result of sfdc’s acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6, the Marketing Cloud application allows companies to measure brand presence, ROI, and more over social channels. Users will also have access to ad purchase and deployment on popular social sites, such as Facebook–Utilizing customer data stored in Salesforce, users will be able to find customers on Facebook and work with the social site to ensure those customers see certain, targeted ads. It sounds a bit like that “Amazon.com-like” customization that we saw at Inbound ’12, doesn’t it?
- Chatter Communities for Service: A Facebook-like social network for “industry peers and experts,” these are essentially private social communities that give users peer-to-peer customer service. Based on the Chatter Communities platform and integrating the Service Cloud, this will allow companies to create a branded, customizable social base for customers to ask questions and get professional advice–often the first step to a sale.
- Chatter on Partner Portal: Chatter will now be available on partner portals to, “better connect and enable channel partners, suppliers and distributors.”
- Salesforce Identity: A new identity management platform, Identity will, according to Salesforce, “deliver a single, social, trusted identity service across all enterprise apps.” This means no more juggling passwords–users will have one, pre-integrated identity to use across all Salesforce apps, and updates from all of the users’ platforms will be pushed into one, centralized Chatter feed.
If these developments were in the first day alone, we can’t wait to see what the rest of the week brings!
