Businesses need to embrace the “social revolution,” says Salesforce’s Benioff

Businesses need to embrace the “social revolution,” says Salesforce’s Benioff:
Thursday in San Francisco, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff delivered the keynote at the Cloudforce Social Enterprise Tour, the company’s cloud technology event. Salesforce is tackling the “social enterprise,” trying to make businesses become more social to keep up with customer’s increasingly social lives.
In keeping with the theme of social enterprise, Salesforce unveiled two new products at the event, Salesforce Rypple and Salesforce Site.com. Rypple, which was acquired by Salesforce in December 2011, is a social network and employee feedback system for businesses. Site.com is meant to help marketers update company Facebook pages and maintain a consistent “social brand,” meaning how a company presents itself on Facebook, Twitter, and other social sites.
Benioff discussed the shift from mainframe computing in the 60s to cloud computing in the 90s and in 2011 the “social revolution,” which he says businesses need to embrace to be successful. Benioff argues that the social revolution is “bleeding into our society,” through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. He cites the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street as “key moments of transformation” for social networks, to demonstrate how powerful social media is. Salesforce has obviously recognized these events and is pushing for businesses to use social media tactics.
Salesforce pushed the importance of its employee social network Chatter, which Beinoff said is important for large companies that need to stay connected. He highlighted in his keynote that Chatter has reduced 30 percent of employee emails.
George Hu chief operating officer unveiled Rypple to the crowd, likening it to playing a game such as Zygna’s Cityville. Hu highlighted LivingSocial, of Rypple’s customers, which has been using the service.
Burberry, LivingSocial, Activision, and HP were used as Salesforce case studies in the presentations, to highlight how each company uses its services and to show off its new products, Site.com and Rypple.
Angela Ahrendts, Burberry’s chief executive rallied Salesforce’s next step saying, “If you don’t have a social enterprise, I don’t know what your business model is in five years.”


Filed under: cloud, VentureBeat