Salesforce.com Hypes Social Enterprise at Cloud Conference

25.04.2012
WASHINGTON -- To coincide with the , Salesforce.com brought its Cloudforce conference here to the nation's capital to trumpet the emergence of the social enterprise, which the company is touting as the next major evolution in business computing.

Salesforce is pressing corporate--and now government--customers to embrace social, open and collaborative cloud technologies in the workplace, arguing that CIOs can boost productivity with work tools that more closely resemble the social applications that have come to figure so prominently in people's personal lives.

"Social is eating the Web. People are spending more time on social media sites than they are on the rest of the Internet," says Vivek Kundra, Salesforce's executive vice president of emerging markets. "Those enterprises that have embraced the social revolution have seen tremendous gains."

In that spirit, Salesforce has developed a three-tiered social approach that aims to help enterprises cultivate their own social profile, create a social network for employees and engage with customers.

Much of that effort follows the upheaval that the advent of social media has created in the marketing world, where the stewards of corporate brands have sought to engage with customers and critics alike on the social Web. Whether they are launching a new promotional initiative or doing damage control, marketers are in near consensus that if consumers are discussing their brand on social outlets, they need to be a part of the conversation.