Social Media is going mainstream: but is your company ready to be a social enterprise?

Social Media is going mainstream: but is your company ready to be a social enterprise?

Dreamforce 2011: Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt Keynote Discussion

This is an excellent session captured on video of a discussion between Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt.

http://tiny.cc/mo9wu

Eric outlines beyond Social Enterprise, which involves artificial agents having dialogue with customers through their mobile phone. Some of this thinking was encapsulated in a paper published by the Economics Intelligence Unit called the Future of Marketing: Moving from Monologue to Dialogue that was sponsored by Google. Though it was published in 2006 it has become clear this is an integral part of the Google strategy. Eric now sees that the dialogue platform sits above the Social Enterprise Platform. No wonder Marc and Eric are on the same stage.

Dreamforce 2011: Marc Benioff's keynotes are now on video

The Entire Dreamforce Keynote 2011 by Marc Benioff is now available on-line:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=By7abvkNLS4

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ldVcOOxr5A

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Skf4kxcGc

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofaDa07v7l0

Part 3 includes Lord Rothermere, Chairman of DMGT. 

The gamification market starts to grow as new companies use it as a loyalty differential

Gamification platforms have raised over $30 million this year (source: Gabe Zichermann is chair of the Gamification Summit, an entrepreneur, and author of Gamification By Design and Game-Based Marketing).

New business start-ups are using gamification from the start to develop loyalty. One example is flickme.com, which is a new streaming film rental/buying site which is also accessible via Facebook. It assigns a Beta badge for being an early adopter. Completing certain tasks earns one badges and points. There’s a set of leaderboards. 

 
By 2015 70 percent of the Global 2000 will use gamification (Source Gartner Group) spending over $1.6 billion in the U.S.A alone (source M2 Research). 

Gamification is changing loyalty marketing and social engagement

Source: BizReport article by Kirstina Knight

Gamification is helping to rebuild the loyalty space. Gamification makes it simpler for brands to engage and for consumers to earn rewards. This, of course, keeps the consumer coming back.

Here are some of the highlights from the article:

1. Gamification is another form of loyalty … identity is now available on the web because of sites like Facebook and Twitter. 
2. The social graph is a major accelerant to the value of social rewards and behaviour. 
3. Gamification can be about loyalty or engagement. 
4. Finding ways to make social experiences meaningful and exciting is a major trend and it's falling under the umbrella of gamification. 
5. Expect to see even deeper social capabilities. 
6. Right now, Gamification 1.0 is about status, reputation, points, level, achievements--powerful motivating sources of behaviour. The next phase is making those much more social, akin to how social gaming elevated gaming and transformed the industry.

Keynote Marc Benioff conversation with Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google about the digital roadmap

The most exciting part of this keynote dialogue was Marc asking Eric what is going to be beyond the Social Enterprise.

Eric answered by saying that mobile will become our personal advisor so that, with permission, it will use point of presence to suggest choices that are most likely to be of interest at that moment in time. This he believes will be the next paradigm shift based on ‘sensing’ and ‘responding’ using contextual dialogue. Therefore, he passionately believes the next generation of apps will be based around predictive states and artificial agents for meaningful dialogue.

This positioning ought not to be a surprise as Larry Page and Sergey Brin both believe the future will be driven more and more by Artificial Intelligence. It is also in keeping with the web road map:

• Web 3.0 Cloud and Mobile with Social Enterprise leading the way 
• Web 4.0 Artificial Intelligence Complementing Humans 
• Web 5.0 Artificial Intelligence Surpassing Humans 

Eric positioned the future state in line with Web 4.0 and Web 5.0 and articulated that a higher level of platform (presence + predictive + artificial agents) will sit above the Social Enterprise platform. It is no wonder Marc and Eric are on the same stage as they are creating a win-win future state.

Eric believes ‘mobile first’ is the priority for developing apps. No wonder Marc has recently launched the Mobile AppExchange as an accelerator for businesses to go global.

Marc and Eric were both in agreement it is now all about social + mobile + open + local + real-time.

It seems to me solution-sets should be local, national and global – this three tiered framework is now feasible for forward thinking corporates.

One final note, both Marc and Eric are seriously concerned at the lack of new ideas for job creation. New models are needed and are needed fast. 

Dreamforce 2011 some of the force.com features

Here are some of the Force.com features:

• declarative logic (5GL)
• workflow and logic
• analytics
• Chatter built-in
• mobile ready
• open APIs
• APEX programmatic logic
• Visual Force for front-ends 
• Security and sharing rules
• Chatter Connect for data feeds
• Mobile: touch.salesforce.com and HTML5
• Open streaming API
• Siteforce

There has been a major update to make the workflow more drag-and-drop, clicks not code  

Dreamforce 2011 Some of the database.com features

Here are some of the highlights for database.com:

• Social Enterprise data model
• Shared security model
• REST API lets you integrate with Force.com applications using simple HTTP methods
• Tool-kit for Android and iOS (Apple)
• Platform agnostic API
• Data Residency Option

Also its free to get started

• 100,000 records
• 50,000 transactions per month 
• 3 enterprise users 

Dreamforce 2011 Changing the corporate and investment economics of apps

At the moment there are over 1,250 apps on the Appexchange which are designed not to 'reinvent the wheel'. This is already the world's leading cloud exchange for corporate apps, which is already a $500m market place.

The Appexchange is still quite small compared to

• Facebook which has 550,000 apps 
• Apple + Google which have 750,000 apps 

New apps are being developed all the time. 

The most impressive new entry is a company called Kenandy which raised funding from Salesforce and  Kleiner Perkins. The investment decision by Ray Lane from Kleiner Perkins took only 5 days because of the credential of the founder Sandy Kurtzig. Kenandy's market sector is social manufacturing. 

What is amazing is that the first social manufacturing app took 14 days to build.

Now Salesforce has launched the Mobile Appexchange. 

The investment cycles for new apps has changed profoundly. 

Using the Social Enterprise PaaS provides scalability without any CapEx for servers.

The Appexchange will grow rapidly as corporates with their partners are likely to build apps that can be resold on the Appexchange. The notion that corporates can move from the cost of apps to generating a profit from apps is now a reality.

The advantage of corporates using partners is that they can provide the support and follow-on development. 

There is now an emerging new economic model for corporates, investors and Salesforce partners. 

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce creates leading Social Enterprise PaaS

The Platform-as-a-Service provides the ability for an enterprise to create hundreds or thousands of apps that are underpinned by the same architecture, which has been purposed built for the Social Enterprise.

The new Social Enterprise  PaaS architecture basically consists of

Level 1 Social, Mobile, Real-time and Open

Level 2 Force.com and Heroku

Level 3 Database.com

Level 4 Data.com

Dreamforce 2011 Salesforce-to-Salesforce for sharing data across Orgs

Salesforce-to-Salesforce makes it fast and easy to share data between different Orgs. You can share lead, opportunity, account, contact, task, product, opportunity product, case, or custom object records with any other Org and get real-time updates on the shared data.

This enables collaboration to be a lot more easy.

With Salesforce-to-Salesforce, your different business units or partners can easily integrate your data with the data they manage in Salesforce. They can also integrate their business processes with updates received from you using workflow, assignment rules, and reports.