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Tag Archives: chatter
Salesforce.com get friendly with Toyota
Earlier this year the CRM vendor announced plans to build ‘Toyota Friend’, a private social network for Toyota customers and their cars.
This week Toyota unveiled the soon-to-be-launched Prius PHV plug-in hybrid in Japan, and with this, Toyota made ‘Toyota Friend’ available for the first time.
This vehicle will launch in Japan on 30 January 2012 and one of the features being offered free of charge is:
“Toyota Friend: A proprietary social networking service that provides charging and service reminders via “tweet”-like alerts. It also enables communication amongst Prius PHV users.”
Toyota Friend will be powered by Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce.com’s enterprise social messaging platform. Toyota Friend will connect Toyota customers with their cars, their dealership, and with Toyota.
Information that is expected to filter through the application include product and service data as well as maintenance tips. It is not a closed loop system, however, which could be key to marketers: customers can communicate to family, friends, and others through Twitter and Facebook. The service will also be accessible through smart phones, tablet PCs, and other advanced mobile devices.
Do.com – Chatter on Steriods
Back in September we blogged on the new offering from salesforce.com: do.com. At that time no one really knew much about what it would do, although with some educated guess work many people, us included, thought that it might be linked to Manymoon, which salesforce.com acquired.
Yesterday Marc Benioff tweeted “Check it out www.do.com! Now live.”
Cue a flurry of people trying to access the site. Sadly it’s currently invite only and even those who have requested invite codes don’t all have them yet, but no doubt these will be forthcoming in the next few weeks. Beta invites being trickled out slowly are immensely popular, with Spotify being one tech-firm who have made this model work for them in recent years; but early reports of those who do have access are very positive.
“Do.com is for anyone and everyone,” says Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s Senior Vice President, in an interview with RWW. “We’re calling this a prosumer application. It’s the closest thing to a consumer app we’ve ever done.”
In December 2010 salesforce.com purchased the open cloud platform Heroku. Then yesterday, Salesforce.com unleashed do.com, which would seem to be a Heroku-based service, but integrated with Gmail (and presumably Google Apps) and indeed Outlook.
The concept is a social-cloud task management and collaboration platform, aimed at corporate and personal users. Think Chatter on Steriods.
Techcrunch report that do.com allows small teams and individuals to manage task lists, organize projects, and capture notes. The app allows you to assign tasks to other users (non-Do users can be sent an email to join), and in joint tasks, users can comment on tasks, accept and reject assignments and more.
Do also serves as an Evernote-like application and allows you to take notes from within the app, and assign yourself tasks from parts of your notes.
As Salesforce says, the app is meant to be used for both everyday consumer, list management use as well as for small group use within a business. So you can use the app to plan a dinner party or coordinate a marketing launch. Once you have a number of different tasks with shared users, you’ll see a Chatter-like Activity Feed, with real-time alerts and access to any comments on specific tasks.
The app is available via a web-based HTML5 app, as well as an iOS app. Do will also be available in the Google Apps Marketplace, Salesforce App Exchange, Chrome Web Store and LinkedIn App Marketplace. Any actions in one of these apps will be synced across your Do account. And Do is integrates with Dropbox so you can share files within the application from the file sharing service.
Do is free for now but Salesforce says eventually it will be adding paid features such as administrative controls and customization. For now, Do is still in private beta but will be opening up to larger audience over next few weeks, and will eventually open to the public in late November.
“A lot of people have referred to [Do.com] as a social productivity app,” Whiteley goes on, “but really it’s the set of things that you need to manage task lists – it can be your own task lists, or ones you share with a group of others. You can organize small or big projects, at home or with life or at work. Plus there’s some utilities such as easily taking notes and having them on all your devices – the basic sets of things you need to get work done with other people.”
Here’s some screenshots:
Teamworking communications: a beginner’s guide
The good people at BizGene recently approached ROD, asking for our thoughts on online collaboration. Our Operations Director, Theresa Durrant happily penned a few thoughts for them.
Here’s a snippet from that article:
“There are two sides to communications within a working team. One is technological – there are huge amounts of productivity tricks and tips which work now because we have the technology available which simply wouldn’t have happened a few years back. The second is the ‘soft skills’ side, the people element. Both are vital.
Collaborating over the Internet has expanded dramatically since someone first had the idea. It is possible and very desirable to allow people to work on files and projects simultaneously.”
To read the full article, including Theresa talking about Google Docs and Chatter, just click here.
Chatter at the Superbowl
The Superbowl is billed as ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’ by the NFL and so for salesforce.com it was the natural occasion to showcase chatter – and make their TV advertising debut!
The two adverts that were shown to an audience of millions were:
salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff explained the process on the Cloudblog which you really should read:
Making it to the Super Bowl is all about hard work. The athletes have spent their entire careers training for this event—and now hope that the right mix of talent, dedication, and luck will win them a ring. In their own way, companies advertising during the most important spot of the year face a similarly labor-intensive process that requires selecting the best agency, testing concepts, and hoping the ad appeals to consumers in a memorable and meaningful way. It takes time.
Time was something I did not have. But from the moment will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas and I first talked about collaborating on an advertisement for the biggest Sunday in television, I knew it was something that we had to do. Combining the reach of the Super Bowl with the creative genius and vision of will.i.am would be a big win for salesforce.com — and the perfect showcase for our new service Chatter.com. We couldn’t afford to fumble the opportunity.
So I called our chief marketing officer Kendall Collins and told him what I wanted to do. “Next year, right?” he asked. Not quite—this year’s game in 90 days, I said. “Impossible,” Kendall told me. And I knew we had to do it.
That’s because I knew we could pull it off. We live in an exciting time when the right technology redefines what’s possible. Last year I wrote about the Facebook Imperative describing the shift to the next phase of cloud computing, which I call Cloud 2. With Cloud 2, we’ve moved beyond making Internet applications that are easy to use, and progressed to a cloud computing model that’s inherently social (like Facebook), open and mobile – working on revolutionary devices like Apple’s iPad. Chatter, which we released in June, is at the heart of our effort to bring Cloud 2 to the enterprise.
Already, more than 60,000 of our customers have deployed Chatter — helping their employees come together in unexpected ways to share ideas, improve productivity and accomplish the impossible. I’ve never seen any product adopted this quickly in the enterprise. But a growing number of companies that were not our customers have been telling us they want these social collaboration capabilities too. And so, we launched Chatter.com, opening it up to an entirely new audience of 65 million businesses worldwide. Now any employee can create a free, secure, private social network to help their company collaborate, innovate, and grow.
We had to tell this story. What better way than during the biggest advertising event of the year? But we had only three months to create content, tag lines, music, animation—all with teams who had never met. We had never even done a TV spot before — let alone the mother of all spots.
New challenges require new approaches. And we didn’t want to take the traditional ad agency approach. In this case, the agency was the artist. We worked with Dipdive, LLC – what will.i.am calls a social media lifestyle agency that has a totally revolutionary approach to content, brands, social media and art. And we decided to manage the entire creative process in Chatter – meshing, on the fly, each person’s distinctive approach to achieve the impossible .
Our corporate marketing team, will.i.am and Dipdive used Chatter to brainstorm and surface the best ideas. We shared documents, scripts, compositions – all in the cloud. We rapidly iterated on everything: the tag line; our animated character Chatty, a helpful superhero cloud; and the awesome sound ID for Chatter.
The most powerful part: We did it all from different locations, using all kinds of devices. Teams were in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Tokyo and the UK. will.i.am approved things from his BlackBerry while in Paris. I did everything the same way I run my company—from my iPad. We were never in the same room, or even on a conference call. There were no email threads, no excuses for not getting documents. (As will.i.am said: “This is 2011, there’s no time for that!”) We cut a process that usually takes eight months down to 90 days. And, it was insanely fun. You can even watch a video on how we did it:
If we were able to do an ad for the Super Bowl in 90 days, imagine what we can achieve 10 years from now as we embrace and evolve this technology. When “impossible” loses its meaning, we strive for a whole new level of what’s possible.
With Chatter, anyone can do impossible things as a team. I encourage you to check out Chatter, and experience ‘The End of Impossible.’
Cloudforce 2010 highlights
Tim Anderson is a highly regarded freelance Technology journalist, he was in attendance at Cloudforce 2010 and put together this article, of which the rest can be found on his Technology blog ITwriting.com…
“I’m attending the Cloudforce conference inwidel London to catch up on what’s new with the Salesforce.com platform.
CEO Marc Benioff was on good form, with a fun slide in his keynote presentation saying “Beware of the false cloud” – this was a jab at private clouds which he considers lack the advantages of a multi-tenanted public cloud platform like, you know, Salesforce.com. He has some justification – operating your own cloud is clearly a significant IT burden to carry – but that is the price of freedom. His company continues to report impressive growth. The theme this year is Salesforce.com Chatter, a Twitter-like service embedded into the platform, for which there are just-announced mobile clients (Apple iOS, Blackberry, Android coming) as well as integration with the web UI and programmable platform.
Chatter is reducing email usage for adopters, apparently; Benioff says by 40% in his own company. Another of its advantages (aside from general social media goodness) is that users cannot attach documents directly, but only links to documents – pass by reference not by value – which is a better approach to collaboration. Of course you can do this in emails as well, but people habitually do not. It makes you think – maybe the likes of Outlook should do this by default, saving no end of space in corporate mailboxes. Or perhaps we should just use Chatter instead.”
To read the rest of this article, please visit Tim’s blog.
If you were at Cloudforce we would love to hear what you enjoyed about it. If you found yourself hearing about the cloud for the first time and would like to chat with us about a career as a salesforce.com consultant, force.com developer or becoming certified either phone us on 020 8123 7769 or email us: rod@resourceondemand.com
Facebook to use Chatter
In one of the more interesting news stories of last week, salesforce.com announced that they had signed Facebook as a CRM customer.
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talked so much about the Facebook imperative that he landed the social networking giant as a customer.
Salesforce.com said Wednesday that it has landed Facebook as a CRM customer for its sales operation. Under the deal, Facebook will use Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud 2. The system is deployed.
With the move Facebook gets access to Salesforce.com’s Chatter, which is designed to be the Facebook of the enterprise.
In fact, Facebook and Chatter already look like they were separated at birth.
“Salesforce.com lands Facebook as a customer” was originally published at ZDNet.
Chatter: How good is it really?
It’s now four months since salesforce.com announced the private beta launch of Chatter and many people have been experimenting with their new Cloud Collaboration tool, so how good is Chatter, really?
Chatter was hailed as revolutionary when it was unveiled at Dreamforce in November 2009.
Salesforce.com describe Chatter as a collaboration tool that allows you to stay on top of what’s happening in your company with real-time updates on people and groups, important documents, and your top deals and accounts.
After playing, experimenting and testing Chatter, it wouldn’t be unjustified to describe it as a game changer, through allowing you to connect with co-workers, projects and accounts in a way that increases productivity and inter-work efficiency.
Imagine being able to see what colleagues are working on, being able to answer their questions within Chatter without your inbox being bombarded with ‘request emails’, only reading and contributing your thoughts to relevant topics and all in a Facebook style with short updates and then follow-up comments (which also allows attachments.) This is the future of real-time collaboration and it comes in the shape of Chatter.
The initial concern was that it was another communication tool that would distract from tangible work; however anecdotal evidence and first-hand experience is that your inbox will begin to get quieter, whilst your productivity and input from colleagues will increase.
Marc Benioff said that: “We are in the era of Cloud 2, where social networking use has surpassed e-mail, Facebook and YouTube use have outpaced search, and new mobile devices like the iPad are creating entirely new ways to interact with information”.
You shouldn’t embrace Cloud 2 because it’s the new buzzword, you should embrace it because it will benefit your business.