What I learned at Dreamforce 2011
Jason Kort is one of the forces behind Marketing Automation Times, a blog dedicated to providing the latest news and information on the world of marketing automation. He is an experienced online marketing professional with a history of developing personalized, relevant, and timely communications to help businesses close more sales. Jason shared with us his key takeaways from Dreamforce 2011.
As usual, the show had a rock concert feel and having real performers like Metallica, Cake, Neil Young, and will.i.am completed the performance. According to Salesforce, Dreamforce has become the largest tech show in the country with 45,000 registered attendees. At times it felt like a religious event with the Dreamforce faithful giving raucous cheers during each keynote address.
Here are some big ideas that I took away from the show…
The Social Enterprise
The central focus of the show was leveraging the power of social media to reach and help more customers. As Marc Benioff said, “Salesforce was born cloud but reborn social.” Benioff quoted Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg by saying, “The way to delight customers is knowing who they are and what they like.”
Benioff asked the question, “Why should I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees? That inspired us to create Salesforce Chatter.”
Salesforce believes that enterprises will bridge the social divide through…
- Creation of a social customer profile
- Creation of an employee social network
- Creation of a customer social network and product social network
To accomplish this, social profile has been integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and takes advantage of open API. This launches in Winter 12.
Better Collaboration with Chatter
Chatter delivers real-time enterprise collaboration and has been enhanced to allow users to see when their colleagues are online, instantly chat with them in context and share their screen without leaving Chatter. Chatter Customer Groups allow users to invite people/customers from outside the organization to collaborate in secure groups.
With Chatter Service, customers will be able to ask their question once in a familiar social feed, and have the answer come to them in an instant--whether it's from the knowledge base, the community of experts or a service agent. Chatter Service will also connect to public social networks, such as Facebook, extending the community far beyond the boundaries of a traditional self-service portal.
Every Salesforce.com org comes with 4,000 Chatter FREE licenses which provides a cost effective way for every business to improve their communication efforts.
Data Dump
Data.com is a single source for complete and actionable business data from Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) and Jigsaw. This provides one place to help customers build and maintain social customer profiles.
Mobility with Touch
Touch.salesforce.com leverages HTML5 for mobile versions of all Salesforce apps on iPad, iPhone, Android and other platforms. Touch.salesforce.com will deliver an optimized experience of Salesforce apps and customizations for touch devices.
Heroku
I am not a programmer but Heroku language enables developers to quickly create apps that can scale up for large bandwidth consumption using the power of cloud computing.
Heroku was used to develop Facebook apps for Disneyland Vacation Property and Warner Brothers for live video streaming of movies. Heroku for Java now gives more than 6 million enterprise Java developers a clear path to build social, mobile and open cloud apps. Java joins Ruby on Rails, Clojure and Node.js as the fourth language for the Heroku platform.
That is just a small fraction of what was unveiled and click here for a complete recap. Looking forward to Dreamforce 2012!