GENERAL BUSINESS

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CARIBBEAN BUSINESS THURSDAY, MAY 3, 2012

Salesforce brings next-generation social media to P.R.

Local rms join forces to spread enterprise-wide use, deploying unique system recently introduced by cloud computing giant
BY ALEX DAZ

alex@caribbeanbusiness.pr

ere you are thinking you had social media all gured out. You set up your Facebook, Twitter and Google+ pages, added YouTube and Flickr, did your blog, connected it all to your website, and nally integrated the platform nicely into your brand management and marketing campaigns. A team of two to three staffers, whether in-house or at an external agency, regularly upload dynamic content (text, photo and video), handle all real-time interaction with customers across desktop and mobile devices, and generate a daily report to help you keep track. Thats great, except that now youll probably want to broaden that horizon by quite a bit. Your sales team, you see, has been using social media to do deals, and the procurement department to purchase supplies. Human Resources has been using it for recruitment as well as internal communications. The plant manager blogs regularly to keep up with the latest trends, as does your nance team. See where this is going? It is called social enterprise, the extension of social media as a communications channel across all or most of a companys operations. Its not just for marketing anymore, said Joel Otero, the Miamibased representative of Salesforce covering the Puerto Rico market. The fact is that social media has become pervasive across the entire enterprise, whether you have realized it or not, and to not integrate it all in a single, seamless platform represents a signicant opportunity cost that any business is able to avoid given new tools that are now at their disposal. Otero should know. San Francisco-based Salesforce, which began as an online CRM (customer relationship management) shop in a small apartment in 1999 and quickly became a global leader in cloud-based services, has now taken the lead in social-enterprise solutions.

Social Matrix partners Josette Pagn and Juan Carlos Pedreira (in the back) have joined forces with Salesforce representatives Francisco Figueroa (second from left) and Joel Otero to introduce social enterprise in Puerto Rico.

The service, launched last year, has already drawn such top-name global clients as Kimberly-Clark, NBC Universal, GE Capital, Comcast, Avon and Burberry. A glitzy multicity tour in 2011, complete with Steve Jobs-like staging and showmanship by Salesforce founder & chief executive Marc Benioff, caught the attention of the global media and succeeded in getting the message across. Social enterprise is one of those game-changing ideas that comes around every so often with the potential of catapulting a companys results, and theres no doubt that it will mainstream within the next ve years, said Francisco Figueroa of The Values Management (TVM) Group. So if you dont get in now and take the lead, if you dont become a social enterprise, youre leaving a lot of money and opportunities on the table. TVM, Salesforces Puerto Rico representative since 2007, partnered last month with local onlinemarketing rm The Social Matrix to create eCloud Suite and bring social enterprise to the island.

Social media must become part of the DNA of a company in every department, Social Matrix Partner Juan Carlos Pedreira told CARIBBEAN BUSINESS. Thats our focus.

3 PART INTEGRATION
Salesforce offers social enterprise in a three-part matrix. It begins with Rypple, an internal-communications platform that integrates coaching, feedback loops, performance reviews, recognition programs, volunteerismevery possible

Social enterprise, the extension of social media as a communications channel across all or most of a companys operations, was launched last year by Salesforce.

way employees interact with their company and co-workersas well as a tool that helps the human resources department recruit. Next are customers and suppliers. The rst come at a company from many directions, but mainly through shopping around, sales, offers, customer service, apps and ongoing social-media conversations, while the suppliers are increasingly using social media to pitch their services to companies and manage the relationship once in. Finally, there is what Salesforce calls the public, or everyone else. This is critical because there are always conversations going on in social media, and many times they have to do with your brand, Social Matrix Partner Josette Pagn said. The thing to do is for the company to be engaged, listen to what people are saying, and sometimes drive the conversation with smart content. Salesforce either uses such existing social media services as Facebook and Twitter, or designs a Chatter, a solution that creates a customized, branded social-media platform just for a client, and integrates all of the above (employees, recruits, customers, suppliers and the public). This is particularly helpful for people who dont use Facebook or other social media services very often and yet are computer savvy and would prefer to communicate in a social media interface, Otero explained. Facebook is now up to 1.2 million unique users in Puerto Rico, with adults 50+ the fastest-growing group. Whats making that gure grow tremendously is the penetration of smartphones, which are up to about 40% of all phones in Puerto Rico, and social media makes it easier than ever to communicate with those users, Figueroa said. To have a single dashboard integrating all of these touchpoints and including social-media conversations across all corporate departments is extremely valuable. Its what makes us feel very bullish about the growth of social enterprise.