What's the big deal about Salesforce Chatter?

The more people work together, the more tools they need to make collaboration a productive art, rather than a befuddled mess.

Salesforce.com has delivered its Chatter cloud-based collaboration service to enter the fray, based on social networking methods more common on Facebook or Twitter.

Directed first at enterprise help desk and customer service processes, Chatter has the strong potential to become a company-wide collaboration accelerant. And if that happens, more data and insights into what people do to solve problems can be identified, refined, repeated, automated, and extended. The cloud model makes this easy to afford, to get to and to expand.

Chatter, and its ilk quickly sprouting up elsewhere, can foster better, targeted and self-directing collaboration; can spur and capture the data about processes in progress, and can become a service feature within nearly any business application, process or ecosystem.

Email can not do this. Instant messaging, no. Portals, not quite. Chatter shows that email's role is overextended, counter-productive, and in need of a replacement.

But what caught me by surprise in watching Salesforce.com's Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff introduce Chatter this summer in San Jose, CA, was not that consumer-focused social media motifs have a place in the productivity enterprise portfolio. What screams to me of "killer app" is that the data from social interaction are freer in the enterprise than they are on the open Web.

The data and analytics derived from Chatter are not defined by privacy boundaries, or the attempt to define and maintain them. Any user company controls the data, and so the data is free to be cultivated, consumed, analyzed, reused, extended, captured, codified, integrated, innovated from.

The data from social media and network activities in the enterprise therefore is far more free and open to the enterprise needs than Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Google are free to use or share the data they have about what their (your) users do.

Chatter helps to sort out what comes next when processes and people collide. Like with our communicative ancestors as they faced challenges in the dynamic wild, self-selecting groupings, pairings and open-ended dialogue about how to react to a situation can arise and amend via Chatter. This is a tool that entices and abets collaboration, rather than confines or stifles it. Too often machine-made silos confine today's online interactions into point-to-point email threads that swiftly run aground.

HP has seen the powerful confluence of IT functions and social networking tools and UIs, as evidenced by its limited-beta 48Upper SaaS collaboration tool. I received a demo of 48Upper last week, and all the things that make Chatter powerful work there as well. I hope HP targets 48Upper beyond the IT department. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of my BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

For while such uses as in software development and IT support are a no-brainers for Chatter and 48Upper, as they align well with agile and scrum methods, this is but the beginning. In a fast-paced business world, these app dev principles now have huge relevancy across many more business functions and processes. And Chatter can be the catalyst for doing so. It fits in well with Japanese kaizen and Deming-derived thinking too.

What's more, Metcalfe's Law has a supporting role, in that the more people that use Chatter, the more valuable it is; and there's a qualitative branch to the support -- the better the dialogue and sharing, the higher quality the thinking in the Chatter ongoing scrum, the more everyone benefits. This is the 100,000-year-old self-reinforcing frontal lobes cognition that makes us our human best ... together.

Matt Bertuzzi nailed it - less e-mail, less clutter. Chatter is a way to subscribe to and collaborate on streams of conversation that are of interest to you, without the overhead of more e-mail, most streams, etc...

At this point I'd have to say it's still a bit of an experiment - it's not a 'big deal' until it gets widely-adopted, and adoption is just beginning.

But having used it, I've found it to be a clever, low-overhead and (most importantly) useful service. I'm optimistic.

Chatter is a very good name for the Salesforce.com tool. It illustrates the informal, interactive types of communications that have been popularized in the consumer market with products, such as Facebook and Twitter. While some may look upon such tools as narcissistic, others see value in the information that is exchanged. Quickly, these tools are becoming another way for knowledge workers to collaborate (a popular word in the IT market nowadays). In theory at least, information can be recorded, exchanged, and located more easily and more informally. With the Salesforce .com tool, a company customer service representative may pick up a helpful hint from a coworker about how to handle a particular problem. In the past, such information remained bottled up in the company, often limited to those individuals who had immediate contact with the person.

Of course, realizing the potential benefits is not as simple as buying the software. Companies need to find ways to harness the information and help users find it. That is not a simple task as use of the tool spreads and the volume of data increases. In addition, they need to make sure the system does not create any new security concerns, a major bugaboo with the influx of these social networking tools and an open question in most cases. In fact, some companies may not deploy it because of security concerns.

Despite such challenges, acceptance seems inevitable. Analyst firm Gartner expects that by 2014, social-networking services will replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users. It also predicted that by 2012, more than 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging. In addition, Salesforce.com is a $1.3 billion company, one pushing Chatter hard. In sum, there is a lot of chatter about Chatter because it is designed to provide enterprises with social networking capabilities, comes from a key vendor, and is being heavily promoted by Saleseforce.com, which views delivery of such tools as key to its long term success.

Hey Courtney-

Think of it this way...if Facebook helps you keep in touch with your personal life, Salesforce Chatter helps you collaborate and work more effectively with your work life. With Facebook, you share your thoughts, photos, ideas, and "What's on your mind?" with the people that are "friends" with you. With Salesforce Chatter, you share "What you are working on?" with your co-workers that are following you and collaborate on documents, deals, and other projects. The huge difference with Salesforce Chatter is that besides people being able to chat, objects in Salesforce can chat.

So, let's say you are following a sales deal in Salesforce. When something happens on that deal, the deal chats to you letting you know that something has changed. So that information is pushed to you into your newsfeed...very much like information in facebook about your personal life is pushed into your home feed. Salesforce Chatter helps you keep on top of the things in your work life, in real-time. So that you can take action, be informed, gain more insights around what's happening at work.

You can see a nice 3 minute video below that explains more. Hope this helps

Salesforce Chatter
http://www.salesforce.com/video/chatter.jsp?t=Chatter_Overview_Demo&v=puydh-e...

Chatter is an internal collaboration tool - essentially a Twitter for your employees. Chatter CANNOT go beyond the firewall of both the salesforce.com platform, nor can it actually be used to collaborate WITH customers (just about them with co-workers).

It could be used to pull data about customers via facebook connect or Twitter API - but that would be all after-the-fact useless data for any real time process. But it could power a knowledgebase or other "audit trail" around a CRM process.

All in all - a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, to quote Macbeth...SugarCRM for example has had a more robust version of Chatter called Sugar feeds for two years prior to Chatter that it gives away free (disclosure - I work for SugarCRM) but never made a big deal out of it because it is not really "social CRM"

And really, salesforce.com sells mostly to small businesses. Their "collaboration tools" or "chatter" is just that: yelling over the walls of their cubes.

The Chatter idea is ultimately underwhelming at this point.

Chatter improves enterprise productivity and it's fun to use. I've been using Chatter since February 2010 it has helped me do my job better countless times because I'm more closely connected with colleagues and coworkers who have valuable information that I need. It also reduces email traffic which is definitely an added bonus. Our experience using Chatter is that it makes our company more collaborative, friendly, accessible, and productive. Once you get hooked on collaborating and problem solving with Chatter, I'm afraid you can never go back to the old way of working.

Real time enterprise collaboration is an excellent communication vehicle that capitalizes on consumer collaboration trends like Twitter. For an enterprise it needs to be secure, manage and controlled. This trend reminds me a lot of instant messaging. First it was AIM, Yahoo and etc. and that penetrated the enterprise space. Folks like Jabber, Facetime, Omnipod and others came in and made IM communication safe, managed and controlled.

Enterprise collaboration goes beyond simple messaging and adds document sharing, grouping, broadcasting, etc. We are seeing a lot of success from a client of ours called Intridea and their product Present.ly. It is Twitter for the Enterprise and could be run both behind the firewall (for the really security conscience) as well as through SaaS. Check it out as they have a free trial. You are not at all limited to a single domain or enterprise as the Administrator could invite folks from all over to participate in the conversation.

Evan

You can upload a document or file, or attach a proposal to a certain account. That’s a valuable time and resource saver over having to e-mail an attachment with an updated document to everyone on the project who might need access.

Chatter is a modern collaboration product that's private and secure for your business.
Learn more, watch videos, and check out some great customer examples here:
http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/gettingstarted/