"Companies are wrestling with social media," says Kraig Swensrud, Salesforce.com's vice president of product marketing. "Many don't know how to interact with these sites yet, and as a result, they're losing touch with their customers. Today, it's not a matter of investing in the call center. They need to expand customer service to where they're communities are now living, which is places like Twitter, Facebook and Google."
A symbiotic relationship with the latter company began years ago, establishing Salesforce.com's first significant step in partnering with powerhouses on the consumer Web. In June 2007, Salesforce.com announced that its core customer relationship management (CRM) software, which is used by sales and marketing people to track their clients' information, could be used alongside Google Ad Words, which allows companies to advertise their products on Google by associating them with specific keywords.
In April 2008, the two companies announced that any customer of Salesforce.com could add Google Apps to their existing CRM software for free. Google Apps is Google's Web-based software for businesses (a competitive product to Microsoft Office) that includes Gmail and instant messaging, as well as basic productivity apps like Documents & Spreadsheets.
After its Google alignment, Salesforce.com felt emboldened to push further into the consumer Web. In November 2008, at Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco, the company's CEO Marc Benioff shared a stage with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, unveiling a product that allowed developers to build enterprise applications for Facebook using Salesforce.com technology.
While Facebook leaders remain consumer focused (and will for a long time), they welcomed the partnership as an acknowledgment that social technologies will change the way people consume and use technology at work. Because Salesforce.com was a pioneer of the idea that people could access business applications on the Web instead of installing them on their company's machines - a process often referred to as software as a service or cloud computing - its products became a logical fit for emerging technologies on the Web like Facebook.
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