Behind Your Business

Social networking has been the face of Web 2.0 for many years now. But until now the phrase has been synonymous with Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Despite the efforts of companies like LinkedIn to bring social networking into the business world, in many ways organizations have been slow to adapt to the new technology.

Salesforce.com wants to change that. Speaking to 19,000 attendees at the company's Dreamforce conference, CEO Marc Benioff announced Salesforce Chatter, a social-networking product for Salesforce customers.

"Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees?" Benioff asked. "Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me. My employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need."

Transforming Decision-Making

Why should businesses enable social networking, which to many people is the epitome of time-wasting Internet use? According to Salesforce's promotional materials, the "Collaboration Cloud" allows companies to "stay on top of everything that's happening in your company with real-time updates on people, groups, documents and your application data. And all of it will fuel better -- and faster -- business decisions."

Chatter features pretty much every trick in the social-networking toolbox, including profiles (Facebook), status updates (Twitter), Groups (Yahoo), feeds (RSS), collaborative documents (Google Docs), collaborative applications (Salesforce), as well as integration with Facebook, Twitter and Google directly.

So should small and midsize businesses rush out to add social networking to the mix? Maybe not so fast, Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT, said in a telephone interview. King pointed out that IBM beat Salesforce to the social-networking party with LotusLive, introduced in January.

Before launching the service, IBM deployed LotusLive internally to every employee around the globe for VoIP telephony and avatar-driven virtual meetings. IBM's work may represent the largest beta test ever of social networking in the enterprise and the jury is...