Salesforce CEO Benihoff urges social enterprise adoption

Hype around the so-called "social enterprise" seems to be building on a weekly basis, and one of this week's top contributors to the enthusiasm is Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, who told attendees at the company's user conference that companies need to integrate social networking into their corporate enterprises or risk failure.

What he more specifically told the 45,000 attendees of the Dreamforce event was that the corporate equivalent of an "Arab Spring" could be on its way for CEOs who don't adopt social networking into their enterprises, a sort of awkward comparison unless your CEO really is a dictator.

Some of the urgings around the social enterprise movement sounds like the same stuff we heard in the late 1990s about the Internet in general: Figure out how it affects your business, or else your competitor will first and use it against you. It is hard to imagine there are that many companies left that don't interface with their customers and others through social networking, though Benihoff's broader point may that it need to be integral and not just for show.

Salesforce.com has been putting its money where Benihoff's mouth is. Back in 2009, it integrated Twitter into its cloud service offering. The company also has invested in its own enterprise-focused social network called Chatter, with which it aims to helps business do things like host live chats, collect customer data, integrate with other social networking platforms and other functions. The company last week also partnered with social network Yammer, and it acquired social media monitoring company Radian6 last spring.

For more:
- read this San Francisco Chronicle story

Related articles:
Salesforce.com recently partnered with Yammer
Salesforce.com integrated with Twitter in 2009