Business Email On Life Support ? Enter Salesforce.com Chatter

Let's face it, email has become an extremely undisciplined form of collaborative communication for organizations. From my own experience I see it every day. It starts with a question or comment, copied among a group, and then spreads, unknowingly, to become a waste of resources and time. What to do ? Well we've all been participating increasingly with social networks and there are a lot of potential there. Its just that organizations using social networks haven't been able to leverage their potential as efficiently as they could be until the advent of tools like salesforce.com's chatter.

Salesforce.com announced at its Dreamforce event in San Francisco this past week something called Chatter, a "collaboration cloud" platform that integrates social network features. Chatter proposed to bring the flexibility and ease of use found in applications such as Facebook to businesses, enabling feeds from business applications, content and users that can be followed, profiled and shared. Salesforce.com plans to begin offering Chatter in 2010. The end of email as the mainstream method of communicative collaboration is approaching.

Facebook Exceeds 300 Million - What Does It Mean ?

Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that its online community crossed the 300 million user threshold, equaling the approximate size of the US population. About 70 percent of Facebook's users are outside the U.S., according to statistics posted by the company. Facebook says its fastest-growing demographic is people older than 35.

Facebook's growth reflects a tipping point for web 2.0 tools and its implications are far reaching for organizations, as consumer driven platforms will increasingly shape our world. With integrated voice chat coming soon to the platform, even more rapid evolution is inevitable. In Fortune's recent interview, CEO Sheryl Sandberg, reveals the rise of advertising revenues and users using the Facebook tool. She points out that you are seeing the beginning of what advertising is becoming - "part of the user experience".

One cannot underestimated the implications of Web 2.0 tools, which Facebook is. These tools and their users will redefine the constructs of markets and fuel business innovation opportunities. Truth is their adoption is just beginning and the tools will evolve rapidly with other even more powerful platforms like WAVE coming soon.

Three key points for organization's to keep in mind when employing these tools were brought to light in a recent article by Udayan Banerjee, The 3 Faces of Web 2.0, and are outlined below. When exploring Web 2.0 potential, its important to keep these points in mind.

1. Remember You Are Interacting with an Enlightened Consumer

“…the new consumer has grown up with brand new perspectives and redefined the interplay of communications, relationships, brands, technology and media.” – from Five Rules to Engaging a New Breed of Consumer

2. Adopting An Open Collaboration Platform Requires New Disciplines

“…make the corporate intranet into constantly changing structure built by distributed, autonomous peers – a collaborative platform that reflects the way work really gets done.” – from Enterprise 2.0: Dawn of Emergent Collaboration

3. Monetizing the Collective Intelligence of Users

“…collective Intelligence draws on this to enhance the social pool of existing knowledge.” – from Collective Intelligence page of Wikipedia