Last week, I attended Salesforce Training Boot Camp for new hires. Bluewolf was lucky enough to be one of the few Salesforce partners invited to this internal training event. During the 4 days of intense salesforce.com messaging sessions in San Mateo, I met about 90 new hires and was treated as one of the team. During Boot Camp, I became Social Enterprise Certified and Sales Cloud Certified. The process for both is to give a presentation, using a Salesforce deck, to top level executives at the company. Very nerve racking for sure! But, it was rewarding when I successfully passed both certifications. For the Social Enterprise Certifications, I was grouped into a team of 5 salesforce.com employees and 1 other partner. We had to get creative and come up with a Social Enterprise vision for a company. My team worked extremely hard on the presentation. It was great to work with such a passionate and fun group of people! 

 

So what does it mean to be a Social Enterprise? Maybe you have heard the phrase being tossed around amongst your peers. We know about using Twitter and Facebook within our own personal lives. And now, collaboration and social apps in the consumer market are driving what is happening in business. But, how can we communicate internally and externally to gain a complete view of our company and customer channels? Well, salesforce.com answers many of these questions in their new messaging.  

 

Collaborate Internally for a Holistic View of Your Company

Salesforce.com’s messaging begs management to ask questions about internal collaboration.  Many companies have trouble communicating internally--creating siloed departments and segmentation within the organization. Enter Chatter. By using this internal collaboration tool, now employees and departments can communicate with one another. New employees can follow seasoned company top performers to share best practices. Join conversations and tag content you like. With Chatter, every employee can have visibility into what each department is doing and what their peers are working on. 

 

Start a Conversation with your Customers

So now you have your employees talking internally, but how do you collaborate externally with your customers? This is the second piece of the Social Enterprise. Social networks, blogs, and Internet review boards are all central to how your customers are communicating. Do you know what they are saying? You can either sit back and watch them have a dialogue without you, or you can begin to have a dialogue WITH your customers. Your customers can then begin living YOUR brand message. By opening up the communication channels, you can start to define what that is.

 

Ensure that your Systems are Communicating 

And what about your systems? This is the third important takeaway about The Social Enterprise. How are you systems communicating? You are bringing your employees together and you are now beginning to have a dialogue with your customers. In order to maintain efficiency, it is imperative that your systems are in line with each other. Make sure to map your technology directly to your business processes, not the other way around. If your systems are in sync, it is much easier for your employees to streamline business practices on a daily basis.  Employ more single sign-on, integrate systems, and make sure your systems are reporting data to one another.  

 

This is the heart of what I learned at Boot Camp. It is imperative that enterprise organizations take a cue from how consumers are interacting. Social media is a very powerful communication channel and salesforce.com is trying to help companies harness the power of this medium to become better communicators - both internally and externally - so that they have more control over brand experiences. And salesforce.com did a great job of teaching this message to all of their new hires and partners. So stay tuned because you will be hearing a lot about the Social Enterprise!  

 

How social ready is your enterprise? Participate in our quick 8 question survey.