Today at Dreamforce salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff welcomed more than 30,000 attendees to the Social Enterprise, the business strategy for the next decade of computing that bridges the divide between today’s social customers and the companies that cater to them.

The social revolution is here.  In a world where entire governments have been overthrown thanks to their citizens’ activism on Facebook, enterprises large and small are awakening to the reality that it’s no longer possible to operate in a world without social computing.

Facebook and its 750 million users have changed the way the world communicates.  In fact, Facebook is eating the web.  According to Nielsen Wire, 22 percent of all Internet time is social, while time spent on the rest of the web continues to decrease.  And the devices people use to access the Internet has also changed radically.  Between 2010 and 2011, the percentage of CIOs that allowed employee-owned tablets in their enterprises increased from 29 percent to 67 percent.  In one year.

The social revolution has created a social divide.  While customers live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and hundreds of other social networks, most companies are stuck in the past.  What are their customers ‘likes’ and wants?  What is the most important trending topic discussed by their customers on Twitter?  Who within the company has the best knowledge about important Customer X who’s looking for a deal on new Product Y?  Most companies have no clue.

The Social Enterprise is more than a catchphrase.  It’s an entire philosophy based on the premise that the world moving forward looks much more like Facebook than it does like Microsoft Outlook. The social divide has created a rift between your company and how you interact with your customers.  Here’s how salesforce.com will help your enterprise bridge the social divide.

Customer Social Profile – Know who you customers are. And also what they ‘Like.’

Salesforce.com now has more than 100,000 customers with more than 800 million contacts in its database.  Since Marc Benioff and his cofounders started salesforce.com 12 years ago, the core of this CRM data has been phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and physical addresses with call notes. But this is not the future of CRM.  The future is social, with data from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Customers today expect that the companies they work with know what they ‘like’ on Facebook, what they are saying on Twitter, who they are connected to on LinkedIn and more.  Now, hotels can monitor their guests’ Twitter feeds to help them plan their stays.  Airlines can discover what their customers like in order to help ease anxiety during a delay.  B2B sales reps can plan their next meeting with prospects -- whether a sports outing or a dinner -- based on their prospects’ interests.  In today’s world you need to know who your customers are and what they ‘like.’

When you know who your customers are, you can serve them better.  

Create an Employee Social Network

Today, it’s too hard to get the information we need.  Amid a sea of Intranets, corporate file servers, sales portals and e-mail archives, many employees are lost.  They don’t know who has the right information, they don’t have the right relationships, and often they don’t even know who to ask to get what they need.

But in a Social Enterprise, the information comes to you.  Why?  Because social networks, where everyone is connected, bring you the most important information about only the people and things that are most important to you.  No matter who has the answer, across all levels of the company, and even if you don’t know who to ask.

With Salesforce Chatter, your employees can collaborate across your company to connect with experts, stay informed, manage projects, and get more done.  And this year at Dreamforce we’re excited to announce Chatter Connect, Chatter Now, Chatter Customer Groups, and Chatter Approvals, which bring several new innovations to Chatter, including:

• Collaborative Forecasts: Help teams give the best forecast to management, with team and deal-by-deal adjustments - say goodbye to horrifying spreadsheets.
• Deal Rooms (Customer Groups): New customer groups let users connect and collaborate with customers and prospects during the sales process, as a trusted partner should.
• Social Contacts: Know customer questions, requests and 'likes’ on social media, before making that critical call.
• Dynamic Dashboard Filters & Mobile Dashboards:  Create a single view of the business and quickly toggle between products, regions, and operating groups on the fly.
• Salesforce for Outlook Task Sync & 2010 64-bit, with accelerators:  Salesforce for Outlook now syncs your tasks and is even faster and easier, with support for the 64-bit version of Outlook 2010.
• Chatter for Outlook:  Now users can put recent Chatter posts and context into Outlook - before emailing a colleague, users can know what he cares about.

KLM is listening to the relevant conversations, analyzing what its customers are saying, and marketing to its community.  KLM Surprise is only one small glimpse of what’s possible when companies engage over customer social networks.

Gatorade listens and engages with its customers via the Gatorade Social Monitoring Center, resulting in a 7 percent increase in sales and a 250 percent traffic increase in product education: