With the explosion of social media channels, companies need to think about how they can share social media guidelines and best practices with their employees. Starting this week, we will bring you a series of posts from our own Salesforce Social Playbook. Check back weekly for new entries and let us know your thoughts. To learn more about the goals and development of this playbook, check out our video story.

A social revolution is taking place today. We see examples of people using social media to power movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. We saw what happened at Oracle OpenWorld. We saw customer darlings like Netflix fall out of grace because of big social media blunders. Overall, the acronym S-O-C-I-A-L tells the story of 2011.  

The power of this social revolution becomes even clearer if we take a look at the stats. We are seeing a broad shift in Internet usage from search engines to social sites like Facebook and YouTube. Nearly a quarter of all page views on the internet are generated by Facebook. Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world. People are accessing the Internet from mobile devices more than from desktops today, and this trend will continue. Inevitably, social networking technologies are transforming the way we live, work, buy, and, as a business, the way our customers engage with us.


Salesforce.com was “born cloud” in 1999 -- long before the era of social media dominance. For the first 10 years, we championed cloud computing and transformed the industry. We were the protagonist against the like of Oracle and Microsoft, calling for the End of Software. One of our videos called “What is Cloud Computing?” has defined the industry and positioned Salesforce as the recognized market leader.

In the past few years salesforce.com has been “re-born social.” Inspired by the transformative power of social media, our CEO Marc Benioff coined the “the Facebook Imperative” in a TechCrunch post. It consisted of a simple question, “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?” – collaborative, mobile and open. This insight compelled us to transform our businesses, and ultimately led us to develop tools such as Chatter and social business apps.

Most recently, we introduced our customers to a even more ambitious vision – the Social Enterprise. This is the concept that a company should be social inside and out and use open, mobile and collaborative platforms to engage with employees and customers. You can see some examples of how this has worked for brands such as Burberry, NBC, Rossignol, HP, and Kimberly-Clark.

These have been just the first steps of social journey. Now tell us about yours!

How has the power of social technologies changed your business? Do you have any examples of how social media has influenced your customers?

--Learn more about the playbook project and what is to come by watching the video below--