Sounds like Marc Benioff believes in Yammer
At the end of a long post on TechCrunch, Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce pushes his own platform’s version of Yammer – Salesforce Chatter…
Now, we need to take this idea to our businesses. We need to transform the business conversation the same way Facebook has changed the consumer conversation. Market shifts happen in real time, deals are won and lost in real time, and data changes in real time. Yet the software we use to run our enterprises is in anything but real time. We need tools that work smarter, make better use of new technology (like the mobile devices in everyone’s hands), and fully leverage the opportunities of the Internet.
New realtime cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure offer the path to redefine the future of collaboration. Now in beta, Salesforce Chatter takes the best of Facebook, Twitter, and other social leaders, for instance, and applies it to enterprise collaboration—making people more productive and businesses more competitive. I already see it working: I have an enterprise desktop where without any effort I can learn about what my team is focusing on, how my projects are progressing, and what deals are closing. It is fundamentally changing the way our organization collaborates on product development, customer acquisition, and content creation—making it all easier than ever before.
We are on the precipice of a major shift in our industry. It stems from a change we badly needed and the once-in-a-decade question we had to ask. And this time, we are all ready for the answers.
Well, ok. I get it that quite a bit of interesting information can be collected and generated through the salesforce product or yammer interally at a company (interestingly, though I think you need an Autonomy or Google installation to tease out useful info from that data at the end of it). I guess this lines up with The Dachis Groups’ general beliefs (where I tend to disagree with them is on the tools they suggest will be used and the openness which is required to really embrace all of this cloud sourcing). But at the end of the day, the efficiency gains are going to be tough to measure. You will have 2-3% of the people in your company really contributing to the chatter; are they really the most productive? Will they be after they generate all this noise? Will the chatter really improve internal business communication? Possibly. Jury is out.