Salesforce.com has learned a number of lessons from the social network, and it shows in its enterprise applications.

Facebook is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, and the milestone put Saleforce.com within the mood to touch upon the social network’s impact on enterprise software.

It was five years ago that Saleforce.com CEO Marc Benioff told top managers that he wanted them all to get on Facebook because, he said, “here’s the direction we have to elect the software we bring to our customers,” recounts Peter Coffee, some of the executives who attended the meeting.

That directive soon ended in a public “Facebook Imperative” blog by Benioff and was followed later in 2010 by the introduction of Salesforce Chatter, the collaborative social feed and micro-blogging tool since exposed pervasively through the vendor’s applications and platform.

You could say, “and anything else is history,” but that wouldn’t really capture the level to which Salesforce.com has embraced the Facebook way, in step with Coffee, VP of strategic research and Marc Benioff’s usual warmup act at events starting from Dreamforce to Cloudforce to this year’s Salesforce1 World Tour. In spite of everything, what enterprise software vendor hasn’t since added Facebook-feed-style interfaces to its applications?

[ Maybe Salesforce.com doesn’t desire to follow in these footsteps: Read “10 Famous Facebook Flops.” ]

“We didn’t merely create a medium for private conversation and laminate that on top of the enterprise software suite,” says Coffee in a phone interview with InformationWeek. “The material of that collaboration was woven in from the very bottom of the platform, so we’re ready to make it scalable and we’re capable of have entities like processes or accounts or external events in ERP or financial systems manifest as an update in a Facebook-like environment,” says Coffee.

Point taken, but many other vendors — whether it’s Infor with its Ming.le application or Oracle and SAP with their more recently added collaborative layers — also will let you join events, accounts, suppliers, and processes in addition to people.

A second way within which Salesforce.com stands proud, says Coffee, is that it’s “turning the siloes inside out,” so it is not treating them like three different entities when they’re speaking to sales, marketing, and repair.

“By way of our multi-tenant architecture we’re ready to do some extent of unification of the view of the shopper not just contained in the company, but bringing within the customer’s behavior — when the client chooses to act in public — on social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook,” Coffee says.

This is unquestionably much harder to do (and it potentially touches at the third rail called privacy concerns), but to perform that Salesforce.com acquired Radian6, which a lot of its customers are using as a platform for social-monitoring and engagement applications.

“We expect it’s really important to answer people within the channel within which they approach you because that is the channel of communication they apparently prefer [rather than, say, the company call center] and, two, because your active response is now at the same stage, so their followers are accustomed to your response.”

Here, too, Salesforce.com isn’t totally unique, technically, as Oracle and SAP have social monitoring and sentiment-analysis capabilities in addition to social tools. But we do hear many more real-world examples of Salesforce.com’s social tools actually in use — whether at American Red Cross, Citi, Dell, or Toyota.

The third way by which Salesforce.com is following Facebook’s lead — and it is important and unique to Salesforce.com — is in presenting itself as a platform as opposed to a cloud-based application suite. Just as Facebook encouraged other content, application, and experience creators to deliver their ideas within Facebook and extend that environment, Salesforce.com has done the similar with its AppExchange and Force.com platform.

“The community started small, however it builds and builds on itself to the purpose where now, almost every body of our major customers uses the phrase ‘Salesforce is our platform’ spontaneously in conversations,” says Coffee. “Five years ago or maybe three years ago, that was not the case.”

There are hints of this type of approach with what SAP is doing with what it now calls “The Hana Cloud Platform,” but it’s miles from realizing this type of network effect that Salesforce.com has seen with Force.com.

In the fourth and most-recent way during which Salesforce.com is following Facebook’s footsteps, Coffee says the current Salesforce1 push is absolutely not unlike Facebook’s emphasis over the past year on improving mobile capabilities.  

“We’ve redoubled our efforts on mobile to the purpose where i’m able to now say that our mobile clients evolve three to ten times faster than do our desktop clients,” says Coffee. “That’s crucial in an atmosphere where people treat their mobile as their primary tool for running their lives and getting work done.”

Too many companies treat digital and mobile strategies as pet projects. Listed here are four ideas to shake up your organization. Also within the Digital Disruption issue of InformationWeek: Six enduring truths about selecting enterprise software. (Free registration required.)

Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of … View Full Bio

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