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August 31 2011 - Inbox webcomic - Write Comment
If you did not know before August 30th 2011, you do now. Salesforce is making everything they do about using social media to better serve their customers and partners. It is all about their Social Enterprise and the Mobile Cloud.
While we have been trumpeting the need to integrate business with the critical mass of social media, they have the billions to put some power behind it. And frankly, I say BRAVO!
Why?
Because it is not just the question of getting it right. It is not about which one of us makes the best online collaboration tool (Pssst, it is us). It is about making sure that the entire business community sees that through the progression of the mobile, the growth of the web and the elimination of silos of data (the anti-cloud), we can make work easier for all.
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When Foursquare’s phenomenal growth hit the papers, everybody started looking for a reason. Why would anybody want to check in his location on a phone?
It was widely attributed to their badges and rewards. While checking in had some value per se, by letting others know where you are or keeping a bookmark of that place, Foursquare encouraged users to play: you can become the mayor of places you visit often (competing against other users), and you can obtain badges for different events (super-user, crunked, adventurer, etc).
As with every success story, others tried to understand and emulate.
Researchers dug into the topic, attracting mass media’s interest.
Blog posts and talks covered the topic of “gamification”, the most famous being Jesse Schell’s “when games invade real life” talk and SCVNGR’s presentation. Considerable buzz about it is still going on.
Last week I had a harsh dose of reality. I have a customer who had cut a purchase order and was ready to procure our services. Sounds great, right? It was. It felt pretty good when I first got the PO. These guys promised it would be in my hands day after day. We were coming into the end of the month and I was beginning to believe I would never receive it. Sure enough, it showed up in my inbox. Soon thereafter the e-mails and incessant phone calls would begin. Ordinarily this would not be such a big deal but in this instance the customer is in India, I am in California and our developers are in Spain. I would get an answer, wait for the call from India, relay answers to the customer and receive a new question for the engineers in Spain. This happened several times in a 24-ho
ur period. The waiting game was a nightmare.
I think any salesperson can relate to this reality. It’s the common “everybody in the boat rowing” mentality and I am happy to be the intermediary; ESPECIALLY when there is a larger deal on the horizon. So I happily answered the 1:00am phone calls from India and chatted with the engineers just hours later in Spain. It is not a huge deal until you realize how much time is being wasted and little is being accomplished.
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