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Burberry builds deeper customer connections, from the runway to the retail store.

There are few industries where “brand” matters more than in fashion. Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts gets it: “You have to be totally connected with everyone who touches your brand.” The iconic, beloved fashion brand embraces the Web and social media to extend the brand and engage with customers and fans in entirely new ways.

Burberry has been in business for 150+ years—today, Ahrendts and Burberry Creative Director Christopher Bailey are busy transforming the company to ensure it thrives for decades to come. “You have to create a Social Enterprise today. You have to. If you don’t do that, I don’t know what your business model is in 5 years.”

In addition to traditional media that has been a mainstay of fashion advertising and promotion for a century, Burberry is breaking new ground in social media. The brand has 10+ million Facebook followers and uses salesforce.com technology to power Burberry World, “the ultimate expression of the Burberry brand,” where visitors can “engage, entertain, and interact, as well as providing the ultimate online luxury shopping experience.”

Like so many great ideas in fashion, Burberry’s Social Enterprise started with a sketch

In this case, a sketch drawn by salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on a napkin during a meeting in New York hotel with Ahrendts and Burberry CTO John Douglas. The goal: total integration among the company, its employees, its customers, and the all-important brand.

“Our vision is that a customer has total access to Burberry, across any device, anywhere,” says Ahrendts. “They get exactly the same feeling of the brand and and feeling of the culture. Everyone can come to Burberry World and understand the journey that Burberry is on.”

Taking Healthcare Mobile.

Critical to success for Zimmer, a leading supplier of orthopedic devices, dental implants and related surgical products, is it’s close collaboration with healthcare professionals. But to continue its mission of improving the quality of life for its patients, the team needed to be able to deliver information to its teams in a timely and consistent manner. And Larry Siebs, Senior Vice President of America Sales knows that “Healthcare in general is going mobile. You can take it [devices] into an OR (operating room) you can take it around the halls of a hospital with you.”

To cater to that instant-on, instant-access need, “What we built in our mobile application was a very simple framework. And that whole thing was built in Force.com.” In collaboration with salesforce.com, Zimmer was able to build a mobile communication aid that allowed sales teams to take the latest technology and discuss it with surgeons and answer their questions with as simple as a point to a knee or a point to a hip to help them understand a new technique and give them the relevant product information.

“It’s all about patient comfort and patient care and making sure that we’re equipping that surgeon with the information and devices they need to be better at doing what they do every day.”

Akio Toyoda, CEO of Toyota, was looking to take the auto industry into the future.

Together, salesforce.com and Model Metrics deployed Toyota Friend, a private social network connecting Toyota customers with their cars, their dealership, and with Toyota based on Salesforce Chatter and connects to Facebook and Twitter. Toyota Friend provides a variety of product and service information as well as essential maintenance tips, creating a rich car ownership experience.

According to Akio Toyoda, “Social networking services are transforming human interaction and modes of communication. The automobile needs to evolve in step with that transformation. I am always calling for Toyota to make ever-better cars. The alliance that we announce today is an important step forward in achieving that goal.”