After a rather intense lead-up, Dreamforce 2011 is finally behind us – and what a show it was! 4 days, 45,000 registered attendees, Metallica, Will.i.am, MC Hammer, Alanis Morissette, Jay Leno, and on and on. This was one of the largest tech shows we've ever seen in terms of numbers, and the energy was amazing. 

We unveiled our ongoing message of building the "Mobile Social Enterprise," which focuses on enabling mobile access to social networks. We build Chatter and Facebook/Twitter into so many of our mobile apps that it only makes sense.

This of course matches up well with Salesforce's big unveil of the Social Enterprise. Take a look at Marc Benioff's presentation below to get a true sense for their vision of the future:

Creating energy in a call center has always been a challenge. Of course you can give extra incentives for certain KPI's, but oftentimes those incentives result in only a temporary upswing in agent motivation and performance, and may even have adverse effects.

What if we looked at the entire idea of incentives differently? What if the call center became a game and the operators were the players? Gamification is making its way to the enterprise and it starts with the support center.

In order to participate in the game you'll need an avatar.  Your avatar would participate in the game along with other agents. The concept of the game would be simple. Complete a mission – the agent’s task – and earn gems or badges.  

Badges would be earned for helping a peer, successfully handling a certain number of cases in a row, receiving a thumbs up on a knowledge article, or handling a certain number of calls for the day. The badges would appear as they earn them and their peers would see them on their team’s leader board.

Gems would be earned for larger tasks or achievements such as employee of the month, receiving customer accolades or publishing a knowledge article. Gems could be used to purchase items for your avatar. Over the course of time, successful agents will have a more "blinged out” avatar representing their accomplishments.

Game achievements can socially be shared across the company, using salesforce.com’s Chatter, a free feature of the Service Cloud.  Peers and members of the leadership team can "like" or comment on the agent’s success. The game provides a fun alternative for leadership, encourages peer-to-peer recognition and becomes a long term solution to increase call center productivity.   

The average age of a call center worker is 23, so the adoption of new technology and a gaming culture is a natural fit, however in order to drive desired results the implementation must be handled with care.  As a leader in cloud consulting Model Metrics is working with companies to integrate these solutions into feature rich support center solutions like salesforce.com's Service Cloud and adopt gamification into each company’s culture. 

Sound far-fetched? Check out Bunchball – you'll be surprised to learn it's already happening. The possibilities are endless when you integrate gamification into Salesforce.com's Service Cloud.

It's a game, it's social, it's fun…it's work?

Dreamforce this year was similar to past shows: exciting, a source of breaking news, and unbridled energy. But the scale of this year's show really set it apart from the past. As we understand it, there were nearly 28,000 attendees, an increase of nearly 50% on the year before. To say Salesforce is on a roll would be quite the understatement. 

This year Dreamforce focused heavily on what it calls Sales Cloud 2 and Service Cloud 2, representing the transition all of us are making from desktop or laptop computing to mobile computing. Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris made special note of this during the keynote, giving us a shout-out in the process for our dedication to mobile development:

Dreamforce this year also saw 2 other major announcements regarding database.com and Chatter. 

Chatter of course launched earlier to much fanfare as the first enterprise social network. Promising to improve collaboration and reduce email traffic, Chatter was already a success. The announcement at Dreamforce that Chatter is now free to all Salesforce customers will only serve to make the service more sticky. 

Database.com represents the next logical step for salesforce.com as a true infrastructure-as-a-service offering, bringing a cloud-based database to the masses. Since it is salesforce.com's database, it is already one of the largest enterprise databases with more than 20 billion records and an astounding 25 billion transactions per quarter. 

How many times have we heard, both in our personal and business lives, that good communication is key factor to success?  Sometimes this idea is discussed casually and never acted upon.  Despite the lack of attention that communication sometimes receives we have never had more opportunities, both personal and professional to ‘stay in touch’.  Smart phones, enabling both email and text messaging, are prevalent.  Communication mechanisms in the work place have never been more widespread either.  Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter seem to be taking over the world.  The challenge becomes how to effectively use each of these tools.

Model Metrics uses four main forms of digital communication: Phone, Email, Instant Message and Salesforce Chatter.  Phone and email uses are obvious (although it seems like more and more people are leveraging email when they should be using the phone).  Instant Message is extremely valuable for getting quick answers to urgent questions.  However, these three communication forms lack one key aspect; they are not good at socializing ideas or questions.  Phone and IM conversations are geared toward a single individual.  Email can certainly be ‘blasted’ to everyone in a company but our In Boxes are so overloaded these days that it is easy to ignore them.  Salesforce Chatter is proving to be a valuable collaboration tool that offers key features that these other communication vehicles do not have.  Chatter allows users to ‘target’ their questions or comments to other users who have the same interest / expertise.  It is very easy for users to pay attention to topics that pertain to them and to not waste valuable time on those topics that do not hold current value for them.  Searching for topics and answers is also a feature that is proving invaluable.  This information is available regardless of who posted it and how long ago it was socialized.

Effective Collaboration is key to an enterprise's success. All employees within a enterprise need to be able to collaborate at any given time on their projects. New ideas need to be socialized right away to increase competitiveness. Given that, having Chatter integrated with Model Metrics’ 2GO platform was a natural extension. This integration allows the end user to get a seamless experience to collaborate on their vertical, their accounts and other opportunities across the organization. Having project based groups allows field reps to stay updated and also respond quickly to changes. Location-aware mobile devices are allowing enterprise collaboration to extended even further. e.g. seeing a VP is in a city where you need a face presence with a client.

Model Metrics has been using Chatter since the start and its value and power were obvious from day one.  We've designed protocols on when to use IM, Email and Chatter so that we can gain maximum benefit from these valuable tools.  Chatter, because of its collaboration value, has quickly risen to the top as a cornerstone to productivity.  As one of the few selected Chatter experts we continuously provide advice about how the Collaboration Cloud can be leveraged in enterprises. 

I get bored. When I get bored I code. Here’s an example:

 

Two hours later I had this: 

Which is all about this: 

This is my two hour Salesforce Chatter Air Application. Its simple enough functionality wise, all it does is:

• Login into Salesforce using Username, Password, and Token
• Allows a user with the Chatter license to update their Chatter Status (see code snippet above)
• Allows a user to see their current status
• Allows a user to see and refresh manually their Chatter Feed

The reason I created this AIR Application a few months ago was simply to drive my own adoption of Chatter. I was so used to using Social Network services like Facebook and Twitter from AIR applications that I wanted to see the same from Chatter. The awesome thing is that coming in the Salesforce Winter 11 release is a Chatter AIR application that puts mine to shame.

What allowed me to build the application out in two hours was really two things: the fact that all you need to do to update your Chatter status is to update the CurrentStatus field on your User record and the ability to parse quickly through the FeedPosts, FeedComments and FeedTrackedChanges from my Users NewsFeed. 

After making sense of the Chatter object model and parsing through it I was able to take the Feeds and any subsequent data that was needed and insert it into a really simple Flex DataGrid. 

A few text boxes, buttons and a data grid later and boom, AIR Application.

Keep in mind that only API version 18 and above will have access the Chatter objects.

Now this is the part of the post where I would provide you source code, but that’s really not necessary. In the time between when I built this AIR application and now there have been a ton of resources here at http://developer.force.com/chatter. What they have there basically blows out the water what I have and with the new Chatter Visualforce components if you do want to build an application on the platform its very easy.

Working with Chatter is very simple. The Visualforce components that are coming out and the fact that you can simply post your status on your User object really made the whole experience very smooth. I urge all Force.com Developers to get into Chatters metadata and platform offerings and see what they can do with it.

Questions? Reach out to @ModelMetricsInc on Twitter. 

Have you ever had an experience where you see a new product and think, “I wish I would have thought of that.” This tends to happen when we see something that is so simple and so obvious, yet so remarkably useful that we can’t imagine how we got along with out it. Leonardo da Vinci said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” There is a lot of truth in that.

I had this experience about a year ago when I was first exposed to salesforce.com’s new Chatter product. Chatter is a social networking mechanism within salesforce.com that allows for powerful collaboration among the users of a salesforce instance. That is the simplicity, but the power and the implications are transformational.

Salesforce.com has a long history of taking the simplicity of the consumer web (e.g. eBay, Amazon, Google) and brining it to business. I heard a question posed years ago that asked “why is it that we have so many web-based tools that we can so easily use in our personal life, but when we go to work we are saddled with 10 year old technology?” Well, salesforce.com and other cloud computing vendors have addressed that issue by building intuitive, easily modifiable products that are capable enough to meet the needs of complex businesses. Chatter is the latest example of leveraging interactions akin to those of Twitter and Facebook, and applying the paradigm to business productivity. Brilliant!

As we look at how enterprises generally build their systems, they start with process. Process defines the tasks, decision points, inputs and outputs that an organization follows to get things done. Process provides structure and predictability, but is it really how things get done? What about informal conversations, one off ideas, and word of mouth? Don’t these things play a part in how things get done? Doesn’t productivity sometimes depend on whom you know rather than what you know?

The answer to these questions has generally been to initiate more process. If you have an interaction with a colleague or customer that you deem important, there must be a process to log that activity, develop a call report, or record an event. Problem solved. Or is it? Does anyone in your organization refer to the process manual every time they go to complete a task? What if there is no formal process?

The fact is that we need structure, but everything that we do cannot be dictated by structure or process. The conversations that occur within your organization aggregate to define the pulse of the company. How can we define a process that captures these conversations to make them useful? How do we get visibility and obtain real collaboration in a way that isn’t defined by process, but leverages the way that people naturally communicate? CHATTER!

Chatter allows organizations the ability to stop fighting the uphill battle of distilling unstructured data into information that can be readily understood. Instead, it allows for the free flow of real information in the form that is most consumable by the people that matter…your employees. It enables the “conversation” and the “pulse” of a company to be shared across geographies, across business functions, and across personal relationships without the need to run reports or do some other heavy analysis.

The value proposition around Chatter has only begun to be realized, but we can take a peek at the potential by looking at the likes of our companions in the consumer web space like Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. Social interaction is how business gets done, and now we have a technology that allows everybody’s voice to heard.

If you don’t follow salesforce.com closely, it’s probably because you’re not currently a user. That will probably change pretty soon. Investors in old technologies are getting worried, with Kaufman Brothers issuing a "Sell" rating on Accenture for that very reason. Cloud computing and SaaS (salesforce.com especially) are taking a significant bite out of the old giants.

On June 22 out in San Jose, salesforce.com is hosting a huge event called Cloudforce (which we’re sponsoring), where they will be unveiling the next nail in old-technology’s coffin: Salesforce Chatter. So why mention the investment worry over the old world of technology players?

Simple: the old guys just don’t get it.

There is an enormous revolution going on, and pretty much every person is taking part in it. Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. The social connections between individuals have exploded, and mobile access to these systems lets us plug in to those connections anywhere.

With Chatter, salesforce.com is now making the enterprise social. Everything you know and love about social media is now coming to your company, but only if you’re a salesforce.com user. Nobody else is doing this, and investors are paying attention and putting their money where their mouth is.

Salesforce has been on an absolute rocket ride, and that is showing no signs of changing any time soon. Maybe it’s about time you join the social revolution too.

Salesforce chatter has been gaining market buzz over the past month or so, especially after salesforce.com’s CEO, Marc Benioff posted a guest blog on TechCrunch on what he calls the "Facebook Imperative." His point wasn’t just to get people talking about his own social platform, but to make people realize just how far technology has come in the past 10 years.

Salesforce has always set out to make enterprise applications (the stuff you use at work) as easy to use as the applications and websites you use at home. Salesforce Chatter is going to do for the workplace what Facebook has done for personal communications. Things will move much more quickly and relationships will grow.

The ability to update your co-workers enmasse without spamming them and filling their already overfull inboxes represents the biggest difference between push and pull communications. Salesforce claims that since rolling out Chatter internally their email volume dropped by 40%. Imagine how much time that would save you in a given day!