Salesforce.com beefs up social networking tools

Salesforce.com is turning its Chatter feature, a Facebook-like tool for business, into a mobile application. Meanwhile, the company is also integrating Chatter with a real-time social networking app for consumers from Seesmic. It is the kind of marriage between consumer and business technologies that some industry experts predict we will see much more often.  

Calling the integration of Chatter and Seesmic "one of the slickest and most seamless integrations I've yet seen of the realtime social web and enterprise worlds," Mike Butcher at TechCrunch offers some examples of how it will work. In a nutshell, it will enable employees using Salesforce to have internal and external conversations at the same time. For example, if someone is using Salesforce on Seesmic, he could "push" a Twitter message onto the Chatter wall of an internal colleague, such as a sales rep. "The upshot is a great ability to respond, in real-time, to social conversations around brands or products," Butcher writes.

The mobile Chatter app, available for a host of devices, will allow users to share data and collaborate in real time. If a colleague posts an update or makes a remark in a conversation, users receive an alert, and they can add their own comments as well. Nearly 25 percent of Salesforce.com's customers are already using Chatter, making it likely that employees will be quick adopters of the mobile app as well, writes Cody Barbierri at VentureBeat.

For more:
- Mike Butcher's post at TechCrunch
- Cody Barbierri's post at VentureBeat

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