Monday, February 02, 2009
Narinder Singh
Today, Appirio released our new Referral Management Solution. You may have seen some of the positive coverage of the product already, but we wanted to provide a deeper look into why we created it and why it's so valuable for helping enterprises connect with customers, partners and employees in a Web 2.0 world.
In a world that is more interconnected than ever and that offers more information than people can actually consume, the commercial value of 'friendship' and word of mouth referrals is at an all time high. This is why LinkedIn has become such a boon to recruiters looking to fill open job positions. Why enterprises are investing in social software both inside and outside company walls. And why recent PEW research shows an increasing number of adults choosing to join Facebook, which is already up to 150 million users and growing every day.
Over the past two years, Facebook has become the medium for keeping large networks of people up-to-date on your life. Facebook is a different animal than LinkedIn, where user profiles are mainly updated only when someone is looking for a job change. On Facebook, contacts are kept up-to-date on your life by default - the events you're going to, what you're reading, your personal and professional interests and more. This, combined with a more open approach to interfacing with other applications, ultimately makes Facebook a better opportunity for companies looking to tap into the value of these networks to hire new employees, spread the word about new offers, build brands or solidify relationships.
HOWEVER, there must be a careful balance in tapping into the commercial value of a friendship. In the physical world, we are appreciative when a friend recommends a potential career connection, a valuable discount, or a product they think you might like. Yet we can feel repulsed when we know someone is using the guise of friendship just to try to get something out of us. Interacting with online social networks requires preserving the same level of trust and integrity.
That's why when Appirio created our Referral Management Solution, we had two key prerequisites: to maintain the trust inherent in these social networks and to provide relevant value to users (as well as companies). This is why we designed our solution to:
In a world that is more interconnected than ever and that offers more information than people can actually consume, the commercial value of 'friendship' and word of mouth referrals is at an all time high. This is why LinkedIn has become such a boon to recruiters looking to fill open job positions. Why enterprises are investing in social software both inside and outside company walls. And why recent PEW research shows an increasing number of adults choosing to join Facebook, which is already up to 150 million users and growing every day.
Over the past two years, Facebook has become the medium for keeping large networks of people up-to-date on your life. Facebook is a different animal than LinkedIn, where user profiles are mainly updated only when someone is looking for a job change. On Facebook, contacts are kept up-to-date on your life by default - the events you're going to, what you're reading, your personal and professional interests and more. This, combined with a more open approach to interfacing with other applications, ultimately makes Facebook a better opportunity for companies looking to tap into the value of these networks to hire new employees, spread the word about new offers, build brands or solidify relationships.
HOWEVER, there must be a careful balance in tapping into the commercial value of a friendship. In the physical world, we are appreciative when a friend recommends a potential career connection, a valuable discount, or a product they think you might like. Yet we can feel repulsed when we know someone is using the guise of friendship just to try to get something out of us. Interacting with online social networks requires preserving the same level of trust and integrity.
That's why when Appirio created our Referral Management Solution, we had two key prerequisites: to maintain the trust inherent in these social networks and to provide relevant value to users (as well as companies). This is why we designed our solution to:
- Give the user full control over every decision to make a referral. The user decides whether to install the application and when to act on recommendations that the app surfaces in Facebook. This SlideShare presentation on the solution describes in more detail how this works.
- Encourage people to make referrals because they make sense, not simply for the reward. The application helps make recommendations that are most relevant to your friends. After all, it's the quality of the product, service or offering that will ultimately determine how often it's referred and who chooses to act on it.
Appirio's new solution is designed to help companies tap into the commercial value of friendships by incorporating the use of social networks in a mature and responsible way. The days of email spam, where marketers send thousands of useless emails with abysmal response rates are (hopefully) fading. For despite generating a return for the spammer, the net result of mass email on the entire community of recipients is decidedly negative. We instead relate our solutions to a next-generation Nielsen. Without interfering with the experience of the end-user, we allow them to make judgments on what they are seeing and make referrals to their friends.
For these types of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns to work, we also believe it's important for companies to have a way to manage and measure the effectiveness of their approach. Our new solution looks to address this issue by providing the ability to understand how your users talk about your product through recommendations, and offering native integration to back-end enterprise systems so companies can quantitatively measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.
We hope Appirio's Referral Management Solution can help people find jobs, learn about products and services their friends love, and allow companies to listen better to their customers, partners and employees. After all, those attributes are as timeless as the value of friendship itself.
For these types of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns to work, we also believe it's important for companies to have a way to manage and measure the effectiveness of their approach. Our new solution looks to address this issue by providing the ability to understand how your users talk about your product through recommendations, and offering native integration to back-end enterprise systems so companies can quantitatively measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.
We hope Appirio's Referral Management Solution can help people find jobs, learn about products and services their friends love, and allow companies to listen better to their customers, partners and employees. After all, those attributes are as timeless as the value of friendship itself.
Labels: appirio, facebook, LinkedIn, salesforce.com
Sunday, December 21, 2008
2009 Prediction: Enterprises will figure out how to use social networks in the right way
Prediction #9 in our series of 2009 predictions...covered out of order due to New York Times Blog coverage.
2008 recap: In 2008, social networks exploded in popularity, but remained almost entirely a consumer phenomenon: 2008 was the year where social networking was more popular than online pornography... "In 2008, if you're not on a social networking site, you're not on the internet," wrote the Interactive Advertising Bureau. But while 96% of Millennials / Gen Y had joined a social network by the end of 2008, only 57% of overall internet users did. And while there were over 50,000 applications written on the Facebook platform, nearly none help people be more effective at work.
2009 prediction:
In 2009, we predict that companies will finally figure out how to use social networks in the right way: by building up (NOT undercutting) the trust between employees and their friends. Your employees already use social networks to connect and exchange information with others in their personal life... there's no reason that this trend would stop at the office door. In 2009, you'll see HR, marketing, and sales organizations at leading companies capture real business benefits from effective, trust-based use of the social networks of their employees:
The underlying reason that social networks are valuable in the enterprise is simple: people trust their friends. Messages that come through personal connections will always have a higher impact than corporate messages conveyed through traditional advertising. This is what gives social networks such potential for viral sales, marketing, and recruiting.... and why maintaining the integrity and trust of the social network is so important. Companies who want to use the social graph effectively need to understand 3 core principles of social networking in the enterprise:
2009 prediction:
In 2009, we predict that companies will finally figure out how to use social networks in the right way: by building up (NOT undercutting) the trust between employees and their friends. Your employees already use social networks to connect and exchange information with others in their personal life... there's no reason that this trend would stop at the office door. In 2009, you'll see HR, marketing, and sales organizations at leading companies capture real business benefits from effective, trust-based use of the social networks of their employees:
- Find and attract great talent for your company by encouraging viral employee referrals
- Create a "virtual account team" of friends inside and outside your company as you approach strategic accounts
- Virally promote activities your employees, customers, and partners are excited about
The underlying reason that social networks are valuable in the enterprise is simple: people trust their friends. Messages that come through personal connections will always have a higher impact than corporate messages conveyed through traditional advertising. This is what gives social networks such potential for viral sales, marketing, and recruiting.... and why maintaining the integrity and trust of the social network is so important. Companies who want to use the social graph effectively need to understand 3 core principles of social networking in the enterprise:
- The world doesn't need "yet another" social network: Social networks benefit from increasing returns to scale. The larger the network, the richer and more valuable the connections between its members. That's why efforts to create "behind the firewall" social networks have failed. Even the largest companies are too small to sustain the diversity of social connections required to rival the level of interactivity of a public service like Facebook. Companies need to acknowledge that the most valuable social networks live outside their firewall, and that making the most of the social graph requires reaching out, not
replicating within. - Lines are blurring between work and play: Many of us would like a clear line between our work life and our personal life....including a separation in these two social networks. But this separation isn't sustainable, and is already starting to break down. One example: our grad school classmates initially connected on Facebook--- even though we are all now doing business together, we still use Facebook to stay in touch. Functionality wise, there's no reason not to (Facebook's interaction is just as effective with work friends). And in any case, services like FriendFeed and Ping.fm make the notion of a separate, disconnected personal social network quaint. What does this mean? Companies need to get used to doing business on Facebook, and seeing personal information on LinkedIn. Employees need to get better using the capabilities these services offer to show different things to different friends. But at the end of the day, people are people, whether at work or at play-- there's no such thing as a purely social network.
- Employees own their social network, not their employers: Every marketing organization salivates over the prospect of privileged access to Facebook's 120 M users. But effective use of social networks requires an understanding that employees own their social networks, and will only allow their employer access if there's a clear value proposition to them AND their friends. The New York Times wrote up Appirio's Jobs4myFriends Facebook application, calling out the risks of inappropriately using an employee's social network. We couldn't agree more: that's why recruiting is such a great use case for an enterprise Facebook app--- our application puts control in the hands of employees, allowing them to refer friends they’d love to work with. YOU choose whether or not to refer a friend for a job, and your company will never see anything about your friends that isn’t public. Establishing this trust is critical to bringing social networks into the enterprise.
What do you think?
Which of our predictions do you agree or disagree with? Please let us know by voting in our poll or commenting below.
Which of our predictions do you agree or disagree with? Please let us know by voting in our poll or commenting below.
Labels: 2009-Predictions, enterprise 2.0, facebook, remove, social networking
Monday, December 08, 2008
Force.com for Google App Engine: Apps "Native" to a Cloud Community
Ryan Nichols
1. Force.com for Google App Engine is a natural extension of Salesforce's strategy to “Connect the Cloud.” We’ve already talked about why we’re so excited about Salesforce’s recent partnership with Amazon and Facebook, and the deepening relationship with Google. If you've been reading this blog or following Appirio's own news over the last year, it's clear we share Salesforce’s vision of “connecting the cloud.” (And we’re flattered that Salesforce has adopted our term so enthusiastically!). Today's integration with Google App Engine takes that idea to the next level-- highly scalable, consumer-focused web applications built on App Engine fully integrated with Force.com.
2. Force.com checkout is a natural extension of Salesforce's strategy to encourage "Native" Apps. Salesforce rightly argues that there’s something unique about applications that run entirely on Force.com. Force.com is a powerful, trusted platform, and there’s a confidence that customers can have in applications that rely on that technology. That’s why Appirio has built dozens of custom applications for our customers entirely on Force.com, offers several 100% native apps, and strives to have all of our products that interact with Salesforce run native functionality.
Here's the power of the Salesforce platform strategy: Salesforce customers can now have the best of both worlds. Salesforce is combining the strengths of multiple, complementary, on-demand platforms, delivered through applications that customers can trust.
2. Force.com checkout is a natural extension of Salesforce's strategy to encourage "Native" Apps. Salesforce rightly argues that there’s something unique about applications that run entirely on Force.com. Force.com is a powerful, trusted platform, and there’s a confidence that customers can have in applications that rely on that technology. That’s why Appirio has built dozens of custom applications for our customers entirely on Force.com, offers several 100% native apps, and strives to have all of our products that interact with Salesforce run native functionality.
Here's the power of the Salesforce platform strategy: Salesforce customers can now have the best of both worlds. Salesforce is combining the strengths of multiple, complementary, on-demand platforms, delivered through applications that customers can trust.
Here's why this is so remarkable: there are many types of applications that Salesforce is very good at supporting. There are other applications for Salesforce customers that wouldn't be effective to build entirely on Force.com. Salesforce.com recognizes this, and partners with Google, Amazon, and Facebook to create a "virtual platform" for the entire industry. This is game changing - and should scare the daylights out of the old big four of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM.
Each of these on-demand platforms have different and complementary strengths:
- Force.com excels at modeling business processes, workflow and UI
- Google excels at scalable, consumer-focused applications that extend its strengths in communication, collaboration, search, and advertising
- Amazon excels at highly scalable low-level computing power and storage
- Facebook excels at viral applications that leverage a user’s social graph and its community of 120M+ participants
Salesforce knows this--they formed these partnerships to differentiate from the isolation of legacy "platforms." Salesforce customers know this—that’s why they are eager to use applications that bring together the best of multiple platforms. Just look at the number one app on Appexchange (Appirio’s Calendar Sync for Google Apps) as well as 5 of the other top 10 on Appexchange. These solutions draw on the capabilities of the Salesforce, Google, AND Amazon platforms. That’s what customers want and need, and Salesforce is in a unique position to deliver on this promise.
After all, there is still a huge difference between an AppExchange application that largely runs on a server under my desk (of course, not native) and a Force.com application like Appirio Calendar Sync that runs certain intense computations on Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine. One is running on a set of trusted platforms, the other is not. There is real value in Salesforce working with partners to build stable connections with trusted on-demand platforms, and recognizing applications that take advantage of these platforms in a way that customers can have confidence in.
Today's announcement of integration between Google App Engine and Force.com enables a new class of applications that are "native" to a community of trusted cloud providers. And at the end of the day this will be one of the key ways Salesforce will distinguish its own on-demand platform from that of Microsoft…. Look for an upcoming blog post on "Microsoft—is it lonely up there in your Azure cloud?”
Labels: Amazon Web Services, AppExchange, Cloud Computing, facebook, Force.com, Google, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, On Demand, PaaS, SaaS, salesforce.com
Monday, November 03, 2008
Salesforce and Facebook: Connecting the Cloud
We loved today's virtual bear hug between Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and Sheryl Sandburg of Facebook at Dreamforce. It reminded us of the embrace between Marc and Eric Schmidt of Google back in April, for a couple of reasons:
- Another cloud to connect: There are 110 million active users of Facebook... many of these people also find time to work in between their wall postings. Facebook is an open, on-demand application platform, much like Force.com.
- Further consumerization of enterprise IT: Consumers have become accustomed to using the incredible power of social networks to connect with old friends and family in their personal life. Now, with Salesforce and Facebook together, these same people can use the power of this same social network to get their job done.
- Not just demos: People have talked about bringing the social network to the enterprise every day since "Enterprise 2.0" hit the radar. But today's announcement went further-- we saw real business scenarios with the potential to create enormous value for the enterprise. We are thrilled to be part of all this-- we built the recruiting scenario shown by Marc and Sheryl on stage. This is a preview of an application we think every HR head needs to consider.
Labels: cloud, Dreamforce, facebook, keynote, salesforce
Narinder Singh
In today's keynote and as reported recently, salesforce.com released the capability to create and run web based apps available to those outside of your company. There were a ton of cool demonstrations shown today and we built many of them (Harrah's, Facebook). We'll highlight those in our Dreamforce Central Blog, but we want to focus on a more subtle point - the rate of innovation and the pace at which it impacts customers.
1. The high rate of innovation of salesforce.com (and other cloud providers) - Two years ago it was Apex code, that allowed real business logic; last year it was Visual Force, that allowed full control over the user experience; this year they announce salesforce sites; allowing you take your apps and expose part or all of them to web users. No enterprise software vendor has come close to matching this pace over the same period of time.
2. The rate at which innovations actually impact customers - In typical on-premise software, even cool new things will require a generation to get into the hands of customers. Already 11 million of Apex Code and more than 50,000 Visual Force pages have been written by salesforce.com customers. We have used both with more than 50 enterprise customers in mission critical apps.
The fact that these two factors can occur while reducing overall IT costs at first glance seems like black magic. But this is in fact the ultimate testament to how different cloud computing is from old world and how far Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and others have to come. You can get started with trying out salesforce and getting started with a trial of all of this in 60 seconds.
How long will it take the others to match that? We have always been fans of cloud computing, but even I sit back stunned at how far the gap is between the old world and the new
Labels: Amazon Web Services, facebook, Force.com, harrah's, salesforce.com
