Salesforce announces brand new social initiatives, inside and out

When you think of Salesforce, you might not think of it as a social company. Its business products “in the cloud” store all of your business records, transactions, and notes.

However, with some recent acquisitions in the past six months, the company is calling this decade “the decade of social”. Smart move on its part, I have to say.

The company is hosting its Cloudforce conference today in San Francisco and is making some big announcements for customers who are currently using Salesforce products to run their business. The announcements center around making your business more social internally as well as turning the social on outside of the company, for consumers.

Rypple for Salesforce

With a heavy focus on making your entire company more social, Rypple is a company that lets you perform ongoing reviews with peers as well as “thank” them with custom badges for a job well done. It truly gamifies the workplace and that’s why Salesforce snapped up the small company last December.

Rypple tells us that its integration with Salesforce, which the company is announcing today, was built in just six weeks. It lets you use all of Rypple’s powerful social features alongside and within Salesforce services like Chatter.

There are some huge companies using Rypple right now to plan out projects and keep in touch in between meetings. Some of those companies are Facebook, LinkedIn, Spotify, and starting today, LivingSocial.

Rypple still exists as a stand-alone site and service, and it’s really worth taking a look at no matter how small or large your company is.

Site.com for Salesforce

If Rypple is social “inside”, Site.com is social “outside”. The service allows pretty much anyone create new mini-websites and landing pages with little or no coding required. Site.com has all of the tools that you’d expect from any WYSIWYG web publishing tool but it’s much more since you can pull data from anywhere within the Salesforce suite of products.

No database knowledge needed, just dragging and dropping fields, files, and photos:

For tech-savvy folks, this might not sound like a big deal, but for marketers who can’t wait around for developers to add content to a website, this is absolutely huge. Using all of the security features of Salesforce, administrators can choose who can update which pages.

Salesforce currently has over 100,000 customers, so when a company that big says that it’s time for social, people are going to listen. Here are just some of the products that the company offers to its customers:

● Salesforce Chatter, a secure, private social network for your business
● Salesforce Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and contact management
● Salesforce Service Cloud, for customer service and support solutions
● Salesforce Radian6, for social media monitoring and engagement
● Salesforce Data.com, for the most complete source of accurate business data
● AppExchange, the leading marketplace for enterprise cloud computing applications
● Force.com, for custom application development
● Heroku, for building social and mobile customer apps
● Database.com, the world’s first enterprise cloud database

Watch out social world, here comes Salesforce.