Salesforce.com Goes Social

“Why do we know crucial things about our family and friends in real time as they happen but we don’t know what’s happening with our top customers, our top deals, our critical support cases, or even our own employees we sit next to everyday?” Why indeed?

This was the question that was asked over at Salesforce.com and they came up with a solution that has my inner nerd all worked up.

In the office, rather than wade into a sea of dead Intranets or (often homegrown) online applications, important information comes to you. And you make the determination of what is important yourself. You can “follow” data.

The interface is very Facebook- and Twitter-like which makes user adoption easy. But it is not just Facebook bolted on to Salesforce.com. It is not sales guys telling each other what they did over the weekend. The integration is deep, at least so says Senior VP of Product Marketing Kraig Swensrud in the video up above.

There are hooks into everything exposed through their API: business documents like price lists, top customers, customer service issues, deals you are working on; you name it. And of course you only share data with the people who should be able to see that data. SalesForce has powerful privacy features and Chatter honors the privacy rules you set up in Salesforce.com elsewhere.

You can even set up long-term or short-term groups so you can work with people outside your organizational hierarchy.  Communities. Wow, this could be powerful.

The product goes into full release in summer of 2010. I am so excited.