Will the Public and Private Social Network Intersect?

With Salesforce.com’s announcement of free, standalone Chatter, along with an upcoming, associated marketing blitz, awareness of the idea of a private social network will increase dramatically.  In fact, Salesforce is planning on maximum public exposure with ads that will run during the Super Bowl 45 halftime.

The Private Social Network Concept

When Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, first announced Chatter at Dreamforce 2009, it was portrayed as “Facebook for the Enterprise”.  Mr. Benioff, who is generally regarded as a visionary in the technology sector, saw that the widely consumer-adopted Facebook would surely need a corporate equivalent.

There were seemingly a couple of gotchas, however.  First, Chatter was only going to be available to customers of Salesforce CRM.  Second, Chatter was going to come at an additional cost.  Salesforce had always been very good at making money, and the idea of a free offering of this magnitude cut against the grain at the time.

Another issue was going to be the degree of near term customer adoption within the base.  While Yammer had proven out the model of a private social network, a corporate version of public social media was still not something that was perceived by many corporate managers as being as indispensable as CRM.

The Progression of the Private Social Network

As with many disruptive technologies, actual customer adoption can take time.  While many Salesforce customers have adopted Chatter, there are companies whose management perceives a private social network as not necessary, or even as a distraction.

So, with a maturing private social network technology on its hands, but perhaps not a big enough base to sell into, what’s a visionary organization to to do?

Well, as one of the best marketing companies in the history of the U.S. technology sector, Salesforce seems poised to leverage Chatter as part of its overall plan to increase its footprint in the corporate technology world and to keep offering more solutions on top of the world class cloud infrastructure that it’s built up over the last decade.

Future Intersection Points

Looking ahead, what type of connections will there be between a private social network like Chatter and public social networks like Facebook and Twitter?  Chatter is used for private, internal conversations about everything from how to sell and market better to how to better support existing customers.  Facebook and Twitter are more about public engagement with prospects and customer, based on strategies developed, in part, during those private conversations.

Will there be a need for a technological integration between these two types of platforms and, if so, what should that integration look like?  Will there be certain private conversations that should seamlessly morph into public conversations?  Are there public conversations that should be taken up internally with a single mouse click?

Or, are these two separate technologies that should peacefully coexist in separate browser tabs or in separate tabs within a social media management platform?

The answers to some of these questions may start to reveal themselves not long after will.i.am to does his part in promoting the Chatter private social network during the Super Bowl halftime.