Emerging Coporate Facebook Imitators – Highest Form of Flattery?

With over 500 million users, Facebook is undoubtedly the King of social networking applications and its success has not gone unnoticed in the business world where software leaders recognize the continental divide between how their customers communicate versus how businesses support and communicate. In short, most companies are still using old fashion call centers, telephony and emails to support a population of customers who live in twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Leaders in evolving the way companies communicate with not only their customers but among themselves are jumping with both feet onto the social media platform, where IBM has remodeled its Lotus notes to WEB 2.0, Salesforce.com not to be left behind has launched its Chatter and Microsoft with a newer and more robust Sharepoint are offering Facebook like features and benefits to namely – reduce incoming calls, accelerate deals, improve brand and image especially among the 18 to 49 age groups(those most likely to use social media) and reduce internal operating costs by offering super collaboration. I for one having attended conferences on these three new private collaboration applications am impressed with the speed, quality and usability of the applications… its a new world for corporate customers who can now communicate like they do in their private lives. Chatter Demo