At Dreamforce 2010, All the Chatter is About ChatterAt Dreamforce 2010, All the Chatter is About Chatter

The goal, to use Benioff’s term, is to take Chatter "wall to wall," to every person in a company.

Last year, I wrote here about Dreamforce 2009 saying, "The big news during CEO Marc Benioff's keynote address was the announcement of a new salesforce cloud, Chatter." The success of the enterprise social software application in the intervening year cannot be denied. salesforce.com reports that 60,000 companies have turned on Chatter. Admittedly, Chatter is an included component with every salesforce.com application. If a company wanted an employee who didn’t use a service or sales app to have access to Chatter, the charge was $50 per user per month.

Yesterday, Benioff blew the doors off that licensing model, announcing Chatter Free. Chatter is now free for every employee in a company that has a salesforce.com solution. When is that available? NOW. salesforce implemented the feature over the weekend, so companies just have to turn it on.

The goal, to use Benioff’s term, is to take Chatter "wall to wall," to every person in the company. Some companies have already done just that; Benioff reports that Michael Dell has 100K followers on Chatter at Dell--out of 113K employees.

And now Chatter is not just for desk-bound employees. Chatter Mobile was announced, with support for iPhone and iPad available from the iTunes App Store and Blackberry support via a free download. (Apparently Android support is coming in the first half of 2011.)

So you say an enterprise social media solution that I can just use inside my company is nice, but what about customers? What about partners? Chatter announcement #2 yesterday was Chatter.com, a free version of Chatter for anyone. A company can then decide to extend their cloud ecosystem to partners, individuals or groups. Benioff succinctly summarized the thinking about Chatter.com as, "100% global, 100% viral, 100% free."

Speaking of groups, that was a feature added to Chatter over the summer and it has apparently taken off like wildfire. An often-created group is Competitive Intelligence. It allows sales and service personnel to have an easy place to post their up-to-the-minute competitive dirt for all to see just by following the group.

Are all 60,000 companies using Chatter with process-shattering success? Perhaps not. Yet. But I have to tip my hat to an enterprise social software solution that was announced in November 2009 and can not only point to so much adoption but make announcements that will make the application even more attractive.

A salesforce.com product exec at an analyst briefing here said the goal is to make applications that are fast, easy, transformational and fun. Chatter hits the mark.