Chatter: now with more social intelligence. Hosted business software vendor Salesforce.com said Thursday that it is bringing new social intelligence capabilities to Chatter, its social networking platform for the enterprise.
According to the vendor, the new capabilities will allow business customers to gain more insight into the interests and behaviors of their customers, partners and employees, and interact with them in a more meaningful way.
Through our interactions on social networks, Salesforce says, we’re building what it calls graphs. On Facebook, we’re building a social graph based on our interactions with friends and colleagues. On Twitter, based on our interactions with brands, experts and hashtags, we’re building an interest graph. Salesforce is looking to bring this same model to Chatter, building these charts based on business interactions, and providing actionable intelligence to users.
“Serendipity is not a strategy for connecting employees with the right information and experts,” said Nasi Jazayeri, executive vice-president of Salesforce Chatter, in a statement. “Social intelligence in Chatter gives enterprises unmatched ability to unlock their internal knowledge base and deliver new levels of collaboration and productivity.”
At the heart of the new functionality is Chatter Topics and Expertise, which will analyze and categorize structured and unstructured information within Salesforce. Related experts, files, groups and other information will be displayed on a single topic page, auto-curated and refined based on user activity and engagement.
As an example of how it could be used, Salesforce says a new hire could discover topic pages and groups to help them become productive more quickly, or an employee could identify the internal expert with the expertise to help them complete a project sooner.
Chatter Influence is currently available in Salesforce Chatter Plus, and Chatter Topics is now available in pilot.