Disclaimer: I work NimbleUser, which is a consulting partner for Salesforce.com. The goal of this article is to discuss the Salesforce.com community strategy and not the products, although there may be some reference to products and functionality because the Salesforce.com community is built using their own products.
To revisit the last article, A Tale of Two Communities Part 1 – Volkswagen, I looked at the Volkswagen community. In essence the conclusion was that is a very user driven ecosystem with VW being fairly hands off. It is wildly successful and Volkswagen is, for the most part, doing what they can to continue to help its growth.
Salesforce.com (yes, it is the name of the company) is a publicly traded Software as a Service company that offers a salesforce automation database and a customizable development platform “in the cloud”. See http://www.salesforce.com for a quick overview. Being a technology company, their community is an active network consisting of developers, consultants, customers, and Salesforce staff.
In contrast to the Volkswagen community which has organically grown over the years, the Salesforce community was birthed intentionally. Salesforce is actively running their communities with fervent involvement. Much of the community is even built on their own platform and infrastructure.
Here’s the quick overview of Salesforce.com’s community “outposts”:
- Twitter: Salesforce has an active Twitter community. Salesforce has multiple active “corporate accounts” such as @Salesforce. There are also numerous staff such as @ReidCarlberg who actively engage.
- Facebook: Salesforce employs multiple Facebook profiles as well. Salesforce executives also have their own pages which they tend to befriend a lot of people (Check out CEO Marc Benioff’s Facebook page)
- Blog: Salesforce has an official but “Off-Site” blog located here: http://cloudblog.salesforce.com/
- Public facing community site: Salesforce “eats its own dog food” and uses its Ideas and Answers products to host community discussion and collaboration: http://www.salesforce.com/learning-center/community.jsp
- Private community site for events: Salesforce also employs a Facebook-like internal collaboration tool known as “Chatter”. A private Chatter portal was created and all event attendees are given access to it.
- User Groups: Salesforce sponsors several hundred user groups across the USA. They assist with meeting expenses and provide speakers if requested.
- Evangelists: Salesforce employs a multitude of product evangelists whose job is to engage the community and promote brand awareness.
Open Community Means Collaborating with a Purpose
The purpose of the Salesforce community is to enhance, improve, and expand the usage of the Salesforce platform. With over two million users across the globe, there is a lot to discuss! Businesses from every demographic are Salesforce customers. The community acts as the nexus for everyone to share their knowledge. The Answers community is an amazing example of this. Here are a few statistics I received from a Salesforce community manager:
- 233,330 registered users
- 700 questions are asked each week
- 1500 comments are posted each week to help other users’ questions be answered
I was unable to get statistics for “lurkers”, but I am sure it is high. The answers community is fully indexed by Google and other search engines, and when searching them, the community answers tend to rank very highly in the results. The answers community has eclipsed the official Salesforce documentation in its depth of knowledge by bringing users’ real world experiences to the table to solve problems.
Open Community Means Developing into a Social Organization
Salesforce is committed to being a social organization and has permeated every aspect of their operations with social integration. At the heart, they enabled social collaboration software for their internal operations using the Chatter product. They actively encourage their employees to go out and be social (and developed a great social media policy which you can read here) Take a look at that link, you’ll see that it was voted up to 80 points and there is the ability to comment. That’s how everything is in Salesforce, open and commentable because they want the community to collaborate on everything!
Open Community Means Embracing the Ecosystem
While Salesforce keeps pretty “tight reigns” on its community resources, they also realized that there are individuals who are going above and beyond the normal usage pattern of the community and evangalizing for Salesforce, answering large numbers of questions, connecting people to others, or bringing unique ideas to the community. They decided to create a program to embrace these power users and elevate them to a special “MVP Status”, to encourage them to do even more, produce more content and answer more questions. In return MVP’s were given product roadmap briefs and nice perks like front row seats at events. Their strategy for this is no secret; they produced two YouTube videos about it. The first one outlines the program, and the second one outlines the MVP’s and why they were selected.
By embracing the ecosystem Salesforce is creating an army of advocates for their brand. They are rewarding those who are active contributors and creating a goal for those who want to get involved. The MVP’s get some nice perks and feel recognized.
Open Community Means Empowering the Periphery
With 2 million people using the product, it’s easy to feel like one of the masses while using it. If you had a problem with a feature, imagine the frustration and feeling of helplessness. Salesforce decided to empower the periphery by giving all users an outlet for product feature improvement and then allow the community as a whole to “bubble the good ideas up to the top”. Salesforce Ideas was born, which does just that. Any user of Salesforce can submit ideas for improvement and if they are voted up sufficiently, they are incorporated into the next product release. Hundreds of user contributed ideas are incorporated every year. Every week, 140 new ideas are submitted which receive over 2500 votes. Click here to view current user submitted ideas under consideration.
Open Community Means Participant Defined Engagement
Dreamforce is Salesforce’s annual convention. This year they created a private social network for Dreamforce attendees. About 30,000 people registered for the event. The statistics were pretty surprising for what was generated in the Dreamforce event community:
- 14,753 attendees opted into the social network
- 56,689 posts (user to user, user to group, and user to session
- 30,995 comments to other posts
- Out of those, 5014 attendees created at least one post, and 4088 commented on someone else’s post
- 860 groups were created by community members
- The average number of members in each group was 255!
So what was discussed in this environment? A multitude of things, including:
- Suggestions for sessions. The show schedule was modified to accommodate interest in certain areas.
- Solving Salesforce problems. There was a “Challenge” group created which has over 500 members. We took turns challenging each other with difficult problems and suggesting solutions to each other.
- Discussion and scheduling of the many after-parties. I learned where to find the best cup of coffee and best beer through this community
- Official announcements from Salesforce for any updates or changes
- Live discussion during keynotes and sessions. A “BackChannel” was established using this Chatter community. Salesforce even posted it to the big screen during keynotes.
- Friendships were made. I met dozens of people in there that became my friends before the show even started.
- Idle banter. We told a lot of jokes and laughed a lot. Productive? Probably not. Awesome? Definitely.
The end result of this community – The most amazing conference I have ever attended. I was so moved that when I got back, I put together this video. If you watch it, keep this in mind – I had never met any of these people in real life prior to going to this conference. This online community made it happen. Also check out the multiple references throughout the video to the community and the social nature of the event. It was EVERYWHERE.
So what can an Association take away from the Salesforce.com community?
Unlike the VW community which grew organically, the Salesforce.com community is a masterfully executed social media strategy which was researched and then vigorously followed through with. Salesforce invests a huge amount of resources in both its community infrastructure and staffing. Based on the statistics and my personal experience, they are also reaping the rewards. (Look at their stock price – Yowzers!) Salesforce encourages its employees to stay active no matter what their position. They have done an excellent job balancing freedoms of community members and protecting the company identity. This was accomplished by having a well defined and reinforced social media policy as well as fostering constructive conversations in their community arenas.
A few questions:
- Would constructing your own community infrastructure be a benefit or drawback to the organization?
- Could you benefit from online communities to enhance your events by encouraging collaboration and discussion before and during the event?
- How far are you willing to go resource-wise to promote an open community effort?
- Have you considered having social media policies and encouraging staff to be involved in “The Conversation”?
- Do you even know where all of your outposts are? Can you get involved with them and help steer the conversation to the organization’s benefit?
- Are there super users out there that, with a little bit of accolades from the organization, would increase their participation even more?
- Does your organization listen to all of the ideas submitted, even by the lowliest of members? Do you have a facility to collect these ideas and consider them for future enhancements?
I hope this series has helped present a few variants of open communities. Both case studies have very diverse strategies yet both are successful in their own right. If I made one observation about both groups, it is that they set a vision and have remained true to it. They have continually evaluated and reinforced their efforts. Community building is not a “Set it and forget it” activity but a “Care and Feeding” activity.
Thanks everyone for reading
Washington, DC 
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