How sociable do we have the capacity to be?
Many cloud apps vendors are starting to talk about building new social tools. Marketo CEO said last week that marketing automation should move beyond the prospect funnel and help manage engagement throughout the customer lifecycle by moving into social. Of course he would say that, but it raises a more fundamental question about how organizations are going to manage such an array of social tools in the future.
If all apps are going to be social, then there will be so many places to be social, how will users know what to use when and where to go for what?
It’s easy to jump on the bandwagon but as always, vendors need to think about the business value of such tools. Perhaps ‘social’ is the domain of the cloud platform rather than cloud apps vendors – so users have a single social stream like Chatter running across all their applications on a single cloud platform like Force.com?
Only time will tell, but already we’re seeing the beginnings of social fatigue in the wider marketplace – Google+ a case in point.
