Welcome to the world of fake transparency
Jinfo Blog

13th September 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Farewell Cloud 1– welcome Cloud 2 proclaimed Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff at a recent London jamboree. The transition he predicted was from transactional to social models – but as technology allows sales and marketing people to do ever cleverer things with social media, there’s early evidence that the regulators are fighting back. Cloud applications needed to move from the ‘Amazon’ model which inspired Salesforce’s original customer relationship management software solution to the ‘Facebook’ model, Benioff declared. ‘If you are paying attention then you are moving your company to where the users are,’ he added later in a briefing to journalists (follow links from http://www.salesforce.com/live/ to Cloudforce 2010 London 8th September for the webcast, or see Public Technology’s report at http://digbig.com/5bchwa). Claiming an exclusive, Public Technology also reported that Benioff expects to open a new data centre in the United Kingdom to tap the potentially lucrative UK and European public sector markets, while meeting government requirements that citizen-centric data be housed within national boundaries (http://digbig.com/5bchwc). And Salesforce additionally took the opportunity to announce the launch of Chatter Mobile (widely covered – see for example PC World at http://digbig.com/5bchwb or go to http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/ for basic Salesforce Chatter details). Chatter allows customer relationship managers and others to add social features like profiles, status updates and real time feeds to any Force.com application (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28513 or http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27071 for background). But in the wider context, sales, marketing and advertising folk are finding plenty of further ways to exploit social media’s potential. In its latest Technology Quarterly feature, the Economist magazine reels off a string of clever outcomes that become possible from analysing social connections (http://digbig.com/5bchwd). And asking selected advertising agencies where they thought the future lay with social media recently, Jolie O’Dell of the Mashable blog uncovered some distinctly cautionary tales. Part of the art of selling is the illusion that the company is doing what’s best for the consumer, and engaging with social networks facilitates that, said one – but, he added, consumers were getting more savvy about ‘fake transparency’ all the time (http://digbig.com/5bchwe). In fact, consumers in the United Kingdom will be getting a bit of extra help with this soon, following the decision by the regulatory body the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to extend its oversight to all marketing communications online (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28138 for background). From 1 March next year, the ASA’s remit will additionally take in advertisers’ marketing communications on their own websites, as well as those in other non-paid-for space under their control such as social networking sites (http://digbig.com/5bchwf). As information professionals, our immediate concern may be with what suppliers like Salesforce.com are doing – but perhaps we need to take a leaf out of Salesforce’s book and look at the wider context as well.

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