Back in December, Salesforce announced the acquisition of social performance platform Rypple, and revealed that it will be entering the human capital management (a.k.a. employee and talent management software) market with the launch of a new product Successforce. Today, the CRM giant is launching the newly integrated product; however, Salesforce is keeping Rypple’s name. The company is also debuting Site.com, which offers marketers and businesses a simple, cloud-based content management system.
Salesforce Rypple
For background, Rypple is a social performance management platform that helps managers and employees improve performance. Essentially, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with a more social and collaborative approach. The software has been compared to a “Zynga for the enterprise,” and allows managers to track projects, guide their team and give kudos to deserving staff for others to see within its online application.
The new Salesforce Rypple basically achieves the same goals, except within Salesforce’s interface and with more integrations with platforms like Chatter. Basically employees and administrators can set goals, manage objectives, and provide feedback and recognition all from within their employee social network.
What makes Salesforce Rypple unique is that Salesforce customers will be able to motivate their teams by giving them Thanks directly from within Salesforce on leads, accounts and more. For example, a salesperson will able to give Thanks to a customer service agent for providing great service to a customer, or a sales manager will be able to give Thanks to a sales rep for closing a deal. These Thanks will appear in a person’s Chatter (Salesforce’s social network) feed. And all recognition a person receives will become part of their social profile in Salesforce.
Managers and teams will also be able to create custom badges to recognize team and individual achievements. Appearing in the Chatter feed, these actions can be seen my other employees, commented on, or liked.
Salesforce Rypple, which is available today, starts at $5 per user, per month. Salesforce says that already, Facebook, LivingSocial and Spotify are using Salesforce Rypple.
As Salesforce’s John Wookey explains to us, the company decided against rebranding Rypple after hearing that customers identified with talent management platform’s brand.
Site.com
The company is debuting Site.com as a simple way for marketers to manage content across websites, portals, landing pages, public social networks like Facebook as well as mobile sites. Salesforce says the new platform is built for the social enterprise, allowing users to create content once and publish it in seconds across a company’s corporate sites, landing pages and to Facebook.
From a data integration standpoint, Salesforce Site.com integrates into existing Salesforce environments including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Force.com custom apps and Database.com. So users will be able to pull information from these other products into the CRM.
As Salesforce’s Mike Rosenbaum says, Site.com was launched to allow marketers to create websites create once and publish anywhere. And it’s simple to use so that users with non-technical background can publish and update sites without having to learn HTML or other programming languages.
Site.com users can access templates to create sites, drag and drop forms, and collaboration with Chatter. Site.com users can connect with R&D, sales, Web developers and even external entities such as creative agencies and design firms using Chatter. Site.com also allows users to localize and publish websites and content in multiple languages, and publish HTML mobile sites.
Companies such as FICO, The Häagen-Dazs Shoppe Company and Hewlett-Packard are already publishing sites using Site.com.
“Salesforce.com is seeing unstoppable demand for the social enterprise as companies see their customers and employees become more social and mobile by the day,” said CEO and founder Marc Benioff. “With Salesforce Rypple and Salesforce Site.com, we’re excited that companies will now be able to extend their social enterprise to reach every employee and every customer.”
Site.com charges per site and per website developer user. The price of a site is $1,500 per month. Salesforce Site.com can be purchased stand-alone or added to existing salesforce.com installations. Publisher and contributor users are an additional $125 and $20, respectively, per month.
Salesforce has added a number of new products to its SaaS family of late. The company recently launched a help desk SaaS for small businesses, Desk.com and a task management app Do.com.
