Salesforce.com cloud adds Twitter, stirs privacy concerns

Today's rollout of a new customer relationship management application for Twitter follows Salesforce.com's already contentious announcement of its Facebook- and Google-enabled Service Cloud in January.

Known as Salesforce.com for Twitter, the new CRM application will work as a plug-in to Service Cloud, a cloud-based customer service channel that gives business workers access to Facebook connections, Google search, and other communications and discussion tools and forums.

Businesses using Salesforce's SaaS solution will be able to pull pertinent Twitter posts into the Sales Cloud and then "capture and monitor the conversation by creating a record in the Service Cloud that tracks the original post and all subsequent replies," in Salesforce.com's own words.

Even before today's announcement, Service Cloud raised some industry contention by allowing on-the-job access to Facebook and Google at a time when integration between business software and social networks is just getting off the ground.

"We are seeing pent-up demand [for social networking tools] from workers who use these technologies on the consumer Internet and enthusiasm from some business managers who expect these tools to help them boost the connectedness and performance of their workers," wrote Gartner analysts Nikos Drakos, Anthony Bradley, and Jeffrey Mann in a report issued last November.

Nevertheless, the Gartner analysts asserted that business customers have made only fairly small investments in social interaction tools, and that social networking deployments throughout entire corporations remains quite rare.

Service Cloud is also designed to pull user data from Facebook into the cloud. Salesforce.com also produces another cloud-based SaaS solution, dubbed Sales Cloud.

With today's launch of the Twitter plug-in, Salesforce.com is now stirring further privacy concerns among some observers, who suggest that customer service workers and/or their employers might abuse the new tool by inappropriately infiltrating user conversations.

In a statement, Salesforce.com has also described the Twitter application as permitting "enterprises to be active participants on Twitter by enabling them to funnel relevant solutions from the Service Cloud knowledge base into a Twitter post, effectively joining the conversation."

In showing off the new feature, Salesforce.com has demo'd how a telecom service provider might find and monitor a Twitter conversation about a user's problems with a specific phone, later sending the user a link to a relevant help document.

Now in beta, the new Twitter plug-in is slated for availability this summer on Salesforce.com's AppExchange, beginning at $995 per month.