Social Performance – What is Social Worth?

By Jim Lundy

Social Performance was all the rage yesterday at Salesforce’s Cloudforce Event in San Francisco. The Salesforce Rypple – Social Performance capability was announced at a price point of $5.00 per user/month and it is a milestone for Salesforce’s entry into HCM.

Social Performance and Salesforce Rypple

Salesforce Rypple provides the ability to rate a user or give rewards – aka Badges to others for doing a good job. In Sales, recognition is a must do to keep motivating the sales staff.

Salesforce only announced the purchase of Rypple in December (See Aragon Research First Cut), so the integration didn’t take long. Salesforce has indicated that they plan to do more in HCM and yesterday CEO Marc Benioff hinted that this (Salesforce Rypple/Social Performance) is just the beginning. We expect to see more from Salesforce on HCM later in 2012.
On Social Performance, at a time when some enterprises are paying $5.00 per user per month for an entire Enterprise Social Network platform, $5.00 for Salesforce Rypple seems like a high price to pay. On the other hand, for many Salesforce users, it is small compared to the $65, $125, or $250 per user per month fees they are paying now. This makes for an easy add-on.

When it comes to CRM tools, executives get nervous when the perception is that the sales organization doesn’t have the tools to do their job. This is one reason that prices for CRM tools have been allowed to keep growing. The question is for enterprises is when to stop and actually negotiate. Salesforce hinted that they are doing that when CEO Marc Benioff indicated that they are signing social enterprise agreements.

Putting aside Social Performance, the value of Social capabilities overall is still not appreciated by Senior Management in most enterprises. We think Social Performance will become a feature set of the core Performance product. On top of that, you can’t separate the annual review from the informal adda-boys. They both need to be done.

Smart HR Executives will recognize this and look for products that do both – capture the annual performance and allow people to tell others they are doing a good job during the year. Just as with Social Learning, Social Performance needs to cover the full gamut of the formal and informal performance aspects of people getting work done. Salesforce Rypple puts Salesforce in direct competition with SAP/SuccessFactors, Oracle and Saba, who all have stories to tell on Social Performance.

Social Performance in the Context of HCM /Talent

We’ll be discussing Social Performance and shift to Social HCM overall in our new special report on Social in the Enterprise that is publishing later this month.