Want a social enterprise? You’d better be in the cloud.

The notion of building a “social enterprise” is taking root in customer relationship management (CRM) circles lately. A social enterprise, according to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, has three primary characteristics:

• Employees are connected to customers and prospects through public social networks, such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Employees collaborate internally by means of a private social network.
• Enterprise applications themselves are “social,” which means that a system can post updates to, or consume data from, a social media stream.

Each of these requires technology support from IT. Connecting employees to external social systems (I’d also include Facebook as a must-have) is best done via some kind of tool-supported framework, optimally integrated with your CRM. You can build your own private social network, but it’s more likely the social media vendors (examples include Yammer, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Jive) can deliver a better experience than you could build. And remaking your enterprise applications to be social? Well, that one’s going to take a bit more effort.

Let’s first agree on the value of being a social enterprise. The market is talking about you, and to you. The force of customers working outside the traditional technical support system first became obvious in 2005 with blogger Jeff Jarvis’s “Dell Hell” series (which Dell impressively used to turn around their culture, by officially embracing the criticism and building entirely new systems around it). Today, it’s a given that Facebook and Twitter have become a form of shadow customer support that you need to harness. If your workforce is heavily virtualized (spread across many offices, work-from-home employees and road warriors), you need robust systems to support their collaboration. And socialized apps have the potential to let managers know at least as much about their employees’ latest trials and tribulations as they do about their daughters’ recent movie and song critiques on Facebook.

The real opportunity here for the CIO is to jump into the breach and prove that IT can provide value by organizing technology in support of these social phenomena. It’s not enough to trust that your helpdesk personnel are subscribing to the right Twitter hashtags. You’ve got to provide real support, in a way that only IT can, by stepping up your CRM game, by owning and deploying social network tools, and improving your enterprise apps to tap into these social tools.

At this point, the CIO who’s remained skeptical about “the cloud” starts to worry. How, exactly, can you quickly reconfigure your CRM to tap into public social networks in a meaningful and productivity-enhancing way? On-premise and even single-tenant hosted vendors are having a tough time incorporating features that no one even dreamed of one year ago. It’s hard to do so when your product manager roadmap life-cycle runs in 24-month increments. And even after you go live with some new features, how will you keep up with ever-changing features from the public social network vendors?

A similar feeling of dread must be overtaking the cloud-skeptical CIO when considering the cost and feasibility of “socializing” existing business apps. It’s not going to be easy to modify traditional single-tenant customized systems to read social graphs, to intelligently post into another system’s update stream, or to play well in a world of rapidly evolving interconnectivity standards such as Oauth. Don’t you wish you’d embraced platform-as-a-service (PaaS) sooner? You could have inherited much of the technology stack to support these changes with minimal IT effort.

In short, IT shops that have built a base of experience with public cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) and PaaS are now in the driver’s seat, better positioned to take advantage of the benefits offered by transitioning into a social enterprise. The agility that the public cloud provides, and in particular the way it frees up your IT analysts to focus on business requirements instead of technical complexities, really starts to pay off.

I’ll close by focusing on just the CRM advantages of becoming a social enterprise. Eryc Branham, general manager of social enterprise at Appirio, explains that “social selling” can be summed up in three essential use cases:

• “My company is my sales team” - internal collaboration, to tap into the collective network.
• “My partners are my sales team” - external collaboration, so I empower my partners.
• “The most knowledge wins” - putting up-to-date info in front of my reps at the right time, whether from Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or other sources.

Social enterprise technology is the key to enabling these use cases, and for all practical purposes, this technology is only available to companies that have embraced the public cloud. If you’re not actively exploring this technology, then you’re already falling behind your competitors who are. Just as CRM replaced the old-school “notepad stuffed in my back pocket” as a demonstrably superior selling tool, so will “social enterprise” replace private, disconnected, anti-social CRM.

Glenn Weinstein is the CTO and co-founder of Appirio, where he oversees the CloudWorks and Cloud Management Center product lines as well as internal IT.