With somewhere in the neighborhood of 111 million viewers, the Super Bowl is engrained in Americana and ranks among the most watched sporting events the world over. That marketing opportunity wasn't lost on Salesforce.com, which bought two segments bookending last Sunday's halftime show featuring Will.i.am and the Black Eyed Peas.
Salesforce.com teamed with media network and "lifestyle engine" Dipdive to feature the Baby Peas, a cartoon caricature of the Black Eyed Peas pop band, who overcome obstacles with help of cloud collaboration problem solver Chatty. Salesforce.com released the Chatter collaboration tool in February 2010, and adoption is on the rise. In case you missed them, here are the first and second ads.
The promotion was a major moment for social software on multiple levels.
- An enterprise software collaboration tool was mass marketed to millions of consumer viewers using cartoon pop icons.
- The making of both segments serve as a case study of creative collaboration under tight time constraints. The filming of both segments was completed in less than three months, according to the "Making Of Do Something Impossible As A Team" video.
- Salesforce.com scores points for moving a historically technical subject -- cloud collaboration -- to a more mainstream audience. This approach aligns Chatter with easy-to-use consumer tools. If the Black Eyed Peas can use it, why can't the average employee?
At last week's Lotusphere, Carol Galvin and Catherine Lord, two IBM collaboration strategists, pegged social business as a $100 billion market opportunity. That's some serious coin. One thing's for certain: Social software isn't a fad. We're just at the beginning.
As Will.i.am so eloquently put it: "There's no room for, like, people getting over on your shoulder, ‘Well, you sent me the e-mail, how come you didn't cc my assistant?' None of that. Everybody knows everything. There's no, like, separation. Ain't no time for that. It's 2011."
Paige Finkelman is the Launch Pad Chair for the Enterprise 2.0 and Cloud Connect conferences. Paige enjoys working with startups and writes about collaboration and the cultural implications of technology on society.
