Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's hyperbolic CEO, has been telling anyone who will listen that the "sudden convergence of cloud, social and mobile spheres" is forcing - and allowing - companies to connect with customers in new ways, and to listen with an intensity never before possible.

I'm sure the benefits of social business are dramatic and undeniable, but am I alone in being totally creeped out at what seems to be an obvious invastion of privacy? I don't know about you, but I'm just not ready for companies - even companies I choose to do business with - to closely follow everything I do and say. Even if other humans aren't involved.

Do You Want To Be Connected To A Machine?

At a recent executive event in San Francisco, Benioff entertained customers and journalists wtih a video featuring Beth Comstock, GE's high-profile CMO, claiming her "core belief" is that "business is social." But she didn't just mean people communicating with people, she also meant people communicating with machines. 

The big question for GE, Comstock said, is "how do we connect our customers/employees to our machines?" GE's goal is to combine data from customers and data from its machines - connecting machines to social networks is very big.

The video demonstrated how GE was connecting jet engines to social networks to alert mechanics of their diagnostic status. "If you're in business," Comstock said, "you need social because it will get you closer to your customer… Feedback - that's a marketers dream."

Sounds great, right?

The Menace Of An Internet-Enabled Toothbrush

But consider Benioff's example of the Internet of Things driving social business. He cited Philips' Internet-connected toothbrush that records the time and duration of brushing. With one of these babies, when you go to the dentist and he asks, "have you been brushing" and you answer "yeah," the conversation doesn't end there, Benioff said. The dentist could reply "Let's have a look" and see exactly how much brushing you actually did.

That thought terrifies me. While such a scenario might indeed help keep my teeth from falling out, it's also profoundly creepy and invasive. After all, what if my dental insurance provider got hold of the data, and decided it wouldn't pay to fill that cavity because I didn't brush long enough?

As Benioff correctly noted, the "biggest part is trust." "With all that data about you out on the network, it gets down to another level of trust with the vendors you choose to let be a part of your life."

I trust my doctor with a large amount of intensely personal information - augmented by pretty specific laws and industry practices. For some reason, I'm less comfortable giving my dentist the same degree of trust. Philips and Salesforce? Absolutely not!

How Much Should Your Shirt Salesman Know About You?

Another participant at the event, male-apparel retailer Trunk Club, is also leveraging user information to help "guys that just dont like to shop" said COO Rob Chesney. Trunk Club's goal is to make "it really easy for you to look great" by not just tracking what he's already bought, but whatever other information may be available online. When a customer contacts Trunk Club, "we pull up this guy and find out what is he all about. We see all his social media info. "It's the future of service-oriented retail."

Not for me.

Chesney noted that having this kind of info could help Trunk Club sell higher end clothing to a customer who just got a promotion - an event it might learn of Facebook. That might not be so bad, but what is the company going to do if the customer gets laid off? Offer condolences and try to sell them cheap t-shirts? Awkward to say the least.

Social.com: Salesforce's Facebook & Twitter Tools

Salesforce also pitched its new Social.com tools, designed to help other companies operate this way. Salesforce rolled out the ability to run Facebook campaigns that target users based on what they've posted and linked to on their own Facebook pages.

On Twitter, the idea is start "buying in the moment" - spreading promoted tweets even as the larger Twitter conversation is trending. The promoted tweet shows up any time someone tweets with a relevant hashtag.

To make that work, of course, you've got to be monitoring all the time. "You can't be relevant if you're not listening," explained Facebook's Fergus Gluster (yes, that's his real name).

Jonathan Nelson, CEO of ad agency Omnicom Digital, said that these innovations are a key step toward closing the loop linking real-time advertising to real-time buying. The key, he said, is delviering "the right message for the right person at the right time."

Ironically, in a small panel discussion for journalists, Nelson noted that the "suppression of advertising" when it's not appropriate is "more than half the battle."

That's a key part of reducing the creep factor. 

Finally, just so you know, I'm not alone in worrying about these issues. Another panelist, Altimeter Group's Susan Etlinger, admitted that "as a consumer, I don't particularly want to be targeted." The key, Etlinger said, is to build a relationship over time and "be relevant when the consumer needs us, not when we need them." 

That's a step in the right direction. But if companies they really care about not being creepy, they'll learn to respond quickly and effectively when asked, and otherwise stay out of my face.

Photos - except for the toothbrush - by Fredric Paul for ReadWrite

If you're not hearing a lot about social enterprise these days, it may be because no one can figure out what the hell social enterprise is.

On paper, the concept sounds reasonable, even important: take popular social media tools (microblogs, wikis, blogs, etc.) and use them for internal collaboration, project management and overall feel-good business practices.

Social Entreprise vs. Business As Usual

But in practice, a lot of companies have found that actually using this stuff is not a magic wand to bring forth happiness and productivity to their organization. The reason? Social media tools in the enterprise often work counter to the internal communications practices that have long been ingrained in companies.

For instance, in theory it might seem like a good idea to coordinate creative activities on social platforms. But in reality, there's always going to be the managerial hold-out who won't accept a project as actually moving forward unless there's a meeting or memos - the very things social enterprise practices are trying to eliminate. And there could be a legitimate need for this, too: If not done properly, social enterprise software can fail at making sure someone deals with all the boring minutia, like documentation for regulatory purposes, which could be a huge no-no.

Then there's the issue of figuring when and for what social enterprise should be used? In too many cases, employees may get confused over when and how they're supposed to turn to the social media platform in their day-to-day jobs. And if only some workers engage with the platform, its utility is greatly reduced. 

You Can't Force Workers To Be Social

Too often, enterprises overlook the importance of organic adoption of social media. You can't just flick a switch and turn on a social network - and an email from the CEO won't work either. Instructions to go social from the IT department are even more likely to ignored. 

The appeal of these platforms lies in the very fact that they grow and evolve network connections at their own pace - as users find them helpful and engaging. Social media tools do make it easier to establish those connections, but it's not something you can force.

That's why, when I read news like Salesforce may be moving away from its social enterprise channel and focusing more on cloud computing, I'm not surprised.

ZDNet writer Dan Dignan points out other reasons that help explain why social enterprise seems to be failing. My personal favorite? That social enterprise is like a cleverly disguised version of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). And that dog just won't hunt. "ERP software changed companies fundamentally, but also led to spectacular IT disasters largely due to people, process and culture. Social with business process integration won't work."

So does that mean the entire concept of social enterprise is doomed?

Not necessarily. The gigant-o, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink enterprise social platforms imposed from the top are indeed in trouble. But targeted tools that companies and their employees pick and choose to bring social techniques to specific projects and use cases may still find success. But that's still a much-reduced vision of the social enterprise's original promise 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Here’s a question you may never have thought to ask:  When you’re using an application that’s in the cloud to begin with, why is it up to you to save your documents - especially if you’re saving them to the cloud anyway?  With Box’s latest update, your cloud app saves directly to your cloud storage.

If the programs you run on your device aren’t installed there locally, and the system on which you store the documents for those programs isn’t local either, then why is saving documents a manual act?  Put another way, why do you have to “click Save?”  Shouldn’t your program know how to save? Maybe you’re thinking the answer is, “Because I have to name my file at some point.”  Well, consider the pointlessness of that act, too, if the app knew the context of your documents by their contents anyway. (If, for instance, it could tell the title of your paper by looking at the first line.)

Saving To The Cloud

Saving to the cloud has quickly become a market in itself. So there’s been a land rush among Dropbox, Box (formerly Box.net), Microsoft SkyDrive, Apple iCloud, Google Drive and some others to stake their claims to automating the Save command. Granted, Google and Microsoft may have a built-in advantage in this regard, but Box is playing the role of “sooner” in this land rush. Box has begun working with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers to embed storage and document saving functions directly into their apps, bypassing the manual click altogether.

The fruit of their labor is something called Box Embed. Essentially, it’s an interface for allowing applications to access customers Box storage and also their Box functions, such as file preview and task management, inside of SaaS applications so that they appear on the client side.

Last March, Box was working to integrate aspects of operating systems into its ecosystem, including a desktop for launching apps from multiple devices. Box Embed is essentially along those same lines: Just as Windows and Mac desktop applications rely on the Load and Save functions of their respective operating system, a SaaS service that uses Box Embed will rely on the Load and Save functions of Box.

Can Box Pry Away SaaS Storage Customers?

There’s one extra benefit in this for Box, at least potentially: It could pry some customers loose from the built-in, exclusive storage that SaaS providers employ.

“In many cases, you see cloud products requiring that you load content into their cloud,” notes Chris Yeh, Box’s platform vice president. He cites an example of a Salesforce user who’s working with a prospective customer, and needs to load several items of sales collateral. With Salesforce, he says, you have to load that material from the service’s own content store.

“You’ve got files in Salesforce’s cloud, then you’ve got files in NetSuite, and some more content sitting in Workday.  The idea for us was to find a way to use Box as the cloud file system, if you will, and embed that – where possible – in these third-party applications.”

If a desktop application can make its operating system create convenient, personal folders for its user, then the cloud-based counterpart should be able to do the same. NetSuite (above) is one of two SaaS applications that is already enabling Box Embed (the other is SugarCRM, below). As Yeh explains it, the automated configuration process for Box on NetSuite actually peruses customer records and generates a folder structure in Box storage for customers by name. Then the existing tagging system is used to flag these customer folders for NetSuite, so that those tagged folders may be shown in NetSuite as though they were NetSuite’s own attached storage.

What Box Embed is not - at least not yet - is an interoperability or cloud integration system. It appears Box could be reserving a niche for itself in this space, perhaps someday competing with services like Informatica that encourage customers to share their own scripts for converting formats and schemas from one service’s database to another.

Box Integration 

“In the past, if you were to take two systems of record and get them integrated,” says Yeh, “there were a certain number of paths.  You could build a custom integration where you’d take data out of one database and move it into another, in some form. You’d do that with a big systems integration: It was a lot of work, and super-costly. Another would be, you’d go through an integration tool like TIBCO, where when you moved data from one system to another, you’d put it on a third-party integration product, and have it be placed onto another system of record, so data was oftentimes duplicated.”

These types of integration, Yeh continues, pre-date the advent of apps run through the browser, where user interface components are not only easily generated, but readily shared. It becomes an almost academic matter, then, to make the user interface components of one app appear in the context of another.

“So in this particular case, NetSuite is creating a place for us to run - it’s an IFRAME - and what we’re doing is putting a version of Box into that IFRAME which is contextually set up correctly to match the customer records.”

It’s integration in one sense – enabling a unified cloud storage structure that’s automatically configured to fit the context of SaaS applications. It’s not integration in the TIBCO or Informatica sense, where the data becomes interoperable from that central location.  But Chris Yeh leaves that matter open for future exploration - and the last time Box left something open for exploration, we didn’t have to wait all that long.

If Box makes itself the preferred storage system for work, since its storage agents would already be on your devices, the likelihood you’ll use Box for your personal applications also instead of the others also rises.

Lead image courtesy Shutterstock.