Reed Exhibitions Deploys Salesforce Chatter Company Wide to Accelerate Enterprise Collaboration

Global events organizer enhances productivity with an intuitive tool for business collaboration inspired by the world’s most popular social network

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 20, 2010: Salesforce.com [NYSE: CRM], the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced that Reed Exhibitions, the world’s leading event organizer, has deployed Salesforce Chatter enterprise wide, enabling closer collaboration amongst its global employees.

Comment on the News
• “Chatter is transforming the way our global business communicates and collaborates and is contributing to ongoing cultural change,” said Dominic Shine, Group CIO, Reed Exhibitions. “It’s adding more power to sales and marketing processes already benefiting from the rest of the salesforce.com platform and totally changing the way the entire organization works together to share best practices, collaborate on global programs and improve every aspect of the way we operate, as though we were all based in the same office.”

Salesforce Chatter Goes Company-Wide
Salesforce Chatter is the industry’s first real-time enterprise social collaboration app and platform, unleashing a new way to work for people around the world. Inspired by popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, Chatter uses many recognized social features such as profiles, status updates and real-time feeds.

As the largest business-to-business event organizer in the world, Reed employs around 2,500 people in 36 countries, running more than 400 events per year across more than 40 industry sectors. It was looking for a cost-effective way to improve collaboration between employees spread across countries and departments. Reed activated Chatter across the company in August 2010 enabling employees to take part in real-time conversations through a secure and private enterprise social app.

Salesforce Chatter Outplays the Competition
Reed trialed Chatter with a six-week pilot project involving 150 people in 10 countries. The company also tested several other potential technologies including SharePoint. Over the course of the Chatter pilot more than 20 interest groups had been created and more than 70 percent of the participants were using the application actively.

Reed selected Chatter over the competition as it provides a secure and private way for workers to collaborate and follow the real-time information that matters most to them, without being inundated by irrelevant messages. With Chatter, those interested in a particular topic can opt-in to follow the discussion and participate accordingly. For the company’s existing salesforce.com users, the integration of the collaboration and social media capabilities with the features of Salesforce CRM is an incredibly powerful additional advantage.

Reed Sees Viral Response to Salesforce Chatter
According to Reed, within just a few days of activating Chatter across the enterprise, adoption was tremendous. In the first week more than 25 groups had been created across the business, including Global Business Development, several best practice sharing groups around topics like social media, workspaces for global programs and even a private group for board members.

Chatter is helping to break down the organizational silos and barriers and connect experts and information across the business. This helps Reed’s employees drive a new level of productivity by providing an opportunity to collaborate in real-time around documents, people, processes and application data. For Reed, it’s already proving to be an enabler of social change by delivering an open platform for asking questions and tapping into the knowledge and resources across the business.

Additional Resources
• For salesforce.com customers, visit www.salesforce.com/chatter/getstarted for guides, FAQs and tutorials on how to turn on Chatter and use within the organization
• For Force.com developers, to learn more about building Cloud 2 apps and adding social capabilities to existing Force.com apps go to developer.force.com/chatter
• For prospective customers, get your free trial of Salesforce today at www.salesforce.com
• Become a fan of Chatter on Facebook: www.facebook.com/SalesforceChatter
• Follow @salesforce on Twitter and join the conversation with #Chatter