(above: Marc Benioff at Cloudforce)

At its Cloudforce conference in New York this morning, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff continued to promote its vision of the "social enterprise." He discussed a new social marketing solution and showed off an HTML5 version of Salesforce.com that can work on multiple applications.

(above: Kraig Swensrud at Cloudforce)

The big announcement was the Radian6 social marketing cloud, which extends social concepts to marketing departments. The new social marketing cloud is designed to combine Radian6's ability to monitor social conversations on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn with analytics tools designed to identify and organize relevant conversations. Salesforce Chief Marketing Officer Kraig Swensrud showed how this can be linked with existing customer information as part of what the company calls a "social hub." Companies will be able to organize social content and conversations to provide better customer service and react to customer feedback much faster.

In addition, the company has a tool called Siteforce, which builds "social websites" that incorporate social features such as Twitter streams and Facebook "likes."

The company also introduced a mobile version of its AppExchange, which can deliver mobile apps for a variety of platforms. Most of these tools seem to be third-party applications designed to extend the company's core applications, such as Dragon for Salesforce and a mobile version of Concur. The company has about 40 apps available now.

Another focus of the keynote was "touch.salesforce.com," a rebuilding of the interface for all of the company's applications optimized for tablets and smartphones. This was announced at Dreamforce in August and slated for availability in early 2012. Swensrud demonstrated how the core Salesforce.com CRM application and the other parts of the company's offerings, including the Chatter communications tool, now work together on all these new devices.

Much of Benioff's keynote mirrored his Dreamforce talk. He said Salesforce.com was "born cloud and reborn social." The concept of "going social" is a three-step process, he explained. Customers must start by creating a social customer profile (following what their customers want), then create an employee social network (for internal communications), and finally create customer social networks.

On the third step, Salesforce.com CMO Kraig Swensrud cited Chatter Customer Groups and Benioff shared an example of Bespoke Wineries creating a "sales cloud" by adding data.com information to an organization's internal systems.

Cloud computing is changing enterprise software, Benioff said, and social networking adds to that. He claimed that Facebook and Twitter were behind the Arab Spring movement, Occupy Wall Street, and the revolt against Bank of America debit card fees. Mobile computing trends are impacting enterprise users as well, particularly the "social divide" that often places the enterprise behind consumers in social networking usage.

As usual, Benioff joyfully knocked the company's competitors; Microsoft tries to stop innovation, he said, and Oracle's "false cloud" is really "the new proprietary mainframe."

He brought up to the stage a number of customers and partners. Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts talked about extending the feeling of the brand to all its customers through the stores, Burberry.com, and its social interactions with its employees, customers, and suppliers. She discussed the launch of a new perfume using its social contacts. Max Levchin, a founder of Slide and PayPal, said companies have value in the shape of data locked inside them. Sigal Zarmi, CIO of GE Capital, Americas, said the company is creating a new platform called GE Edge built on Salesforce's tools, designed to bring GE Capital's customers together. Rich Liu of Facebook talked about using the Force.com platform to build some internal back-office applications on Force.com. Infor CEO Charles Phillips said that having its enterprise applications integrated with Salesforce.com was helping customers deploy applications faster.

Benioff also showed a video from NBC Universal that displayed how the company is using Chatter to better communicate internally and a video from KLM that explained how it used Facebook and Twitter to respond to customer requests. An application that Asics built using Salesforce's Heroku platform called Support Your Marathoner lets people who couldn't attend the New York City marathon remotely cheer on their friends and relatives.

In closing, Benioff emphasized the social enterprise extension to products. He noted the Toyota Friend project, which integrates social networking into cars.

Overall, Benioff concentrated on the integration of cloud services with social networking. The social enterprise is an interesting idea, particularly for companies that focus on consumer sales and marketing.