One word:  Yammer.

(note: Yammer is a twitter like product for companies to use, but the outside world can't access the stream)

You know what the problem with Yammer is?  Yammer suffers from a chronic adoption problem. Everybody thinks Yammer is great for a week, then 99% of your company stops using it.  It's a great product, but it's not a destination in your company.  That means people won't go there after a week. I've witnessed 5 or 6 quick deaths to Yammer in corporations.

That's why the Salesforce acquisition of Rypple makes so much sense.

I wrote a while back that Rypple had to build out more traditional performance management flow to really get traction.  That was true as a standalone product.  That's no longer true with Rypple embedded in Salesforce.

Salesforce is the cloud CRM backbone of choice for thousands, if not tens of thousands of companies.  It's in the cloud.  Once Salesforce is in a company, it's pretty strong in gaining contracts and adoption for customer service, marketing and other departments in addition to its original promise as a Sales CRM.   They've taking advantage of that cross-departmental CRM feel by launching a product called Chatter, which is a CRM flavor of twitter.  Max interaction and collaboration through Chatter, the sales promise goes...

Does Chatter have greater adoption and staying power than Yammer?  Of course.  Chatter has to have much greater adoption than Yammer because, let's face it, your employees have to use Salesforce.

Which is why the acquisition of Rypple makes so much sense.  Rypple is about feedback loops on how you're doing as a part of a team.  Salesforce can plug the functionality of Rypple into Chatter and the core product in a bunch of ways.  Adoption is a given.  The beatings will continue until morale improves.  Rypple can remain cutting edge and not worry about traditional performance management to pay the bills.  

Salesforce paid exponentially less (than SAP paid for SuccessFactors) and got exactly what they needed. Rypple made a good choice.  They obviously got paid.  Everybody wins.

What's it mean for you as an HR Pro?  If your company uses Salesforce, you need to track the Rypple integration and offering into Salesforce.  HR always says they want to be embedded in the business. This is a pretty good chance to do that.  It's Salesforce, people.  If your company uses it, trust me - that's where the action is.

Congrads to Rypple.