A funny thing happened when Salesforce.com held its annual Dreamforce conference last week. It propelled enterprise social software into the mainstream, and with it further emphasized the importance of external communication to the enterprise social experience.

When Salesforce Chatter was launched last year, it didn't seem like much. It was a stand-alone micro-blogging platform that only worked inside of Salesforce.com. This year the picture is entirely different as SF.com has expanded Chatter in a big way, chiefly opening up the API to work with other enterprise applications and providing a 360 degree social experience both inside and outside the organization.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston in June, I noticed a distinct shift in the enterprise social message--that it wasn't just about communicating internally, but also about building closer relationships with external customers, partners and suppliers.

Dan Keldsen, an analyst at Information Architected who closely follows the enterprise social space, thinks Chatter's coming-out party last week was significant. "This is nothing to sneeze about, and as Salesforce opens up Chatter to be able to integrate into non-Salesforce platforms, like SharePoint, through their Chatter Connect API-integration and Chatter Customer Groups, it more firmly moves Salesforce from 'behind the firewall' (only)-CRM, and into SocialCRM with partners, customers and the ecosystem outside of the typical team (sales/marketing) that would traditionally use Salesforce."

And that's more than likely the idea, but as Keldsen points out, this isn't really anything new. It's something Jive (which recently filed for an IPO) and Yammer, for example, have been doing for some time, and these two companies are focused exclusively on building an enterprise social platform.

But will that matter to enterprise customers?

TJ Keitt from Forrester was certainly impressed by what he saw last week, as he indicated in his Forrester blog post summarizing his Dreamforce Chatter impressions. "What they showed was an elegant, natural extension of their core value proposition as a CRM and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider. In a nutshell, Salesforce wants you to use Chatter to connect internal business processes to the external social web in which your partners and customers live," Keitt wrote.

Keitt also likes how Forrester has integrated some of the social pieces it bought over the last year or so including Radian6 for social media monitoring and Dimdim for video conferencing, corporate instant messaging and presence awareness. When you put that all together inside Salesforce's platform, it's a compelling package.

But Salesfoce is not operating in a vacuum here by any means and large players like IBM (NYSE: IBM), Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) are also pushing hard to be the enterprise choice in this space. Microsoft SharePoint in particular seems to have a leg up because of its ubiquity inside larger companies.

But as analyst Keldsen points out, nobody has a clear advantage here because the smaller companies like Jive, Yammer and Socialtext (to name just a few) have the advantage of being smaller and able to innovate more easily.

What's not clear is how much room there is left to innovate in this market or which company (or companies) will come out on top.

For now, it's unmistakable that enterprise social is not hiding in the background anymore. It's right out front and making noise, and it's up to the various players to sort out who will grab the market share and run with it. - Ron