Here at the San Francisco stop of the Cloudforce touring conference, Salesforce.com is extending play to be all things cloud to all people with the introduction of its Salesforce Rypple social performance management and Salesforce Site.com social-backed, CRM-integrated website building tools. It’s all part of what the company bills as the second generation of social enterprise tools – a generation that brings social from sales and marketing into the business at large.

It’s important to note that Salesforce.com does not have the lock on social tools and their use across the various silos of the modern organization. Activity stream technology is really  one example for how lightweight apps can spread like fire inside an organization.

Further, the tools have proven themselves. It is now a matter of the data that travels between people that constitutes the greatest value.

But there is no denying that Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benbioff is a master performer who knows how to convey the power of social technologies.  That was certainly apparent today in his keynote address at the Cloudforce event.

Salesforce CEO and President Marc Benioff took the stage to reiterate his company’s vision for the future of the cloud, making sure to include the fact that Salesforce hit a $3 billion run rate for FY13. But Salesforce’s “social enterprise” game plan – which is to say, that cloud computing enables businesses to leverage mobility and social technologies for unforeseen boosts in productivity and cost savings – remains largely unchanged since its debut at Dreamforce ’11. In fact, between the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, Benioff went so far as to label 2011 “The Year of Social Revolution.”

“Time said the protestor was the person of the year, but it’s the protestor with the mobile device that matters,” Benioff went so far as to claim.

In enterprise terms, Benioff highlighted how that kind of social networking can bring employees and managers and customers alike all closer together, for “unprecedented” levels of engagement. And that’s where the new announcements come in.

Social performance management engine Salesforce Rypple brings the company’s recent purchase into the fold , six weeks after the acquisition closed. For the unfamiliar, it’s essentially a tool for recognizing employee performance, offering feedback and coaching, tracking business goals and generally applying gamification principles to the enterprise. In a pre-Cloudforce demo, Rypple co-founder and VP Dan Debow explained that the solution is designed to make workers “get better faster.”

And speaking of that demo, Debow showed off how Salesforce Rypple integrates with both the Salesforce Chatter social network and the core Salesforce.com CRM itself. From a CRM entry, users can directly and publicly “Thank” their coworkers with custom badges, with employees building a reputation over time, in turn making it easy to identify who the experts in a company are.

“Most organizations are managing compliance, not performance,” said Salesforce COO George Hu on Rypple during his time on stage. “It’s not performance management, its performance motivation.”

Debow also hammered home the idea that this isn’t designed to complement existing performance review tools – it’s designed to replace them, with functionalities for recommending employees for promotion, and so on. Pricing for Salesforce Rypple starts at $5/user/month, with general availability starting today. That Salesforce integration is coming in April 2012 for no additional charge.

Meanwhile, Salesforce Site.com is a platform for developing, hosting and deploying websites all from a browser-based interface. In another demo, Salesforce Director Product Marketing for the Force.com Platform Andrew Leigh showed off how Site.com enables drag-and-drop website editing, with templates and CSS stylesheets. But that’s the least of it.

Leigh explained that the real value of Site.com is its ability to help customers build a brand. Any piece of content can immediately be propagated across corporate sites, publicly-facing sites, and social networks, enabling customers to rapidly update their web presence and keep up with the social web.

And, as a Salesforce product, Site.com is heavily promoting its integration with its entire ecosystem. Drag-and-drop forms enable Salesforce data and Force.com applications to be integrated directly into the website. The example Leigh gave was of a “Jobs” page on a public-facing site that automatically displays open positions from a company’s CRM system and provides an “apply now” button.

Interestingly, Leigh says that early customer HP has already deployed no less than 3,000 sites on Site.com, and has seen a 30% boost in traffic for its troubles.

Site.com is also available today. A website hosted on Site.com is $1,500/month, with publisher and contributor roles and additional $125/user and $25/user respectively. But through April 30th, Salesforce is offering a promotional price of $825/month.

Services Angle

Something Benioff spent a lot of time discussing what sees as the “Social Divide” – which is to say, that employee, public and customer social networks are kept completely separate. It’s something that both Rypple’s Debow and Force.com’s Leigh touched on ahead of Salesforce: Sales and marketing teams now have a good handle on public social networks outside the firewall, but that so-called “revolution” has yet to reach inside the enterprise. That’s where Rypple and Site.com come in, helping customers keep in touch with each other, and, in conjunction with other Salesforce tools, the outside world.

Salesforce trotted out a handful of customers, including Burberry, Activision, and HP to spotlight the value of keeping employees in the loop with the company’s brand and goals by way of social enterprise tools. On a related note, there are reportedly 17,000 companies using Salesforce Service Cloud for social-driven customer services.

Benioff and company covered a lot of ground in the keynote session. But the real idea to take away from Cloudforce, it seems, is that social tools are transforming the enterprise in solid, measurable ways. And it’s not just for sales and marketing anymore.

All the same, SAP recently acquired SuccessFactors to add similar features to its portfolio, and Salesforce doesn’t have a monopoly on the social business market. Is being the loudest cloud booster in the space enough?

And more than that, how much longer is “social” going to be Benioff’s trump card? Social is definitely a trend worth tracking, but in the market that’s coming, apps are going to be less important than the mesh of data they generate. The service providers that thrive will be the ones that know how to intelligently leverage data sciences, crunch customer-generated big data and create new feedback loops. The so-called social enterprise is an important element in that ecosystem, but big data is where the action is.