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So far, the Facebook platform has been mostly about consumers.
Game providers like Zynga, music providers like Spotify, publishers like the Wall Street Journal — all of these companies are using Facebook to reach as many end-users as possible.
Occasionally you get a company that caters to particular kinds of businesses — like RootMusic, which creates pages for music artists.
But Facebook hasn’t played much of a part in enterprise software.
Which is why today’s announcement from Zendesk was a little unusual. The company is integrating Facebook into its help desk product, so user comments on Facebook will flow directly into a company’s hep desk system. This allows companies to respond to complaints quickly before they blow up into a public relations crisis.
Zendesk is one of the new enterprise darlings that is taking a specific function formerly served by on premises software — in this case, help desk support — and moving it to a cloud based service. It’s got more than 10,000 customers, including big names like Sony, Groupon, and MSNBC, and tripled its revenue between 2009 and 2010.