Category: CRM

The user-interface model for the future of enterprise software looks an awful lot like Facebook. The post Seven Takeaways from Cloudforce appeared first on VMR. Seven Takeaways from Cloudforce was first posted on March 4, 2011 at 8:18 am.©2015 “VMR”. Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at hugh@vmrcommunications.com

1. Facebook is the User Interface Model of Choice

The user-interface model for the future of enterprise software looks an awful lot like Facebook. At least according to Marc Benioff who I think is rightly passionate about his belief that so-called “Cloud 2” platform architecture similar to that of Facebook is best suited to bridging the gap between what Salesforce Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami refers to as “systems of record” and “systems of engagement.”

2. Native Social Media Integration Has Improved But Has a Long Way to Go

The Salesforce team clearly understands the importance of bringing relevant conversations occurring in the social web into the Salesforce user interface and fully integrating those “systems of engagement” with the Salesforce systems of engagement such as Chatter. But I’m not sure they fully appreciate the massive scope, scale and strategic business importance of platforms other than the Big Two – Facebook and Twitter. The major problem, in my view is that presently Salesforce offers only very limited native integration with only the Big Two and none of the many thousands of social sites consumers are using today.

Image Credit:   The Conversation Prism, by Brian Solis and Jess3

When I asked Benioff if he thought it would make sense for Salesforce to acquire a social media monitoring firm such as Radian6, he replied that the company is always looking at acquisition possibilities and he hinted that the popularity of the Radian6 app which will soon be unveiled in the Salesforce App Exchange will be a significant factor in determining whether any such acquisition might have merit.

3. Ensuring Maximum User Adoption within Salesforce is the Best Way to Move the Needle on Customer User Adoption

Salesforce is one of the very few technology companies with a Chief Adoption Officer, namely Polly Sumner who spoke briefly during the analyst luncheon. So I was surprised to note – in light of the priority the company seems to be placing on UA, and in light of Benioff’s entreaties for attendees to ask Salesforce employees how they were using Chatter – that one Salesforce employee I spoke with was using email to communicate with a colleague who was also at #Cloudforce.  Salesforce would do well to tweak the product or roll-out processes to ensure more broad-based Chatter adoption within its own ranks and then blog about such adoption experiences as extensively as possible.

4. Marc Benioff Is a Dynamic Leader and is Not Afraid to Link the Salesforce Brand Strongly to His Persona

He’s a superb leader with a natural ability to inspire the best from those around him. Benioff’s style of leadership appears to me to be quite similar to his approach to software development: It is highly collaborative, decentralized and against the grain. For example, I was quite impressed, during the analyst lunch I had the privilege to attend, to note his ability to ask various members of his executive team to answer questions posed by those in attendance. Like his mentor Steve Jobs at Apple, Benioff has a warm and engaging personality that lends itself to brand dependence – and perhaps over-reliance – on his persona. It would be wise for Benioff to begin sharing the limelight more strategically with potential successors. Seesmic.com and LeWeb founder Loic Le Meur does not have the same level of executive experience but Benioff may wish to bring Lemuir on the Salesforce executive team to ensure Salesforce has more than one “face of the franchise.”

5. Integrated Philanthropy Is Central to the Salesforce Business Vision and Could be a Strategic Differentiator

Contrary to the opinion of esteemed economist Milton Friedman, the “business of business” is not only business according to Benioff. Integrated philanthropic initiatives, centered around causes benefitting children, have become a hallmark of the Salesforce brand. Benioff’s participation in America’s Promise, a program spearheaded in part by Benioff’s mentor Colin Powell in 1997, appears to have had a lasting impact on not only the Salesforce co-founder’s philanthropic vision but his business vision as well. As Benioff states in his latest book, “Behind the Cloud,” co-written by Carlye Adler:

As I mentioned to Salesforce’s Gordon Evans, I see Chatter as having the potential to be used as a cross-enterprise, real-time collaboration platform to solve global challenges. Salesforce will need to find creative ways to provide for such collaboration without threatening its reputation as a highly secure repository of business data.

6. Native Integration of More Social Media Systems of Engagement is Imperative

Natively integrating password and non-password protected external systems of engagement such as YouTube.com, Linkedin.com, Quora.com, GetSatisfaction.com, the blogosphere and other social outposts which will continually emerge may not be in high demand presently but as enterprises and SMBs become more aware of the vast scope of social media and understand use case scenarios and ROI opportunities, I suspect Benioff will realize that it may make sense to ensure more native, easy to use integrations with such sites. And that may necessitate a strategic acquisition of a social media monitoring platform such as Radian6 that has a slick workflow dashboard or perhaps – more appropriately – a data mining – focused platform such as DataSift where the Salesforce user interface would compensate for the lack of a sophisticated workflow dashboard.

Salesforce appears to be waiting for demand to emerge but in a highly complex industry where customers need an educational partner just as much as a solutions partner, this may not be the wisest approach. Salesforce – or one of its competitors – may decide to pro-actively educate customers on why such integration is critical to ensuring all systems of engagement are integrated with systems of record and accessible in a user interface that accommodates the differing executional needs of business groups (eg, Customer Service, Sales, PR, Product Development, Legal, HR, etc…).

7.  The Future for Salesforce and Its Customers Looks Extremely Bright

Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Linda Crawford, Peter Coffee, Gordan Evans, and others could not have been more gracious and open to chatting with me during #Cloudforce. And that culture of transparency and openness is what impressed me the most. It was quite literally something I could touch, feel, see and hear today at #Cloudforce. The future looks extremely bright and I feel privileged to be a part of this very exciting moment in the social technology industry’s history.

Did you attend #Cloudforce? What were your take-aways? If you did not attend, what more would you like to know about Salesforce and the future of socially-integrated enterprise software?

—-

Correction : The original version of this post referred to Cloud 3. Although “Service Cloud 3” was announced during Cloudforce, when Salesforce executive Marc Benioff refers to the “Facebook Imperative,” it is what he calls the next phase of computing, or Cloud 2, not Cloud 3. Special thanks to Carlye Adler for clarifying this. – Hugh Macken, March 14, 2011

The post Seven Takeaways from Cloudforce appeared first on VMR.

Seven Takeaways from Cloudforce

VMR

I like everything I’ve seen about Batch Book social CRM except the inability to easily bring into a record that person’s public social media profile accounts. The post Better Social Insights Needed for BatchBook.com Social CRM appeared first on VMR. Better Social Insights Needed for BatchBook.com Social CRM was first posted on July 16, 2010 at 10:11 pm.©2015 “VMR”. Use of this feed is for personal non-commercial use only. If you are not reading this article in your feed reader, then the site is guilty of copyright infringement. Please contact me at hugh@vmrcommunications.com

I admit my expectations were quite high given all the positive press to date. In a post for Mashable.com, Brogan narrowed down exactly what he liked the most about Batch Book:

John Jantsch, one of the leading small business development and business planning experts in North America also gave it two thumbs up:

You get the picture. Renowned small business experts like Jantsch and social media community experts like Brogan have sung the praises of Batch Book. And built-in social network insight reporting seems to be what those who really like it love the most. The company itself seems to practically hang its hat on this feature.

Maybe I’m being overly critical but the important first part of contact-centric social media monitoring that involves bringing into a record a person’s social media profiles is something Batch Book could do a lot better.

Here’s specifically what I mean. Here are two examples of profiles I tried to create for two people – Avinash Kaushik and Paul Miller – I don’t know much about other than the insightful things I’ve read from them online. I wanted to learn more about them, their social footprint, and follow the other insights they are sure to share in the future.

So, when you first go into a contact record in order to start adding contact details you see a “Search Social Network” button, as you can see below:

Here’s an example of my search for Paul Miller’s public social network accounts. Note that I did enter Paul’s individual work email address before doing this search.

In fairness to BatchBook, they do offer a nifty feature called Super Tags which enables you to manually add social network account URLs associated with your contacts.

But having seen what contact-centric social search tools like Gist.com can do, I was hoping for more sophisticated profile search technology from Batch Book too.

Having said all this, there is one option with Batch Book that I figured might reverse my disappointment with the limited social profile account search capabilities. It’s something with which readers of this blog will already be familiar:

It’s Flowtown.com and it too has taken the small business email marketing world by storm. For good reason, in my opinion. For those who don’t know, Flowtown is a service that, to quote from the Batch Book website

I had a feeling that the integration that Batch Book offers with Flowtown would resolve the issue I’ve outlined above. At least, that is what I was hoping.

In order to integrate with Batch Book, though, I had to upgrade to a paid Flowtown account which starts out at $17 per month, which I did.

I then tried out the service on one of the contacts above and here’s what I got:

So the integration definitely solved problem #1  (not narrowing things down enough) but I was a little disappointed still that only 3 social network profiles were included and nothing else.

What even more interesting is that Flowtown itself does a spectacular job of building a complete profile of someone as long as you have their email address. With just an email address, Flowtown came up with the following in a matter of seconds:

Do you see all of the blanks that Flowtown just filled in?

Let me list them:

Please chime in here. Social CRM is hugely important for today’s marketing and PR professionals and its in our best interests to share ideas with one another to help inform the decisions of those who are building the exciting social business technologies of tomorrow.

Full Disclosure: Neither Batch Book nor Flowtown are clients of VMR Communications, LLC or Hugh Macken.

The post Better Social Insights Needed for BatchBook.com Social CRM appeared first on VMR.

Better Social Insights Needed for BatchBook.com Social CRM

VMR