Salesforce Social Inc

Do you know Salesforce sits beautifully in the middle of your social-marketing strategy? No, I am not saying this by taking money from them, (I do however wish they paid me for advertising), but I am saying this because I just had a glimpse of how Salesforce-Social CRM and yes, the picture that was painted was amazing.

So how do we achieve it? Lets have a peek.

1. Google Search/ Google Adwords/ Facebook Advertising/ Your Public Domain Site/Slideshare.net/Youtube
The Salesforce native Web-to-lead form can be used very beautifully here. Create a web-to-link from and host it on your own domain name website. Provide its link as the click-thru URL in the above sites and just collect the leads.
Psst. Create a URL parameter and you can actually track the lead sources in these pages.
If you are looking for a much more sophisticated concept, use the Salesforce Idea controller and let people publish ideas for you. Read more about Idea below.

2. Twitter Sales/Service
Want to monitor your twitter conversations? Well Salesforce for Twitter2 by force.com labs is a beautiful app for you. It fetches you live conversation from twitter using your keywords and you can directly add them to your leads/campaigns or contacts directly. This on demand service fetches tweets only when you want them and hence reduces the risk of missing out a critical message over the minute-by-minute updates of twitter timeline.

3. Facebook
You can use the web-to-lead form discussed above as a feedback form for your product or you can get more creative and create a facebook page using Salesforce Sites, which leverages your salesforce data on external public URL.
Go more interactive, build a Answers community for your product, where users can ask questions and get answers. The selected best answers can be pulled into solutions and also posted on external knowledge base.

4. Idea Controller
The most creative and innovative concept of Salesforce is the Idea controller. Companies have already started using it to innovate their customer. The best example of its usage is by Starbucks. Use it in the center of your Social CRM Strategy and let the people know that you are there to listen to them.

As a added benifit, you can also use LinkForce a URL short shortener native on force.com, where you can make short URL that makes sense to you and your business. A good way to tell people what you really mean before clicking the link.

For more details on how you can use these technologies, you can talk to Salesforce for its implementations.