Salesforce Episode One

Start awesome background score of Star wars,
Once upon a time on the lone planet earth, one of the top three planets in the galaxy, while digging into the archives of web, I found the first implementation of Salesforce.com. This page was designed by 3 developers and was architected by Marc Benioff himself. After trying to promote online, internet base CRM solution to oracle, when no one supported him, Marc Benioff went on to start a company himself. Taking a small startup fund from his former boss of Oracle, he opened Salesforce.com in 1999.

You can see the Stay informed and Join our Pilot program links below which formed the little community of Salesforce.com which grew massively on forums and ideaExchange now.

The day Salesforce.com was launched only one online newspaper carried an article for it,

“The 6-month-old startup, funded by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, among others, will aim the service at companies with 10 to 200 salespeople. It will offer features found in traditional sales-force automation tools, including account management, contact management, opportunity management, forecasting, and reports. But unlike traditional packages, the service requires no implementation or maintenance by the customer.”

The link to the complete informationweek article on Web archive,

http://web.archive.org/web/20000302220511/www.informationweek.com/story/IWK19991206S0002

This Salesforce looks like a stone age considering the current one isn’t it?

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Blogger app for android phones

Those who do not have patience to wait till you each home, blogger has come up with an official android app. The app looks kinda sleek and ok dokay, considering this is a baby step into app world. Let's hope the android team works hard to upgrade the application.

Good thing is, I am publishing the post using android app.

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The Myth of Social Media Reality

The Graphic novel of Obelix and Co. by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo (from the comic series of Asterix) tells us the story of Menhir. The romans to capitalize the Gauls and capture them, decide to buy the Menhir from Obelix. Seeing Obelix showcase his richness, the villages of Gaul start making Menhir and sell it to Caeser.With Preposterus buying up every menhir at ever-increasing prices, it is not long before the camp of Totorum is filled with menhirs, and Caesar's finances heavily in debt. This causes a real trouble to Caesar and the romans because of one single thing... No one really knows what Menhir are used for!!!!

The first and most important factor about Social Media is, it is Menhir, a big rock that everyone is making but no one has any idea what it is used for.

When I meet people, they come with flasy names, I am social media manager for XYZ company or I am social media strategist for XYZ company. The big old tycoons of business are worried, what is this storm of Social media? Oh that facebook, its no use anyway. Don't you know MySpace? There was a big storm back then. This facebook is going that way Or some young tycoons (I am surprised how many they are wow) say, Oh Yes, I prefer twitter, facebook and all. See 360 degree connectivity, ROI, Socionomics and all that. But when asked a simple question, how do you earn ROI out of Social Media, very few people have answers.

Everyone is talking about Why the social media is needed, no one is talking How the social media is useful. Yes, Facebook has the largest population on the planet, this is amazing, this simple tells us that 36% of the world is damaged and lonely, it does not mean all of them are waiting for you to befriend them and spam their walls with your product.

Don't stack up your camps with Menhir like Preposterus did. Try to understand the logic behind it, try to understand what Social media can do for you. Its like Brahma-astra from Ancient vedic Hindu, can take over the world if used correctly or destroy everything in sight, if used wrongly.

Social media is not about facebook, its not about twitter. Its about winning the customer back in a way he likes. Its not about the false promises you made in your corporate brochure or the fancy ad that convinced (read: tricked) people into buying your products and scrapping them anyways. Think about it this way, every customer who bought a product from you, will buy it from you or is angry with you is standing in a large football stadium looking at you. You get one chance of 140 characters to turn that large crowd with you or without you. Use your words wisely.

Also social media won't help you a lot in getting that ROI you wanted, it will help you begin on a journey to get that ROI back. Social media is a shift in the way we communicate and its about time you shed the last cloth of disguise and get into the pool, raw and pure.

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[Idea] Twitter IVR using Database.com or ITR

With Social Media going on complete rhino rampage in the market, more and more companies are jumping the bandwagon opening up their service centers on twitter. This is a good alternative than a boring phone call with a incentive earing, extremely bored tele-operator whose job profile does not include thinking or a rude she-hulk hogan going through rigorousness training on Customer handling and still removes the anger of her husband on unsuspecting customers. But with twitter we are given a most important power, control over data. So can we build a IVR (interactive voice response) system on twitter? lets call it ITW (interactive twitter response)


Concept:

The idea is, using twitter API we will be listening to tweets to a twitter address, that tweet is automatically fetched using a listener agent (we can use java here)

The tweet is then distributed using token and the token can be used to query the data base.

The db will return back the possible response with options available for user to reply.

The user has to chose a response and reply to the tweet, and we can fetch the in reply to information encoded in the tweet to mark it with previous tweet.

Verdict:
The system will be as marvelous as annoying to the user and it will be fun to screw someone out. Right?

How does it sound? Already have dibs on this wait and watch....

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