Salesforce Ninja: An Elite Blog about Salesforce.com

Man is a social animal, this was the first lie they ever told you in your history classes. If we look at the human history going back through the dark ages, we understand that man is anything but a social animal. The agriculture revolution gave control of food in everyone hand and we started building societies, bringing people socially together. But when societies formed it brought all sorts of people together and caused all sorts of conflicts between them. Somewhere in the middle ages, few smart people realized this and decided to kick start a religious revolution. They established common guidelines for communities to work cohesively without stepping on each others foot. But they could not achieve this without control of information. With control comes fear and with fear comes faith. They established Churches, Mosques and Temples and controlled the information to reach heaven. But the voices of dissident did not merge, not easily, they just were suppressed. A few kings got o...

Move aside social metrics and the fancy infographics that make you go wow over social media. Lets get to the harsh reality, in a class of 40 people when Vishnu earned the award for the best student in class, 20 of the students got jealous, 5 of them felt their ego hurt, remaining were indifferent to the obvious. Soon the rumors started floating around about him being teachers pet, him washing teachers clothes and what not. Although these stats are made up, the point is there will always be dislikes for whatever you do. No program can go without reaction. It is human nature to criticize, criticism is one of the basic emotion of human mind, there is no need for coaching in criticism. Every brand will have their set of 'critics' who will feed off negative emotions and criticize, complain and try to stop everything that is being done. Isaac Newton was way ahead of his time when he proclaimed, 'Every action has equal answer opposite reaction', (Newton third law of mo...

In today's world using the world Social has become the latest trend. Every company around the world has started putting social term in their advertisement. Some Indian companies have also started putting Twitter and Facebook logo in their roadside hoardings, what is to be done with it is not yet sure, do they expect people to park their vehicle on the roadside climb up 20 feet and click on them, is not yet confirm? The Governments have woken up to the power of social media with Indian Government acting to censor the internet in name of anti-religious sentiments and American Government attempting to pass SOPA bill 2012 in name of piracy, they have clearly shown that the time is up for the government. People are self censoring themselves and they are relying on the government lesser and lesser. Obviously Government must be there but in this post social work, Governments will loose control over the information which they so dearly protect. But lets not get into politics of things...

Humanity has moved social, hands down. Yup, the war is won people are comfortable sharing their relationships on cloud. But the current social networks are simply relationships on cloud, what we need right now, is something more. Facebook was the game changer, it brought relationships on the cloud. It got better viewing of photos, it now includes video chatting etc. Google Plus started relatively (or rather exponentially) slower, while most of the world was slowly opening of on Facebook, google joined the race and tried to change the arena. Nothing happened, because Google Plus, even though came in fancy packet, it offered nothing different that what facebook offered or could offer. It was same old mumbo jumbo crap of relationships, chatting etc. Twitter always was a home-ground of misfits, the geeks, the marketing guys, celebrities and the journalists. The people in short who enjoy creating things and the 140 char space of twitter status was enough for them to ...

Ancient Egypt was the worlds most flourishing culture. They build structure which have dazzled the world at large for millions of years. But when we look at those giant towering structures called pyramids, we fail to overlook few things. 1. All of them are tombs of pharaohs of Egypt. 2. All of them follow same dimensions and stand similar way. 3. The people who build these structures are nowhere acknowledged. Any historian studying Egyptian would tell you that in ancient Egypt, the citizens used to devout their time farming. When the land was ready to harvest, the system would assign them to build the kings pyramid. There was no room for individual innovation and hence, despite being engineering marvels of the time, the pyramids era died down with the rise of prophets and modern religion. During the era, Moses stepped forward and offered freedom to the peasants. Moses came up to these people who never knew the taste of freedom and offered them, wh...

You may despise it, you may hate it, you may say its a fad or a fashion trend. But whatever you may do, you cannot ignore it. For the first time in the history of human civilization has the top few, who believed in controlling the system through devious means of information contro l, are running for cover. If you scan the daily news papers, there are paragraphs written over a single 140 characters line by some celebrity. The bottom line, we are changing the way we look at things due to these hammering of social media. Social media is no different that word of mouth, there were countless email forwards back in the old Yahoo days. However, email was a private affair the spread of information was linear, however in social media, the spread of information is cumulative making it more effective and blown up exponentially. This pattern can be shown in a graph as below Ideally both email and social media reached the same number of users but unlike in email, in social media you can track t...

Did you see the tweets of #DF11 in your timeline? Did you happen to see large posters of Microsoft, balloons of Oracle floating around in Sfo? If you still didn't know what was going on, it was Salesforce.com annual Dreamforce conference, which this year saw nearly 45,000 people registering for the event from over 60 countries, according to a Salesforce media statement. This turned to be the largest conference in the software industry. Obviously, if you have anything to do with Salesforce, you would know all this. If you are not, you have definitely heard of it. It was a futuristic step to deploy a enterprise based CRM on Cloud and yet even after a decade, Salesforce keeps itself way way ahead of the competitors (are there any left now?) in again releasing a futuristic enterprise application. The key take away from the entire Dreamforce 2011 conference was social and mobile. Salesforce opening the gates for a full fledged enterprise SCRM, where conversation and your lea...

In India there is a famous saying, 'Not all fingers on your hands are of the same size.'  It simply suggests that no two human beings are same. We all think differently, we all have different aspirations. When it comes to social media sites, the world is roughly classified as the battle between Facebook, twitter and Google plus. I have repeated this since beginning, Social media is not new, people were social like this before. If human being is nothing but only social. We used to gather around bonfire, gather near water cooler, people used to bond together in the rock concerts, they bonded in favorite bars. They did talk about brands and advertise there too. With the advent of computers, people have started channeling their energy on the computer. They do things online, why? For one, you can bond with freakishly high number of people that you can physically meet. Every day some start-up does a special feature in some online tech magazine about what the...

There are some speculations growing on in the market about the advent of social media, Social CRM and the increase usage of social sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are quite some articles about controversies around twitter, the most recent one being about TheRednerGroup and Game publisher 2k . A single tweet can spell disaster for a corporate if done wrongly. While this is going on, closer to home India, we have claims of cyber bullying and internet vandalism on celebrities like Barkha Dutt, IIPM . In these events one fails to take in account the social, astrological changes in the millennium that gone by and the change in the way society progressed. We first began long time ago with colonies, a group of people living together. The western civilization progressed with the rise of rumors and threats into the free world while the eastern civilization flourished the kingdoms of those who control the information. This ideology was carried on my the colonies to control the i...

When it comes to social media, people immediately jumped into conclusion about ROI, likes, facebook, metrices, IP address, sentiment analysis and many other 'keywords'. Ideally speaking, I believe all this is.... crap. How can you measure a human thought? How can you stimulate the human thought? Social Media is all about passing a message through the human thought. Twitter, facebook or any other social network are just an extension to this thought. Lets take two examples of the social connection, My mother is a traditional house wife, who also has a facebook account. When it came to getting a bride for her son (sadly me) it took her exactly 24 hours to get in touch with 2 girls from distant Karnataka (my hometown) In a social world this is fantastic, the social channels she used where simple telephone (that also a landline) and total 3 phone calls. The message spread like a wildfire. Here we need to note, getting a wife for her son is about her control over his destiny, which i...

Well they say India is a developing nation, but is it? Kudos to this brave taxi man.

Its a irony that I call this presentation straight, for just like my schizophrenic brain this is nowhere close to being straight. You will agree

Reinventing the wheel is the biggest jargon used in business. It simply means doing the same thing again and again. Whenever I go to any presentation on social media, everyone talks about numbers, so and so network has so and so people. You can use so and so medium to use them. Very few people realize that social media is less about social tools and more about the people. The social tools only provide an easy medium to measure the reach of your campaign. However social media requires faith, faith and passion in your product and your costumer. If the customer believes in your product and you, you will never need any social media strategy to work on because the client will be doing the marketing for you. Ofcourse by doing this we are again reinventing the wheel. This ideology is the oldest written ideology in the world. That's how the man who inventing the wheel sold his idea to the world. Imagine asking people to balance on a wheel in a world that did not know how to stand properly...

We all live in a social world, where everyone knows someone, somewhere. A few days ago I wanted to determine the exact followers of my blog and the numbers were vast, I had around 150+ followers using google reader, 300 around using facebook and 450 around on twitter. Most of these followers overlapped each other. feedburner told me, amidst this chaos the total reach of my blog is 200 people per day on an average. So basically there was no way to determine the exact number of followers. This actually got me thinking about the social scenario nowadays. An average person has joined more than one social network. The social scenario nowadays is completely cluttered and decentralized. We have many tools for the trade, while facebook connects me to my friends, flickr helps me share my albums. A colleague in office casually passed around a information, 'Did you add me on orkut? I uploaded some pictures on my Singapore trip on it.' It was chaos, for I am already added on...

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 S...

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 res...

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 y...

A brief introduction for the first lesson in Social Media, inspired by the book Socialnomics and  http://socialnomics.net  I am suddenly liking it. Special thanks to Mashable.com for make me go crazy over Social Media.