Following from my earlier Post, Salesforce IDs and the 15-18 digit problem, here’s some Visual Basic code that can be installed as a User Defined Function (UDF) in Microsoft Excel (or, Microsoft Access) to easily convert Salesforce 15 character IDs to the “unique”, required by Microsoft applications, form of 18 characters … and a YouTube video to get you started.   Enjoy!

Click on the code below to copy the Visual Basic …

If you have any queries concerning this code, or installing it in MS Excel or MS Access, don’t hesitate to contact me.

May you live in interesting times

These are certainly challenging economic times for charities, for  nonprofits; indeed for-profit as well.  Now, more than ever, at the end of each day, you must be questioning whether your internal system are fit for purpose:

• that those monthly all too critical reports are all too time consuming to produce
• that essential data is still only available on paper!
• that even timely metrics are taking too much time to produce! That you’re unable to track even the most basic of activities
• that all tasks appear to be totally dependent on a proliferation of spreadsheets, all in different folders, with nobody following a consistent naming convention …
• that the details of the last contact with that very generous donor, that’s just called you for an impromptu meeting, are in the fund managers head – and they’re off ill …

Familiar experience?

You’re not alone.  Essentially, it’s time you must consider implementing that CRM (Contact or Client Relationship Management) system you know you need; or, at the least, schedule a review of your existing CRM implementation.

Still unsure as to why you need a CRM?   Well with a CRM configured to your needs you’ll most certainly:

• be enabled to automate a variety of processes and procedures, and in doing so become more efficiently at train new staff, or enabling existing staff to adapt
• have better coordination within your organisation
• have a detailed overview of communication with all your clients, and have better connect with your constituants
• have a comprehensive overview of all contacts; have better contact sharing and management as all contact details (e-mail, phones, address, …, last contact details, …) are all stored in one single place
• be able to share personal calendars and tasks; monitor and forecast performance to focus efforts and work to produce reports: internal and external

But be warned:

It’s never straight forward implementing a CRM system – be they peaceful times, or chaotic.  But, be reassured:

• there’s no perfect CRM solution out there – and they’ll never will be one
• CRM implementations mostly fail because of lack of buy-in
• the CRM itself is often a fraction of the overall total cost (for charities some CRMs subscriptions may even be free!  See my earlier post about Salesforce.com’s philanthropic 1:1:1 model)
• don’t forget the network, and access to the web; annual ongoing support, implementation and configuring additional modules, …, conversion costs: pooling, tidying, and re-structuring all the existing data in your unsupported database and spreadsheet ready for importing …
• that CRMs are for the long-term … so expect that after several weeks, or months, to find that some operation,  functions or processes could be addressed better, and that you would like to modify your present solution …

Where to start?

The trick?  Don’t procrastinate!

• start small!
• you’ll need a team – but don’t let the techies make the decision alone
• identify needs and priorities - what are the deal breakers
• what do you really need?  The classic: Must have, Like to have, …
• ensure that the implementation partner fits your culture, staff, and budget

Require the CRM to support:

• Mass Emails & Mail Merge
• Calendar, Email & Contact Management
• Marketing and Campaign Management
• Lead Management
• Customer Service Management
• Reporting and Analytics
• Interactive Marketing
• Document and Content Management
• and,
• if it’s the current best of breed, as in Salesforce.com, an social media application like Chatter …

May you live in …

Apparently there is no Chinese language equivalent of the curse “May you live in interesting times.” The nearest authentic Chinese proverb, according to Wikipedia, is “It’s better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period.”

Cartoon: Non Sequitor © Wiley Ink INC

Salesforce CRM user?

Are you a Salesforce CRM user?  Use Microsoft Excel for analysis or reports?  Then you’ll have met the Salesforce 15 digit ID problem.

Internally Salesforce IDs are 18 digits long.  But, Salesforce Reports reduce them to 15 digits.  So, for example, an Organisation ID internally might be 0014000000LmabcAAB, but in a report it will appear as 0014000000Lmabc. The missing last three digits (the “AAB” in the example) are check-digits; used for error detection.

Now that wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t that Windows applications, such as Excel and Access, are case insensitive.  The 15 digit IDs are unique, which is what you need when you use the Excel function like VLOOKUP, but Excel treats 0014000000Lmabc just the same as 0014000000LMABC (case insensitive!) - so, your Salesforce IDs are no longer unique and VLOOKUP will no long find the correct match … (incidentally, the 18 digit IDs are unique to VLOOKUP!)

There are algorithms you can use to reconstruct the last three digits of your Salesforce IDs (search Salesforce Help for “How can one convert a 15 character id to a 18 character id?“), but better still there’s a script that works in Google Docs online spreadsheet.

Convert 15 to 18 Digit Salesforce IDs with Google Spreadsheets [video] – enjoy:

My thanks to David Engel, of The Engel Journal, for his Post and Video on this topic.  Similarly, David’s acknowledges in his post Damon Douglas, David Padbury, and Stefan Kuehlechner.

If you need further support processing you Salesforce data using Microsoft Excel, or Access, then please don’t hesitate contact me.  Alternatively, there’s a Java script that converts Salesforce 15 digit IDs to 18 digits that can be found here.

I’ve just come across the stunning image – give it some time …

It’s by Paul, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team. The image represents the social graph of 500 million Facebook users.  Paul constructed the image using the the longitude and latitude of each user’s city and the number of friends between each pair of cities.
For more details on how it was produced see Paul’s article on Facebook here.  Enjoy …

My partners computer crashed yesterday – it’s irreparable! So I re-moved her hard-drive to my server and, thankfully, she now has full access to all her files.  But what if her crash had damaged her hard-drive; wiped all her data?  Classic: we have no back-up of her PC files!

Losing your business data (i.e. data loss, rather than merely data unavailability when, say, your network is “down”) could be significantly more catastrophic than my experience with my partners PC.  Studies have consistently shown that hardware failure and human error to be the most common causes of data loss:

• Intentional Action - intentional deletion of a file or program
• Unintentional Action – accidental deletion of a file or program, misplacement of CD/DVDs, administration errors, …
• Failure – power failure, hardware failure, business failure (e.g. bankruptcy of your software vendor), data corruption (database failure), …
• Disaster – water damage, fire, …
• Crime – theft, hacking, sabotage, malicious software …

The risks of data loss to  your business could be great (statistics from here):

• 6% of all PCs will suffer an episode of data loss in any given year
• 31% of PC users have lost all of their files due to events beyond their control
• 34% of companies fail to test their tape backups, and of those that do, 77% have found tape back-up failures
• and, finally, the most disturbing statistic: 60% of companies that lose their data will shut down within 6 months of the disaster

So regular back-ups of your business data, preferably stored off-site, whilst not sexy is very sound advice – that even your average IT Consultancy should follow diligently!

All you need is a reliable, value for money, solution.  So what’s available.

For a number of years now I have been using Amazon for my off-site back-ups of my business data.  Amazon? Aren’t they just books?

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Amazon S3 (part of Amazon’s Web Services – aws) “can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It [provides] access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites (my italics).”  Amazon states that “it’s designed for mission-critical and primary data storage.” And, I can confirm that it’s very cost effective!  There’s No restrictions on what or how much you back-up. You only pay for what you use, and there’s no minimum charge.

Amazon S3’s “standard storage” is:

• Backed with the Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement
• Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability
• Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities
• Amazon S3 provides further protection via Versioning” (OK – really that’s a little too geeky!  Essentially, it means older versions of your backed-up data can be retrieved)

Unfortunately, Amazon S3 interface is not the most accessible for the average user.  You’ll need to create an account with Amazon, but then I suggest you use other, third party, applications to manage your back-ups.

There are free Browser add-on’s that provide some management of your data stored on Amazon S3 (see for example S3Fox for Firefox), but the best tool I have found, and used for a number of years now, is one provided by Jungle Disk (acquired by Rackspace in 2008).

Jungle Disk is designed to make use of cloud storage. It comes in a number of different editions.  So, for example, the Workgroup Edition provides secure backup, synchronisation (more about this later …), and access to your data between up to 100 PCs.  Their Backup Vault feature uses de-duplication technology – so you don’t back up the same data twice.

With the combination of Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk you’ll have a very reliable, off-site, value for money Disaster Recovery solution.

Costs?

• Jungle Disk (e.g. “workgroup edition”) – $4.00 / month / user
• Amazon S3 (e.g. “US Standard”):
  • First 50 TB / month of storage used – $0.150 per GB
  • All Data Transfer In –  $0.100 per GB
  • Requests – $0.01 per 1,000 requests

Need help and support with this?  Do give me a call …

Notes

1. “50 TB” that’s 50 terabytes -  where 1 terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes (GB)
2. There is a less expensive approach via Jungle Disk using Rackspace’s Cloud Storage as an alternative to Amazon S3

One of the unavoidable complications with your email marketing newsletter is that you cannot fully control the font in which it is displayed. The email reader, or the browser, that your customer uses is not guaranteed to use the font you have so diligently selected for your newsletter. This is just as true for your carefully crafted HTML email, or your web site – i.e. the font may not be available (loaded) on your customers PC. Obviously, the alternative for your newsletter is to send it as a PDF document attached to a covering email; but that’s one extra click required of your time-starved customer …

So what’s available to ensure that your extensively researched look&feel, your brand, is consistent between your website, your newsletters, your HTML emails, and your ‘paper’ publications? You could depend on the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) font-family property (see font family, or w3school.com, or for a more general introduction: sitepoint), alternatively you might consider Google Fonts!

I’m currently mentoring a charity that require a non-standard layout for their new information newsletter. We’ve reviewed Litmus: Email client market share, and have compromised, for their first issue, on a standard font. They are non-profit Salesforce user, using Vertical Response as their email marketing App. (incidentally you don’t need to be a Salesforce user to use Vertical Response, you can use it as a standalone application … this is well worth considering if you’re a charity). However, for subsequent newsletters we’ll be using Google Fonts.

So what are Google Fonts? Google Fonts are “… high-quality web fonts that you can include in your pages …” With simple code (the Google Fonts API) in the HTML of your newsletter you’ll have significantly more control over the fonts your customer will view your newsletter in. Essentially, Google Fonts are downloaded from the Google Font Server when the newsletter is first read (technically: the fonts are saved in the email/browser cache so subsequent newsletters will be quicker … ).

Some example Google Fonts and their effects (Yes! Google Fonts work in WordPress!):

This is Cardo!

This is Tangerine!

This is Tangerine, with shadow!

To preview the currently available Google Fonts try here … So, no excuse now; move your Fonts to the Cloud!

Need more information? Do contact me.

Just come across this excellent Youtube video by David Armano (Senior Vice President of Edelman Digital) presented at TEDxPennQuarter.  A more  appropriate title might be Reinventing Social Media.  Enjoy …

Just come across this great video on Social Media. It originates from Social Media World Forum 2010 – a SixDegs’s Channel on YouTube.  There are some 15 related videos.  Enjoy …

Despite being published just over 11 years ago The Cluetrain Manifesto is still provocative, outrageous, and smart – the Cluetrain.com web site went live in April 1999.  As Thomas Petzinger, then a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of “The New Pioneers: Men and Women Who are Transforming the Workplace”, states in the foreword of the 2000 edition: “I’ve seen the future of business, and it’s The Cluetrain Menifesto.”

The Cluetrain Manifesto was written by Rick Levine (@ricklevine), Christopher Locke (@clockerb), Doc Searls (@dsearls), and David Weinberger (@dweinberger), all well experienced technology users.  The book quickly climbed the best-seller lists.  But, only now has the Internet matured enough for the books predictions to start ringing true:

Essentially, The Cluetrain Manifesto is a set of 95 theses, with associated commentaries, predicting how business will be done on the Internet. The 95 theses are a list of declarations aimed at the misconceptions that corporate leaders were applying to customers in the late 90′s, and are put forward as a manifesto, a call to action.  Here are the first four:

1. Markets are conversations
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, un-contrived
5. …

So why should the Cluetrain Manifesto be required reading?  Social CRM!

What is Social CRM and why it is so important:

Social Networking sites have seen an unprecedented growth in the number of users in the last few year. Brian Solis (@briansolis, a “prominent thought leader and published author in new media“) estimated (August 2009) that Facebook alone recorded 370 million unique visitors globally.  Similarly, Twitter registered  66 million unique visitors worldwide.

So there is a big opportunity for marketers to engage their customers through Social Media channels.  Indeed, in the ENGAGEMENTdb Report “The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged?” by the Wetpaint/Altimeter Group (@charleneli, “a strategy consulting firm that provides companies with a pragmatic approach to disruptive technologies“) it states that they “… have gone beyond surface case studies to measure the true financial value of social media.”  That there is ” … value in social engagement on top of social presence — it pays to actively and continually participate and invest in your networks.”

The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools of the 90′s where process driven; operational and tactical – structuring & controlling the data to help manage the relationship more effectively.  Whereas, Social CRM is young and difficult to define; but it is about people and not technology. Taking the Cluetrain initiative: it’s the conversation – stupid!  It’s a new era for business customer relations.  Business are no long in control.  With the Internet, with Social Media and Social networks, the consumer has more choice – and, the relationship data is unstructured and much more difficult to categorise.  The conversation is not merely business to consumer; but consumer to consumer!

According to Paul Greenberg (@pgreenbe, author of “CRM at the Speed of Light, Fourth Edition: Social CRM 2.0 Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers“), an outspoken advocate of CRM 2.0,  Social CRM is a “philosophy and business strategy designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment.“  So, Social CRM cannot be done with existing CRM tools alone.

For a more detailed attempt at defining Social CRM see Martin Walsh (@martinwalsh, Head of Digital Marketing at IBM – also on LinkedIn) slide show, including Video’s, on Social CRM Definitions … enjoy:

Social CRM Definition By Martin Walsh

However, there are signals that the Social CRM market is maturing – see, for example, “M&A & CRM: A timeline of the tumult” at CRM.COM.  Marketers are spending IT and marketing budgets on tools and technology to engage customers on Social Media channels.  For example, Cisco (“the worldwide leader in networking for the Internet“) currently has a team of 7 dedicated staff to manage the companies social media presence – this will rise to 20 to 30 by 2011.  Even TechCrunch has named Social CRM as one of the top ten technologies that will “rock 2010!”

Finally, a video discussing the intersection of Social CRM and the enterprise.  This was recorded at the Social CRM Summit held by Paul Greenberg, February 2010.  In the video industry analysts Michael Fauscette (@mfauscette, IDC “the premier global provider of market intelligence, …“) and Natalie Petouhoff (@drnatalie, Forrester Research “an independent research company“) answer questions by Michael Krigsman (@mkrigsman, CEO of Asuret, Inc., “a consulting company dedicated to reducing technology implementation failures.“) … enjoy:

So, The Cluetrain Manifesto is required reading … and, if you don’t have time to read the Manifesto in full, from cover to cover, at least read the Wikipedia entry at Manifesto …

Notes and further links:

• “Social Media Strategy Before Tactics“  See the blog post by Lee Odden (@leeodden, April 2010), “It’s a debate that’s more common than you might think. Strategy or Tactics first when it comes to social media?”
• For a blog post on the Evolution of the Social CRM Process read Jacob Morgan (@jacobm, “the Principal of Chess Media Group, a social business consultancy.”)
• What’s a Cluetrain?  From the Urban Dictionary: to become aware of what’s going on; to “get with the program”
• Theses: there are claims that the 95 Theses are based on the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, commonly known as The Ninety-Five Theses, written by Martin Luther in 1517 (Wikipedia)
• “Designing social websites”, Christian Crumlish talks to O’Reilly Media about designing social websites (YouTube)

Related Posts:

• Social Business through Social CRM – Video – March 2010
• Social CRM Strategy? – March 2010
• What the hell is Social Media? – Video, March 2010
• Social Media predictions for 2010 – February 2010
• Social Media Policy – February 2010
• Social Media strategy – Video, January 2010
• Dell kicks up a Storm with Social Media – January 2010
  

Just come across Wordle … enjoy!