Just came across this YouTube video – why Twitter … enjoy!
Archive for November, 2009
Chatter: chat⋅ter (from Wiktionary)
Noun – chatter
- talk, especially meaningless or unimportant talk
- …
There’s a lot of talk at the moment on the web about salesforce.com’s new social media offering: Chatter. Marc, once again, has skilfully used his salesforce.com playbook (see Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company and Revolutionized an Industry
Chatter, when it becomes available next year, should provide a social media layer across salesforce.com Sales, Service and Custom clouds. It is also planned to integrate with other market social computing platforms – see my earlier post
Below are my selection of five posts relating to Chatter.
They cover:
- Chatter is only 20% of the enterprise social web …
- Salesforce.com has, again, confused it’s customers, partners, analysts, press, as well as its own salespeople
- People will become the platform of the new social business
- That Chatter alone will not create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information
- That clients might see your social network site … !
In his Post “Salesforce Pushes Social CRM Technology –But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone” Jeremiah Owyang (“a Web Strategist”) praises salesforce.com for taking the lead in the CRM vendors pack in providing tools that connect the enterprise with the social web. But, rightly states that technology alone is not sufficient to “truly embrace customers in the social web.” That “80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change.”
Meanwhile, Jeffrey M. Kaplan (a Founder and Managing Director of THINKstrategies) in his Post “Salesforce.com: The Double-Edged Sword of Iterative Marketing” states that he admires salesforce.com for “genuinely enhanced its offerings and expanded its capabilities” with Chatter. However, he claims that many of the attendees he interviewed (following the keynote introduction of Chatter at Dreamforce 2009 – see my earlier post) “were confused about Chatter.” He claims that “salesforce.com has also succeeded in confusing its customers, partners, analysts and the press, as well as its own salespeople …”
In a more enthusiast post Michael Fauscette, in “Salesforce.com introduces the world to the Collaboration Cloud”, states that “Chatter moves from the app itself …[to focus] on the people…people become the platform of the new social business.”
Steve Hodgkinson (of Ovum, part of the Datamonitor Group – “a premium business information and market analysis company“) in his Post “Salesforce: chattering its way to social integration in the cloud” (an extract taken from Ovum’s Straight Talk service) correctly states that chatter “will provide a means to stimulate collaborative information flows between the users at the enterprise’s sales and service front line.” But then Steve is rightfully concerned that technology alone doesn’t “create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information.”
Finally, in “Has Your Organization Thought Through its Social Media Policy?” Dee Albritton, of Fast Forward, in a Post on The Nonprofit Technology Network site NTEN, warns non-profits that their “clients could see their social network site.” Whilst there is no explicit reference to Chatter, Dee goes on to say, “it is hard to turn down a client for services when they saw the picture of the big check on your site.” Dee references the results of a survey of 1,400 CIOs of companies with 100 plus employees:
- 54% now completely block social networking by employees
- 90% restrict usage to business purposes only, and
- 8% of employers reported firing employees as a result of social networking use
Interesting times …
Twitter is now the third most popular social network, behind Facebook and MySpace (Compete, 2009). For Twitter, in 2008 (TechCrunch), there were:
- 1+ million users
- 200,000 active users per week
- 3 million/day twitter messages
So Twitter needs to be included in your Social Media toolbox! You’ve connected your blog, and other social media profiles, to your Twitter page! So, what’s next?
This post will focus on two aspects of using Twitter: 1) getting followers, and 2) building relationships
Download the free crib sheet for this Post here
1) Getting Followers – the key terms:
- Tweet/Tweep/Tweeting/…
Tweet: Individual message are called tweets. It can also be used as a verb, as in “I tweeted you last week about the meeting”
Tweep: A conjunction of Twitter and Peeps resulting in tweeps – commonly used to refer to the Twitter followers of someone
Tweeting: The act of sending and receiving Tweets
Twitterer: (noun) One who “Tweets”
Twitterverse: The cyberspace of Twitter – i.e. anywhere you can Twitter including mobile phones
- Following
For somebody to receive your messages via Twitter they have to have selected to follow you, or your company
However, there are a couple of ways to advise people directly to follow you. You can, for example, send them an email from your Twitter home page, invite them (see below), or @reply to them (see below)
- @username message
Dreamforce 2009. Keynote – Day 1. Marc Benioff (CEO, salesforce.com) and Parker Harris (Co-founder. Head of Technology, salesforce.com) introduce Chatter: ” … it’s very very simple … the magic of Facebook and Twitter brought to the enterprise. … Join the conversation.”
It’s Marc enjoying himself …
The book publisher Packt (pronounced Packed) have just announced “… that WordPress has won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards.” This is the first time WordPress has won this Award.
Drupal, another CMS that I support, won the Best Open Source PHP CMS Category in the 2009 Open Source CMS Award. For this category there was a very close contest between the top three: Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla!
Whilst I would expect Drupal to be among the top three in this category, Wordress is in the top five for the first time. “The fact that it was outranked by Drupal by a very slight margin indicates how popular it has become with users as well as developers over the past year.”
Also see my earlier post on WordPress …
I’ve just come across Socialnomics – Social Media Blog with tag-line “to cover the latest trends in social media.” It was founded and is still maintained by Erik Qualman.
Erik’s latest post is Social Media ROI Examples & Video. The video is here:
Erik’s book Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business doesn’t appear to get such a good customer review on Amazon (.co.uk) … has any reader bought a copy?
The current Economist debates is:
Cloud Computing: This house believes that the cloud can’t be entirely trusted.
With Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, surprise-surprise being Against the motion.
So a brief resume of Marc Benioff, and his poster child salesforce.com:
Intrigued by web sites like Amazon.com Marc started salesforce.com in the mid-1990s whilst still working part-time at ORACLE (which then employed 200 people). Larry Ellison, CEO of ORACLE, was his mentor and provided some $2 million seed money to Marc’s and his “software on the web, on-demand” company (though this phrase is currently out of favour, with Marc prefering real-time, SaaS and multitenant). In this short history salesforce.com has received many business awards: The Wired 40 three years in a row: 2005-2007 (No. 7 in 2007), Forbes Top Ten Disrupters (2006-2007), Forbes 25 Fastest-growing Tech Companies (2007, No. 3), and BusinessWeek Top 100 Most Innovative Companies (2006, No. 79). Essentially, salesforce.com continues to be a disruptive success.
Salesforce.com reported in July 2009, at its earnings conference Q2 2010: 2 million users, a customer base of 63,200, and a net-profit of $21.2 million. It’s moving up market with customers like CNN, Motorola, and Starbucks. It’s moving vertically with investments in the financial and healthcare industry. A threat? Well Microsoft and ORACLE are expanding their offerings to compete in the SaaS arena. At the Q2 conference Benioff boasted scoring wins against Microsoft (much in love with their own CRM) and ORACLE (busy building it’s own CRM). Then, in October, Microsoft offers customers of salesforce.com, and ORACLE CRM, the equivalent of 7 months free switch subscription until the end of 2009 (however, after the trial the standard twelve months contract would apply – compare this with salesforce.com rolling monthly contract …)
But salesforce.com, with its Cloud suite, is very much tied to success of it’s customers with Applications, then Platform, then tools to build applications
- Sales Cloud: SFA and CRM applications
- Service Cloud: customer services, call centres, and web-portals
- Custom Cloud: the Force.com platform for custom applications
The latter two being more than 25% of new business.
Contra to the scale of the Google kingdom Salesforce.com relies on only two data centres – and, the main one in California has only 500 servers and handles 200 million transactions per day.
The Economist debate ends with a Post Debate follow-up on Friday 20th November – so go there soon …
Gartner Group top 10 trends for 2010
Last month the Gartner Group analysts highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends for 2010. Number one is Cloud Computing – up from third position last year.
So for a small to medium sized charities what are the benefits of Cloud Computing?
Firstly, there is an acronyms you’ve most likely heard in connection with Cloud Computing: SAAS.
SAAS (Software-as-a-Service) is where a service provider gives access to their software via the Internet. All you need is a PC, a browser, and Internet access. All the back end hardware and software is managed for you. So let us consider the SaaS aspect of Cloud Computing – what are the opportunities of SaaS for small to medium sized charities:
- No support costs – though there may be an annual license
- No need for in-house IT support staff – all installations, upgrades, back-ups, and on-going maintenance are handled for you
- No server – so no purchase, maintenance, or support issues. You don’t need to worry about installing the latest patch, replacing ailing hard-drives, the replacement funding strategy. They’ll be no annual license, or support contract
- Access: staff, and volunteers, can access your application from almost anywhere. Just a PC, web browser, and Internet access
- No urgency to upgrade in-house computers – less powerful PCs will do fine
But there are risks:
- You are dependent on Internet access – but you could always access the system from home, a library, or even the local coffee shop …
- The up time and response time – see for example the System Status page at trust.salesforce.com
- Backups – you still must take back-up copies of your data!
- And maybe, depending on the size and nature of your charity, Security and Regulatory compliance issues
Garner Group Hype Cycle 2008
In the Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle special report of 2008 Cloud Computing was highlighted as “the latest super-hyped concept in IT”, with 2 to 5 years before main steam adoption. It’s already main stream!
For small to medium sized charities, then, with limited capital, limited space, limited access to technical staff, do consider choosing SaaS and reduce your dependence on hardware.
Salesforce.com is the poster child of SaaS. It can be used for SFA (Sales Force Automation), or as a CRM (Contact Relationship Management) tool.
Consider fund raising as an example. Salesforce.com has created a special configuration of it’s SaaS for non-profit organisations, and charities. This Non-profit edition of Salesforce.com provides:
- Tighter communication with your donors
- Stratification of donors
- Collaboration between staff – fully manageable by Salesforce.com. Merge all those disparate spreadsheets, databases, and notes into one easily accessible system …
- Creating and managing a donor development pipe line
- Manage contacts, accounts, and communication sequence: you can also richly manage the relationships between contacts and accounts such as affiliation, board member, reporting relationship, …
- And, with Salesforce.com you can always add new screens, adjust the layouts, add extra fields, include relationships between records, install new applications from AppExchange (“… the complete marketplace for cloud computing“, many of which are free for non-profit/charities) – essentially fully adapt their software to your organisational needs
Obviously, much of this can be handled by a custom built database – but the long-run costs of developing and maintaining such an application can become prohibitive. Using a SaaS CRM like Salesforce.com to deploy a streamlined application is almost always going to be faster, and more flexible.
Finally, keeping the theme of fund raising, using Salesforce.com is about gaining and retaining donors; not about “managing” them – it’s more about managing the increasingly rich information you gather about them. But ultimately it’s not about “donor” strategy, process, or the technology. It’s people – and this includes your staff.
