Dell launched Storm Sessions in December 2009.

Background: Dell’s IdeaStorm was launched in early 2007 “as a way to talk directly to our customers“, and “to have on-line brainstorm sessions to allow you the customer to share ideas and collaborate with one another and Dell.”

The model is a simple one: users of the Direct2Dell site post suggestions and requests.  As these posts are promoted, by other users of the site, their score is increased.  Dell then uses this ranking to identify which ideas are the most important.  It has proven to be a very successful model with some “2,000 ideas submitted within the first few weeks,“  and, over the three intervening years of use, Dell claim to have “implemented almost 400 ideas.”

IdeaStorm is therefore an extremely successful example of crowdsourcing (and what a horrendous term that is!) – which Wikipedia (another model of crowdsourcing!) insightfully defines as “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community.”

So why has Dell changed this successful formula?  What does Storm Sessions bringing to the equation?

Vida Killian‘s (VidaK: Twitter Bio “Idea girl at Dell“) in her Direct2Dell blog post “Storm Sessions Launch on IdeaStorm” suggests that Storm Sessions is the “next level“.  Essentially, Dell will now be choosing the topics!  Driven by Dell’s current business needs Dell will post “targeted, relevant, and time bound ideas” and seek the users comments.  Dell even offer to provide, when the “time bound” is up, feedback on “how and when the idea will be put into action.”

Now this sounds like something worth monitoring …

IdeaStorm and Storm Sessions are powered by salesforce.com

See salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange.  On the IdeaExchange site salesforce.com users can “suggest new products, promote favorite enhancements, interact with product managers and customers.”  Similarly, all editions of salesforce.com CRM come with an in-house “on-line suggestion box” called Ideas – where “a community of users [can] post, vote for, and comment on ideas.“

In the foreword to Clara Shih book The Facebook Era … (Mar 2009), Marc Benioff (Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com) states “more than ever before, the lines are blurring between the consumer and enterprise worlds … bringing together social networking and enterprise applications represents the next phase in this evolution”

Email is failing.  It was never envisaged to do what we now expect of it.  Email messages grow too long, too difficult to follow, too difficult to track, get lost, and attachments go backwards and forwards with no version control.  Should I read the email where I’m only cc’d?  Can I remember which internal group I’ve just emailed that grumble to? Why do we still use it?  Is there no alternative?

Let’s take a blank page.  Take the best of Facebook.  The best of Twitter.  The number of users of these communication tools,  after all, is growing astronomically.  Something must be right.  Merge all that functionality into one place, sprinkle in filters, user controlled groups, and let it inherit all the robust and proven user control and security of an enterprise system.  Then give it away – free!

This is what salesforce.com’s Chatter is all about.  Expect it to be disruptive.  Expect to see it cloned … every organisation is going to need it to stay competitive.  Everybody in the enterprise is going to use it – it will enable networking, it will encourage collaboration, and, be warned, it will ignore the existing hierarchy.  All you need do is Activate it, nurture it, and wait until it reaches that critical mass of users …

Salesforce.com’s User Profiles (a collection of settings and permissions that defines a user) will be extended to include the users Chatter settings – including a current photo (user controlled, of course), and status: “Working on major marketing campaign, anybody have any experience of using VerticalResponse?”.  Twitter like status updates will appear on the users home page – in real-time: “there’s a new vacancy in the London office“,  “the printer on third floor is now working“, – but also, from salesforce.com Workflow triggers, and alerts: “Major donor not been contacted for 90 days!“, and “Large donation made by Corporate Sponsor“.  The user will have full control over the feeds (however, there’s some ambiguity from what I’ve read and seen as to whether email will be included in this – it aught to be), groups (small, and large – added instantly by the user; both public and private; and even secret groups: where that discussion on the “up and coming merger” can continue with confidence), the display can be filtered to show just Object (a salesforce.com term!  Think of Record), a team, Tweets on that competitor you’re following,  …

Better still, when it’s made available in Spring 2010 to all salesforce.com editions for free, all existing applications including those developed by third parties (or, downloaded from the AppExchange), will automatically acquire all this Chatter functionality.  And, of course, it will be on your mobile.  And, of course, it will come with a Desktop app (for when your not logged in to salesforce.com).  And, of course, it comes with a full set of APIs. And, …

Oh, these are interesting times

Working on Setting Your Social Media Strategy?  Then this video, from salesforce.com’s Dreamforce 2009 (the “Global Gathering” of nearly 16,000 people in San Francisco – http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF09/site/), is a must

The presenters are Jamie Grenney (Sr. Director of Social Media at salesforce.com), and Vida Killian (Social Media and Community Technology Manager at Dell – with some 10 years experience of Social Media at Dell).  Dell are a salesforce.com user

In the video Jamie presents a slide showing some quite astronomic growth in Social Media usage.  This includes:

• Facebook: 124 million “actual users” with 202% growth rate year on year
• Twitter: 26 million “actual users” with 660% growth rate year on year

(source: complete.com 2009, growth rate Oct. 2008- Oct. 2009)
Continue reading…

OK.  It is another salesforce.com video – but it’s good about explain SaaS … enjoy.

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:

1. Chatter is only 20% of the enterprise social web …
2. Salesforce.com has, again, confused it’s customers, partners, analysts, press, as well as its own salespeople
3. People will become the platform of the new social business
4. That Chatter alone will not create a flow of useful, relevant and timely information
5. 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 …

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 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.

Earlier this week, 30th September 2009, Google opened up their Wave preview to about 100,000 people.  Salesforce.com, with their interest in the service cloud , are naturally one of the first to demo Wave integrated with their CRM.  In a Salesforce Force.com Blog entry called “Getting in Front of the Wave” you will find background details on Google’s Wave and a YouTube video  (see below) on how the Wave platform might be integrated with Salesforce.com …

Just come across an interesting Blog post by Lauren Ingram, a software QA engineer at Salesforce.com.  The full title of the post is “The Digital Age: Reading in Reverse: How to make a profit.“  It’s well worth a read …

In Lauren’s Post there’s a reference to a Gartner research note (G00168995, 22 July 2009).  In this research note Gartner state that despite a decline in sales due to the economy they have not seen a drop-off in their customers requesting vendor evaluations related to Sales Force Automation (SFA).  The note includes, of course, one of Gartner’s classic magic quadrants.  The magic quadrant, a square (shown here on the right – click to enlarge) divided into four “quadrants”, is essentially a visual aid for comparative discussions of vendors attributes.  Of course, the placement of vendors in the square needs careful interpretation.  All the SFA vendors in the square offer Software as a Service (SaaS – read as service in the cloud), one of Salesforce.com’s key marketing attributes – and, Salesforce.com is in the prestigious top right-hand corner of the magic quadrant.

Lauren summarises the theme of his Post in the final sentences, “… Salesforce is betting on the service cloud.  Today, we’re reading in reverse, making our customers available to their clients.  And it’s all because you, the reader, insist on using that Twitter account.”