Finally, I have a bit of time to catch up on my notes from Dreamforce.
So my two favorite sessions at Dreamforce focused on Salesforce Ideas and Facebook.
Ideas and Force.com Sites
The Ideas session was led by the owners of the Ideas projects at Dell (Vida Killian) and Starbucks (Matthew Guiste). Both Dell and Starbucks use force.com sites to expose the Ideas API. They each gave a run down of how they use Ideas to deliver the features/products their customers want and how they moderate their Ideas sites. Here’s an overview of what we learned from them
- Be prepared for an onslaught of Ideas when you first roll it out. Have plenty of moderators ready to resond to Ideas and put out fires when necessary.
- Be prepared for negative feedback through Ideas. Its going to happen. Not everyone loves everything about your products to death and wants to snuggle up with them every night. Take the negative feedback, respond to it in a constructive way, and turn it into a conversation about how you can make your customers happier.
- Expect a huge drop-off in activity on your Ideas site after the initial wave. Just keep responding to the ideas that do come in and folks will come back.
- Keep a blog on the site that talks about what ideas are being implemented and give Kudos to the people who submitted them.
- Encourage social networking with your ideas. When you integrate Ideas with Facebook, whole communities read the news that the people they know are submitting and voting on Ideas.
And speaking of Facebook, that provides a nice seguay to the next session.
Kingsley Joseph and Clara Shih of Salesforce talk about Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs.
Kingsley’s role at Salesforce is to try to bring their marketing into the social realm. These guys covered so much ground, you really just need to watch the session to catch everything. Here’s an overview though
- Keep up with the metrics related to social marketing and your brand. It can be difficult to do, but its important to try to measure the effects and stay on top of trends.
- Use social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to get your name out in the social networks.
- Try Facebook ads to get your ads infront of targeted audiences.
- Use Salesfore business applications on Facebook.
- Distribute info about your product/brand virally.
