A Force to Reckon With

Next week I am heading to Cloudforce DC with fellow MVP and friend, Amber Neill. We’re taking the train (go green!) and of course made sure we’re on one with wi-fi available. Why are we taking the time to attend a one day event in our nation’s capital? And why would our employers encourage us?

1- Community. I know I say this a lot, but there is nothing better than the community spirit with Salesforce users. When you’re like me and the only person who understands the nuts and bolts of Salesforce in the office, the opportunity to talk shop with others is always welcome and beneficial.

2- Knowledge. I knew before they posted the sessions that I would be able to leave DC with new knowledge about Salesforce. Now that they have posted the sessions, my problem is trying to decide which to attend! Salesforce is committed to sharing the knowledge needed to utilize their systems. They want you to push the limits and find new ways to make the platform work for you to improve your business. In terms of coloring in the lines definition of thinking, Salesforce draws some dotted lines for you to get you started, then offers an eraser and cheers you on to move those lines wherever you want on the page.

3- Inspiration. I love hearing Marc Benioff speak. He is always inspiring and renews my spirit and enthusiasm for working on the platform. He will not be speaking at Cloudforce DC, that will be Vivek Kundra, EVP of Emerging Markets at Salesforce.com and former CIO of the United States. I’d looked forward to hearing him speak at Dreamforce last year but he was unable to attend. I’m certain it will be a great keynote, long as he refrains from #nextslide we’ll be tickled I think!

4- Connections. I get a ton of, well, spam emails pushing this product or that service for our Salesforce org. The Expo at a Cloudforce is a great way to connect with potential partners and vendors, get a face to face meeting with them to discuss their product and see if it will be a possible fit for your instance. It is also beneficial to hit the official Salesforce areas to see how you could expand your use of Salesforce, see a feature you may be considering turning on, or get ideas on how others use the platform.

5- Happy Hour. After a long day where you’ve learned a lot, a last opportunity to share what you’ve learned or just hang out with some interesting people is always welcome. Come join us at #CloudforceDCHH to wind down before heading home or back to your hotel!

I can’t wait to attend Cloudforce DC and hope you’ll be joining us! Cloudforce is free, so especially if you’re in the area, come on over and check it out!

So, you’ve turned on Social Contacts in Salesforce.

You know the drill – pull up a contact, click on the social media icon of choice, look for the contact and if you find them, click to associate it with the account. You can pull their picture to use in Salesforce as well- in theory it is a great way to enhance contact information.

That is, until you try it, per my previous post. Twitter is not too bad if the person has their name associated with the account. I’m still dismayed that there is no way to manually enter the handles and you’re forced to search. Which again, works great if they have their name on it but if you want to associate their corporate account it will be impossible to do so.

LinkedIn – see the previous post. I have learned since then the access is LinkedIn’s product. So if you have access to LinkedIn via Salesforce, it comes with all the standard access they provide at a premium. Not sure how I feel about this as LinkedIn would/should have good business-related data, I can’t imagine companies happy to shell out for licenses to tools to make it easier for employees to job hunt. Just a thought.

Facebook – Here’s the big one. I found myself!!! Ha ha! Actually in talking it through with some fellow MVPs, especially Judi Sohn, I figured out why even though I was logged in with my account, why I couldn’t see me.

Basically even though you are logged into Facebook with your valid access to even begin searching, it treats it like a public search. So you can only find those who have allowed themselves to be searched (for example, if you google the name, their account page comes up- not just references to other places they’ve posted on FB). Here’s where it gets even better- you go to privacy settings, How You Connect and can choose Everybody for the first three. Per Facebook and common sense, this should open you up to be searched by anyone in Facebook. So changing this could make me see myself? Nope. I’ve got it set for everybody to search for me. I’ve met a lot of interesting people and gotten back in touch with them due to that setting.

So if I’m set up to be able to be found by users (in theory anyone connecting from Salesforce) why couldn’t I find me?

Because of THIS setting: Go to Privacy Settings again, then Apps Games & Websites. At the bottom is Public Search which is defined as: Show a preview of your Facebook profile when people look for you using a search engine. Click on the edit settings button and it’ll take you to a page where you can check on or off to be included in public search. The exact message is: Public search controls whether people who enter your name in a search engine will see a preview of your Facebook profile. Because some search engines cache information, some of your profile information may be available for a period of time after you turn public search off.

You must have this checked in order for the search to work from Salesforce. I don’t care for this because if it is off, if you’re in Facebook, you can find me easily. I don’t need/want my profile to be searchable via Google. Due to the privacy concerns over the years with Facebook who would want this turned on – I feel risky enough leaving other settings to everybody!

So if you’re trying to find yourself or a contact and keep getting error messages or no results, odds are this is the problem. Which I find very very strange as you’re supplying your user credentials, so you should be able to view everyone you have access to. Otherwise why deal with individual accounts and let admins have a master account to log the instance against if Facebook insists.

And of course, no means to enter in the Facebook profile ID either so you can’t manually enter and test to see if it will work. At this point in time I think you’re 50/50 – it may work if you could force it to go to a profile, but even if you’re “logged in” it may not accept it and still give you whatever generic information is available.

I love where Salesforce is going with social contacts. I love what the information could do for improving customer relations. I just think they’ve fallen short of what was possible with this version of social contacts. While the process they set up is cute, what I would give for standard profile fields users could update directly without question- and have a place on the account records as well for twitter and facebook pages at least.

Hopefully we’ll hear more about what may come in New York City, at Cloudforce – November 30, 2011. Hope to see you there as well- I can’t wait to hear Benioff talking about the next steps!

Take a look at this blog post by Garry Polmateer on the Red Argyle blog.

I posted a comment there but wanted to make sure this excellent example of how social media enhances the relationship between customers, businesses, and even between businesses (Red Argyle is a Salesforce partner).

It didn’t cost them anything but a couple of minutes of their time.

What can you do as part of your customer relationships to add value with little to no cost?

Here’s the deal. If you are an admin and in charge of supporting and training your users, you will eventually be able to put them into two camps: ones who remember and ones who don’t.

Remember what you ask?

Whenever you introduce someone to Salesforce, eventually you’re going to show them the various tabs. When you click on most of the standard tabs, you’ll find by default, a list of the most recently viewed items related to the object.

The two groups are those who remember this (or pay attention to the screen) and those who do not remember this (and don’t pay attention to the screen). Hooray for the first group because they don’t result in a support call.

The second group though… be prepared for it. This is an area where having a relationship with your users can go a long way. Answering their call when they say “MY ACCOUNT IS MISSING!” the right way will go a long way. If you know your user well enough, you can tailor your response to be funny or serious- because you know as soon as you remind them why they can’t see the account in question it will cause some embarrassment. No one likes to look the fool- if you know you can defuse it through appropriate humor or just putting the user at ease, it is an easy way to make your user happy and more comfortable with the system and with coming to you for help.

Recently Recently Viewed popped up in the changes in Reports for Winter ’12. Luckily for all of us, Salesforce is working on changing this to default to All Items instead- saving admins a lot of headaches whenever you roll out a new report.

Thanks Salesforce! Now, can we please do something for the other tabs too?

Today’s tip harkens back to when we were kids and we’d see a new toy advertised during a favorite television show. The toy could be a truck that seemed to drive over anything on it’s own or a doll who just came alive in her little mommy’s arms. Television made the impossible seem true and until we learned better, many a birthday or holiday was crushed when these magical toys did not live up to what we saw on television or in various print ads.

Everyone has to learn about marketing, few people learn the depths of which marketing can go in the name of producing cool media experiences. Models are sewn into garments, there’s layers of clamps and tape on the back of a dress to get it to fit perfectly, and that awesome looking ice cream is often colored mashed potatoes. Kids learn the hard way the toy that looked so incredibly awesome on a commercial was a different story when they took it out of the box.

When one grows up, one learns about professionalism. Part of being a professional is delivering on requirements, not providing marketing slight of hand. That’s what marketing and customers are for! When I’m told I’ll receive documentation and the preview copies are complete with a great layout and in color, I expect the final delivered product to appear even better- in color and at least collated unless otherwise told to expect something else.

There are always going to be times we may need to show a model of what we’re building, or use a placeholder to show where things are in manufacturing. These are acceptable and no one thinks less of them because they are exactly that- models/placeholders. No one is going to hold them to the final level of detail expected.

When you present something and label it as final version- the customer is going to believe this is your final effort and build their expectations for the product based on the work on this final version. Things go bad when the final version is delivered to the user and it does not look like the final version already discussed. No color? Missing corrections?

It’s a flashback to childhood disappointments again and this time not only are you disappointed in the product, but you paid good money for the results. I’ve had this situation happen recently and was shocked at the end result- where was the color I’d receive earlier? Why is this product not like the preview product? Why am I paying for an inferior result than what was agreed to?

What I’m saying boils down to this– if you show someone color pages, expect them to expect color in the final printouts unless you’ve come to different specific terms. If they expected X behavior from their system and they’re getting Y – either fix it for X or adapt for X1. Don’t promise something without the confidence you’ll deliver it as stated.

Don’t be the negative cruel commercial, failing your audience and taking your business with it. Make sure every delivery is the best it can be and meets your customer’s managed expectations.