Tweaking NetWorks! Boise – Zoho CRM, Ning, Wave?

marcelnunis.com

I was off fishing for a week and so now it is back to work. That sucks (smile). Yesterday we launched our second networking group and it’s going to be a good one. What is very exciting to me is that this group will be able to develop based on the foundations and systems laid out by the first group while it is also creating the need for me to evaluate new tools and tweak existing ones. This will be of benefit to both groups as well as those that may come in the future. Right now I am pretty close to pulling the trigger on three applications ……..

Zoho CRM: We presently use the paid version of FreeCRM to track the lead opportunities generated by our Wednesday group. I like it and it works well. However, the monthly fees have doubled since we first started using it less than 2 years ago. And, the last major update to the program was last April. More important is that I am finding out that our members do not use all of the features that I had originally considered to be necessities. Finally, my understanding of our needs in this area has also evolved. Time to see what else is out there that might better fit our application.

I had looked at Zoho some time back and, looking at it yesterday, it would appear to fit our needs. It is actually a pretty nice interface and does allow for custom account record fields, custom report creation, and filtering by things like “date last modified”. We actually need two users for our purposes and Zoho offers up to three users for the low low price of $0.00 per month. Sweeeeet! Additionally, Zoho offers a suite of applications, most free, that may become beneficial in the future. My plan is to start our new group on this package and get the bugs worked out. Following that, I will migrate our existing group over from FreeCRM to Zoho. Last night I did a test export from FreeCRM and then did an import to Zoho and it worked perfectly. Here’s a screen shot, Sorry about the resolution:

Ning: With only one group, this site has worked just fine for our purposes. It would be very easy to set up an additional page for the new group that featured those members and their companies. However, I want each group to have not only their own separate page, I want to be able to place more emphasis on who they are and what they do. More personal things including blog feeds, photos, etc.. Finally, having the ability to collaborate privately vs. publicly, would also be a plus. WordPress is just not well suited for this application. Ning is. Turns out that Ning gives you the ability to develop your very own social network. And, it is slick! I ran across this via a connection on LinkedIn who operates a networking group in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. I’m pretty pumped. You can use Ning for free if you will allow some fairly non-intrusive Google Ads. For $24.95/month you can get rid of those and even put in some ads of your own. For another $24.95/month you can rid yourself of Ning promotions and for $4.95/month you can use your own domain name. I understand that it is very easy to set up and will meet all of our needs. Necessity really is the mother of invention (smile). Click on the screen shot to go to NetworkInCDA’s site.

courtesy of NetworkInCDA

The future of this page: Once I have the Ning sites set up, this page will serve as a portal to the individual group sites, inform folks about the NetWorks! Boise system as a whole, continue to blog on Social and Business-Social media, and perhaps showcase other services that I am considering offering. The URL will remain the same but the page title will include “Sales Results LLC” which is the legal entity encompassing the “NetWorks! Boise” dba.

Google Wave: I am a little premature on this as selective invitations for this new application are just now going out today and I have yet to see one in my inbox (smile). I should have signed up for one sooner. These invitations are being sent out prior to the general Google Wave launch. However, from what I have seen and read, this thing potentially is a real game changer. Simply put, as I understand it, it will allow our group to collaborate in real time in a “email like” format. The key word here is “collaboration”. Let’s say that various members are all tracking on the same opportunity generated by one of our groups. Instead of conducting research totally independently, they will have the ability to privately collaborate their efforts with each other. Or, “Member A” wishes to connect with “Company B”. Somebody in the group probably knows someone at “Company B”. This will allow us to get the request for help out system wide, in privacy, in a timely manner. The possibilities for this tool are …. mind boggling! Mashable is great source to learn more. Click here to go to their most recent article and do a search for others.

Enough from me for today. Thanks for visiting!

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Salesforce and Gist – CRM Gets Social

I’ve done a reasonable number of articles over the past few months about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) programs. In my last article, I laid out my wish list for a CRM that would integrate Social Media. We are not quite there yet, however, offerings are definitely knocking on that door (smile). I am going to briefly talk about two today and both became widely accessible during the past week. Each is a highly complex and capable product. What is very interesting to me, at least, is that both seem to be approaching this task from very different angles.

So, we all know Salesforce.com. Well, now Salesforce has a Twitter interface. And, it’s free to Salesforce users. Set up was a bit of a challenge and I actually got with their support people on figuring out how to make it work. The fist gentleman I talked to was not even aware that they had introduced and were supporting this app (smile). However, we got it done. The secret is that, after you load the app, you need to go to: Setup, Administration Setup, Security Controls, Remote Site Access, and then add the following sites: http://search.twitter.com, http://twitter.com, and if you are using bit.ly ….. http://api.bit.ly.

What is cool about this integration is that Salesforce is using Twitter to drive opportunities to its users. Here are a couple of examples. If somebody is Tweeting about some difficulties that they are having with Salesforce, the Twitter app will find this and a support case can be automatically created for followup. Or, if I am a sales person for Salesforce and this app finds somebody Tweeting their frustration with say, ACT!, I can automatically create a lead for that person that I can followup on. Pretty slick. I can also Tweet directly from Salesforce and all Twitter activity becomes a part of that Saleforce account/contact record. Sweet. Like I say, there is a lot more to this but it certainly is worth a look. B.T.W, they are looking at adding FaceBook next. In the meantime, enjoy the demo!

Gist is an entirely different animal. What makes this app intriguing is that it is designed to gather as much information as possible on a contact from practically every possible major source including: LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, Gmail, Outlook, and other email accounts and then take all of this and aggregate it into one contact screen. And, I mean that it tries to grab everything it can from every site including blogs, web addresses, and news. It even performs a Google search on both the contact name and company. It also provides their recent Twitter conversations although I am not so sure, at least not that I can see, that it pulls in updates from either FaceBook or LinkedIn. I could be wrong. Gist will also interface with Salesforce.com. What is VERY interesting to me is that it does track my email and link exchanges. Gist has taken the approach that you can still use your preferred email vehicle, in my case Gmail, and it will then go out to that and pull those conversation in. Same with Twitter. Brilliant! Unfortunately, none of this appears to be close to real time and it does appear to operate quite slowly. Not surprising given the amount of data. For that matter, this is a beta launch and I might have a p.o.s. computer and internet connection (smile). However, this is still very very cool and very exciting!

Here is a very good article by Mashable. There is also a slide presentation at the Gist site.

That’s it for now. I plan to write more extensively on both of these apps as I work with and learn more about them. Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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TwitterFeed – Auto-Feed Your Favorite Posts To Twitter

I’ve been using TwitterFeed for some time now. What I first started using it for was to auto-feed my new blog posts directly to Twitter. It is incredibly easy to set up and use. TwitterFeed allows you to specify your RSS feed URL (note that this is typically not the same as your web page address but you can get it by clicking on the RSS feed icon on your page) and then it tests the feed to make sure that it works. From there, you have a number of options:

1. Choose to post to your Twitter account or to Ping.fm or to Hello.txt. Ping.fm may be of special interest as you can then use that account to forward it to multiple sites including FaceBook and LinkedIn. You could use Hello.txt, in this interface, to post to a specific site from many to choose from.
2. Specify how often you wish to have TwitterFeed check for new post updates.
3. Include title only, description only, or title and description
4. Specify how you wish the URL’s to be shortened. I use bit.ly
5. Add up to 20 characters that will start the post out, close it off, or both.
6. And, if you have any concerns about making sure that any post that goes out is appropriate, you can have TwitterFeed search the post for keywords prior to approval.
7. Finally, TwitterFeed will provide stats on clicked links that you send.

If I am posting my own new articles, why would I worry about keyword authorization? You probably would not. However, you can set TwitterFeed to monitor and send multiple feeds from multiple sources and none of those have to be yours. I see a lot of folks who are sending out posts from Mashable via TwitterFeed. Myself, I have chosen 4-5 blogs that I am very fond of and set them up through TwitterFeed. These are blogs that most folks will not run across with any frequency. The result is that I have a vehicle to share fresh content and I am also able to give props and links to my favorite writers. It’s a win win!

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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SocialScope – Twitter For Your BlackBerry

I realize that there are a lot of very cool apps available for the iPhone including Twitter apps like TweetDeck. For we BlackBerry users …. it always seems that what we are offered is second best. However, and you can take this to the bank, SocialScope as a Twitter client for your BlackBerry is H.O.T.! Let’s examine some of the key features.

Twitter and FaceBook updates: And all from one screen with the ability to update simultaneously.

A Beautiful User Interface: It just looks cool.

Tabs on Top: Tweets, @ Mentions, Direct Messages, FaceBook, and All Tweets and FaceBook. There is a little red star that appears on each tab where there are unread messages.

BlackBerry Shortcuts Work: “C” for compose or “R” for reply etc.

Spell Check

Notifications: A yellow icon appears at the top of your BlackBerry home page if you have a direct or @ message waiting.

Easy identification of your messages: Messages that you have sent appear with your photo/gravatar on the right hand of the screen vs. the left for everybody else.

Attach a Tweeter’s Account and Stream to your BlackBerry Contacts: Sweet!

Send Web Page link directly to SocialScope: A Tweet is opened automatically along with a bit.ly shortened URL

Displays photos beautifully: including those in FaceBook updates

Displays conversation thread on Direct Messages

All the miscellaneous functions: ReTweet, Replay, Follow, UnFollow, Block, Group, Favorite

A fabulous Search Tool

If you have not checked Tweet for awhile: You will not have to scroll through pages and pages of updates to get back up to the top of the page.

I have to say that there is nothing about this tool that I do not love. From what I can tell, battery usage is good. I looked at TwitterBerry and did not like the interface. UberTwitter was o.k. but had some annoying features. A friend is using TweetCaster and loves it but, once I got on SocialScope, I saw no need to look further. There is one catch and it does not seem to be a big one. Right now, when you go to the SocialScope site, you must request an invitation as it is in a private beta mode. I got mine in less than 12 hours as did another friend. They must not be that discriminating (smile). So go there, get your invitation, and get you some (smile).

WordPress Update: WordPress has introduced a new spell checker. I will say that it is better than the previous one. Now it recognizes “WordPress” and “blog” as being actual words (smile). There are still a number of terms, app names, and phrases used in social media that it does not recognize like “gravatar”. For whatever reason it also has trouble with app names that combine two words together and separate them via a capital letter like “FaceBook”. It does not like the spelling but Zemanta finds the link and spelled in the exact same fashion. I know that keeping up with all these names and updating a dictionary would be a full time job. The simple solution would be to allow the option to add it to your dictionary. However, I am guessing that there is no way to do that on a muti-user WordPress.com plaform.

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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Bookmarklets – Sharing Content Via Your Toolbar

dixietrend.com

I was looking at my iGoogle Home Page yesterday and realized that I have a least 10 different ways to share updates and content to the sites I frequent and can do so without every having to leave that page with the exception of when I am visiting a specific website. Even then, my browser toolbars remain stationary. For my purposes, I am pretty much strictly on three social networking sites: Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn. However, at least one of the tools that I am going to discuss on this post will allow me to post to a large variety of other sites if I so desired. Today, we’ll talk about 7 and each is a bookmarklet, or button, on my browser toolbar. For the record, I am still using FireFox 3.1 as 3.5 was causing stability issues with some gadgets and flat out was not compatible with others. A colleague of mine found that he had to delete toolbars altogether to get by similar issues with FireFox 3.5. Having done that, he tells me that it runs flawlessly. Not ready to go that route … yet (smile). Moving from left to right on my FireFox toolbar we have:

Share on LinkedIn: The link to load this bookmarklet can be found at the bottom of your LinkedIn home page. FYI, at the time that I first upgraded to FireFox 3.5, this tool was not compatible and was, therefore, disabled. At any rate, should you see an article that you wish to share on LinkedIn, from the article page itself, click on the bookmarklet and away you go. Please note that sharing articles on LinkedIn is not the same as changing your update. When sharing an article you are actually either posting it to a group page or sending a notice out to your first degree contacts that they may wish to see the article. However, it’s perfect for this task and does allow you to also provide your comments regarding the post.

Hootlet: This button is provided by HootSuite. It is designed to be primarily a Twitter tool. When I say “primarily”, HootSuite will integrate with Ping.fm which gives you the ability to post to multiple sites so you could also use it for that. For Twitter purposes, however, once again from the website page you wish to share, click on the Hootlet button and a Tweet is prepared for you complete with a HootSuite shortened URL (ow.ly format) and the article title. You can also add your comments within the 140 character limit. What is very cool about this tool is that I can choose to send the Tweet now or schedule it to go out later by date and time in 5 minute increments.

Share on Posterous: I’m going to be doing a fairly sizeable post on Posterous maybe later this week but this button is great for posting content directly to your Posterous blog which can then, incidentally, be auto posted (forwarded) to a variety of sites.