Social Media CRM – Gist Inside Salesforce

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I’ve been a fairly frequent writer about CRM packages and my expectations regarding seeing them integrated closely with Social Media in the not too distant future. Well, over the past couple of weeks, this expectation has been rapidly inching closer to reality. Of course, the holy grail continues to be total integration that will include not only gathering and sharing data from a variety of sources but will also have the ability to create new data from within that CRM vehicle. Posting updates to Twitter, for example. I don’t think that we are quite there yet but, here is a recent development that is definitely worthy of your attention.

Salesforce.com and Gist: Recently, Salesforce came out with Twitter integration into their basic package. Sweet. A couple of months ago Gist made a big splash with its social media aggregation capabilities and this package is very powerful. Please check this blog for recent posts regarding these introductions. Now, I knew that Gist had the ability to gather data from several sources including: email, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and news feeds. I also knew that it could gather your contact information from Salesforce. What I did not realize was that Gist could not only gather this data, it could at the same time reside completely inside of Salesforce itself. Hmmm. Yum (smile). This link explains the process.

Here is what you will end up with (smile):

Exporting data from Salesforce, importing it to Gist, and then integrating Gist into Salesforce itself is a little bit tricky so here are some tips:

Export from Salesforce:

1. In order to export from Salesforce to a .csv file you will need to download the “data loader” app from Salesforce and you can find that on their site.
2. In order to log in to Salesforce and use that app you are going to need both your Salesforce password and your Salesforce security token. Well, I never wrote my security token down if I ever even saw it. Go to your setup screen on Salesforce and tell it to reset your security token and you will then receive an email with your new token.
3. When you log in to the data loader the format is “passwordxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx” with “x’s” being your security token and with no space between your password and that token.
4. You will then be presented with a series of options. The first selection you will be making is what file you want to export. The natural selection for use with Gist is “contacts”.
5. Be sure to select all of the pertinent contact info you wish to export including name, phone, email, etc. Hell, you can probably just select “all” to be safe (smile).
6. Previously, you should have selected a destination for the file to be saved that you can find after it all is done …. for me that would be my desktop.

Import to Gist:

1. Pretty cut and dry. Go to accounts on your Gist page and select Salesforce.
2. You are asked to identify the location of the file to upload but it is also going to ask you for a “Salesforce instance” url. What in the hell is that (smile)? I’m still not sure but it won’t work without it. The example shows “na6″. By pure dumb luck I looked at the url on the address bar when I was logged into my Salesforce account and saw “nax”. So, I went with that and it went with me (smile).
3. FYI, Gist is very good about not creating duplicate accounts but rather merging them. Putting this into perspective, I imported data into Gist from a number of sources with duplicate information and had no issues with duplicate records.

Integrate Gist into Salesforce:

1. There are a fair amount of steps involved but do not be intimidated. I’m pretty tech stupid and if I could make it work, there is no question that but that you can.
2. I did have one huge problem and have brought this to Gist’s attention. The link in the support forum that tells you to copy and paste the code into Salesforce’s “s control” that you will create for Gist, was incorrect and/or damaged. There is also a .txt file at the bottom of the forum page (actually there are two) and you want the one for “contacts”. Open that file and copy that code. It works. Update: this link has been since corrected by Gist.

That will do it for me for now. Watch this weekend for a post about Outlook with Xobni now featuring Twitter integration. Thanks for visiting! By the way, this post should be sent immediately and automatically to Twitter using WordPress.com’s new “Publicize” app. We will see. We will see (smile)

Craig

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