Xobni – Social CRM For Outlook – You May Be Surprised

I’ve been pretty vocal about my search for the “holy grail” of CRM‘s. There are a number of solutions out there and all are doing some pretty nice things in the way of integrating social media into a CRM platform but, nobody that I am aware of, at least not at an investment level that is affordable for the little guy, has come out with a package that I feel has yet reached that pinnacle of achievement. Let’s talk briefly about a few….

Salesforce.com is likely the defacto leader in this application field. And, they have introduced Twitter to their product but in what I would consider to be a limited fashion. It looks, feels, and acts like an add-on. What it is well designed for is scanning and identifying sales and service opportunities based on product mentions found within the Twitterverse stream. Furthermore, it can automatically create contacts from those discoveries. Pretty cool. FaceBook or LinkedIn integration? Not yet that I am aware of.

Gist is a way cool product that acts like a social media aggregator and it does gather a ton of information on every contact it encounters. Gist also boasts very tight integration with both Twitter and email. No LinkedIn or FaceBook integration yet as it pertains to updates. I know this will be coming soon particularly since LinkedIn recently opened up its API to developers and so you are now seeing those updates via clients like TweetDeck and Hootsuite. Where Gist is weak today, in my opinion, is in the creation of emails and tweets. It is great at gathering them and allowing you to go back to the original source, but not generating them.

Salesforce and Gist Integration: This is something that is very interesting and very nicely done. Put the two of them together and they do form a very very nice Social CRM with Gist doing the gathering and Salesforce doing the creating of things like standard email. I am personally convinced that these two products, and that may mean having them work in conjunction, may be the best solution in the near future for a SAAS solution to Social CRM. Because of this, I am going to be devoting a great deal of time and effort toward learning each better.

Threadsy is another very cool product and if I could splice Threadsy and Gist together, I would do it in a heartbeat. Up to three email accounts, Twitter, and FaceBook and a gorgeous interface to manage all three. No LinkedIn integration yet but from the standpoint of creating and monitoring traffic from these sites and email, it’s a thing of beauty. Honestly, I would kill to see them take this to the Social CRM level and I don’t feel that it would be that difficult to do. Listen to “Mr. Armchair Code Cutter” (smile).

This brings us to Xobni. Get ready but Xobni may be the one of the closest and simplest solutions out there and if you use Outlook, you can have it today and you can have it for free. Please take a look at the image below ….

So, what does Outlook do? A pretty fine job with email. Keeps your contact and calendar. Some people consider it to be a CRM and maybe it is. Combine it with Business Contact Manager and you do have a CRM. A “piss poor” one, mind you, but a CRM nonetheless (smile). Add Xobni and you get the column to the right that gives you at least some information about your contact in terms of whether or not they are even on LinkedIn, their Twitter stream that you can at least reply and retweet, and if they are on FaceBook. Xobni also gathers information on their network and also links you have shared as well as messages associated with this contact. Worth a look? I think so. This package gets even better with the addition of the LinkedIn Toolbar for Outlook. If you do a search within this blog site, you will find several articles mentioning this tool. Suffice to say that it brings much of the power of LinkedIn directly into Outlook and actually quite a bit more.

Well, there you have it. Something more to think about. I also wanted to add that I believe it was today that Zemanta introduced the latest version of their tool for blogging and Gmail. I am using it now as I type. Sweet. Very sweet.

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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Social Media CRM – Gist Inside Salesforce

savethetigerfund.org

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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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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SalesForce.com / BlackBerry Integration

The picture to your left is not from my BlackBerry screen however, if I am going to integrate my handheld with my desktop, this is what I will be working with at my desk.

While I am pleased to say that I finally have my BlackBerry dialed in where it is working correctly and consistently, what good is it having a BlackBerry if you can’t even get to your contacts? I’ve been struggling with how best to accomplish that task. And, it seemed complicated as my only option appeared to be to sync with Outlook and I have had some bad experiences with syncing in the past. As far as that goes, I use Outlook for only 1/2 of the businesses that I am involved in and my focus is moving more and more toward NetWorks! Boise and my parent entity, Sales Results LLC. Then it struck me. I am incredibly stupid. You don’t have to worry about syncing if you are using a web based “SaaS” app and I already have one … SalesForce.com.

I have had SalesForce for some time now but  have never been able to keep up with the commitment to use it full time. It’s just easier to use Gmail for correspondence. My bad. SalesForce will integrate with Gmail if you have Google Apps, and I added Apps for this purpose, but I still do not like this particular interface. If you want to attach an email to a record, and you are using Gmail, you need to BCC to SalesForce in order to accomplish that goal. Not that big of a deal but it is an additional step. If an email comes to your inbox and you also want to attach that to a record, forward that email to the SalesForce BCC address. In all fairness, you can use SalesForce directly to email out without having to go through the Gmail interface.

So, yesterday it occurred to me that SalesForce likely offers a mobile application interface for the BlackBerry. They do. Actually they have a fully featured paid version and a  free “Lite” version so I downloaded the free one. It’s far from a beautiful app. O.K., it’s downright “clunky”, but it works. I can go on-line and bring up all my contacts, call them from my BlackBerry without the need to dial the number, or send them an email. I was kind of disappointed to learn that I still needed to use the BCC command but I am not fully convinced that this is the final statement regarding this matter.