Fuel Conference: Ryan Carson

So...quite a long time ago now (6 weeks) I went to Ryan Carson's Fuel Conference, which was a conference all about marketing with and the marketing of Web 2.0 applications and services.

I recorded some great content that day (pictures, draft blog posts, video) and it is about time that I shared some of that. Writing it all up also allows me to reflect on some of the things that I learnt.

Looking at the blog posts that I drafted on the day, I can't tell where my own comment leaks into my record of what the speakers had to say. I have tried to convey the gist of each speaker's message, in a nutshell, with my own thoughts mixed in - hopefully I haven't misrepresented anyone.

Ryan gave the first presentation, here is what he had to say.

• Nobody cares about your marketing message.
• Nobody cares about your company.


• People do care about people: the real people behind your company.


• So...
• ...be honest
• ...and be accessible
• as a person!


• Your customers want to talk to you.
• Your customers want to talk with you.
• Consider Wesabe: on the front page of their website is a link inviting you to Talk to Marc, CEO of Wesabe. The link takes you to a page with a phone number and the hours that Marc is available to take calls. [I don't know anyone who has talked to Marc this way.]


• In practical terms, how do you be accessible?
• Use Seesmic: asynchronous video conversations
• Use Twitter: public instant messaging, status updates with history
• Use Qik: video streaming from a (Nokia) phone
• Use UserVoice: great site for gathering user feedback, [I have used this to give feedback on SlimTimer, which I love]
• Use Facebook: social networking site
• Use Plurk: Twitter competitor, like Twitter but more visual, supports comments and emotions (?) [username] [is/loves/likes/shares/gives/hates...]


• You have a community as soon as you have one person who cares about you.
• You should Tweet as often as you have something interesting to say.
• Once you open up and become accessible there is no going back.

Ryan's slides: "The New Rules of Business"

view presentation (tags: ryancarson fuelconf)

iSalesforce

So, a couple of months back, Matt and I went over to San Francisco for Google IO - the Google developer conference. We were also planning to catch up with some of our friends at Salesforce while we were out there and so thought that it would be fun to build some more integration between the two companies' technologies. About a week before we set out, the team sat down for a brainstorming session and we came up with iSalesforce - affectionately named in homage to Salesforce and iGoogle.

The idea was to build a customisable desktop / homepage much like iGoogle but within Salesforce using the new Visualforce technology. Here's an outline of some of the things that it can do,

• Users can add and remove functional components to/from a page and arrange the components on the page via drag and drop
• Components can be Google Gadgets or Visualforce pages, which effectively means anything you can display on a web page - including Salesforce dashboards
• Different arrangements of components can be saved in separate workspaces
• State is saved in Salesforce so that customisations are not lost between sessions
• Components are setup and controlled using Salesforce custom objects
• Rights and priveleges can be controlled using Salesforce roles and profiles if required
• This is all achieved without once having to enter Salesforce application setup

After we had started building iSalesforce, and just before we went out to San Francisco, I was browsing the Salesforce IdeaExchange and came across the following two Ideas "Home Tab customizable by End-Users like iGoogle" and "Drag and Drop for Dashboard Editing" with 490 and 2,910 votes respectively. With custom homepages now available and using the unofficial reports API, iSalesforce could fix both those Ideas. I pointed this out to Mark Trang and Thomas Tobin from Salesforce and they encouraged me to offer iSalesforce as a solution. Neither Idea is on any product roadmap and Ideas are often closed by people other than Salesforce themselves, which is something I didn't know.

You might therefore be reading this post having followed a link from one of those two Ideas. If iSalesforce is something that you would like to use then leave a comment below or email iSalesforce[at]kusiri.com. Visualforce pages cannot yet be packaged for the AppExchange so we cannot simply release iSalesforce onto the AppExchange. There are, however, other ways of making Visualforce applications available to people and if there is enough interest in iSalesforce then we'll spend some time doing that.