What's Online

If Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was a revolutionary trend in business paradigms, Social CRM is the natural evolution that is upon us now. If you sell a product or service, or care about a cause you want to promote, you have simply got to be on Twitter. I have Twitter accounts both for my consulting business and for my non-profit volunteer work. I see dozens of new site visitors each day that arrive through tweets I post on Twitter, and you could too.

SalesForce.com CRM (SFDC) is the next part of that equation. With SFDC I can see which visitors submitted a form on the site and track them all the way through won opportunities if someone contracts for consulting services. I can then continue to service clients through a custom object I created called Projects and through Cases after service is provided. And of course, all of this is tracked in numerous ways by SFDC's campaign, reporting and dashboard features, so that I can increasingly make better decisions about how to most effectively let people who need what I offer know that they can get it here.

Toucan integrates these two powerful SaaS business technologies, so that you can not only take advantage of Twitter's marketing and PR power, but do so from within SalesForce.com. Just as you should be integrating your paid Google Adwords campaigns directly into SFDC, you should of course be integrating your free Twitter campaigns into SFDC also.

Of the tweets you've posted over the last month, which ones generated the most traffic to your website? Which tweets generated the most sales? Which tweets led to the shortest sales cycles? If you don't know the answers to these questions, you need Toucan and SalesForce. (If you don't already have SFDC, you can get a one month SalesForce.com Free trial here.)

Twitter is free, and Toucan is pretty close to free itself. If you have up to 25 SFDC users you can get a 1 year license for only $150. That's $150 for everyone, not per user, and not per month.

Instead of reiterating the same how-to material Toucan makes available themselves, I'll just point you to a couple helpful links:

2 minute Toucan intro video - Toucan for SalesForce Intro Video
Request the password for a 7 day free trial - email to
Get It Now link on AppExchange for after you receive the password - Get Toucan for SFDC

With the password you will receive a link to a two page configuration guide that includes helpful screenshots and step by step directions. I tried skipping that (rarely read directions on anything), but got stopped at my first step trying to just muddle through. So I suggest you take the 10 minutes to read the guide they send and just do it right the first time.

The only thing I found missing in the guide is that after you are done doing everything they list there you will want to add your Twitter ID under "Settings" within the Toucan app. That instruction is also not found within the user documentation they will send you a link to. You can't actually tweet anything through SFDC (like the initial message in a new campaign) until you enter your Twitter ID and password under Settings, as shown below:


The folks at Toucan are also very nice, and ready and willing to help at the drop of a hat. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I may also add to this post in another week, after playing with this longer and seeing the stats for the week.

Labels: CRM, Integration, marketing, PR, Recommended_Apps

I get asked often why someone might Twitter. For most people my advice is, "No good reason." That's because they are private individuals who work 9-5 jobs and then go home to their families. Everyone who cares what they are doing (or what they have to say in a couple sentences) will get to ask them over dinner that evening.

But if your business would like to develop a dialogue with a public that follows a conversation with you, Twitter is a free and easy method to open up that dialogue.

Basically, the idea behind Twitter is that someone is curious about someone else, and on the other side, someone wants to nurture that fascination. A fan wants to know what the object of her adoration is up to in his casual moments and feel a personal connection. A famous person wants to satisfy millions of fans in just minutes a week and grow his fan base.

A business wants to control the dialogue about its products or services. It wants to make sure it is not only a part of the conversation thread, but the one leading it. It wants to present a friendly and personal face to the public with only the cost of the staff time for whoever writes it.

Twitter is a great PR tool for any business that caters to the public at large. It's a litle less useful for businesses that cater to other businesses, because realistically, what company would look to Twitter to find out what's up with a company they are thinking of purchasing services from? It's not exactly an official reference source. But I recently started a Twitter account for my consulting business anyway.

It's worth the time to me to get the name of my business in circulation and it doesn't take that much effort. I may only post on there when I update this blog, as many people do, summarizing the gist of a new post so that interested Twitter folks can find the blog when they use the Twitter Search feature to scan for certain topics. Or I may find myself getting more involved in the general dialogue, posting replies to others' Tweets, searching for topics and people I know, etc. We'll see.

For me it's a marginally beneficial PR service, but if your business does fall into that perfect category for which Twitter makes great PR sense, well you can't beat free PR. And on top of all that, just being on Twitter at all paints your brand with "new cool chic," which can be priceless and elusive with some audiences.

Getting started with Twitter is super easy. It literally takes about a minute. Getting a sense that something is actually happening however, can take considerably longer. But hang in there, and consider following AspiraTech -- I'm happy to follow you back as well.

Labels: marketing, PR, social_media