In designing our next generation Social CRM platform, I came across the rather innocuous decision of whether to mirror current social networking trends and allow customer to 'Like' site elements, or allow customers to negatively vote against an entity (such as a Knowledge Base article or Forum post).

In a B2C context, sites take great care not to offend anyone. "Like" has become a replacement for favorites or bookmarking, but one frequently observed comment I see on Facebook is "How do express that I don't Like this?". Presumably, Facebook is shielding the content producer from receiving a negative personal judgement by only allowing 'Like'.

However, should this rule apply in a B2B SCRM scenario? My thinking is that a 'voting' metaphor with a simple one-click "Yes" or "No" option is the simplest and most informative feedback feature for all parties.

If I'm pasting an error message into a sites search engine, and the first result I get back is exactly what I need, then the answer to "Was this article helpful?" is an obvious "Yes". But if the article does not address my immediate needs, and 'Like' is the only feedback option, then the Product Support Manager responsible for maintaining the online knowledge base only receives feedback when people 'like' an article (not that a stream of pure flattery wouldn't be ideal, but it's masking the core problem).

In keeping with rules of declarative configuration, it looks like the Social API will ultimately support 'Like', Yes/No, and 5 star rating as feedback options for any site element. The long-term challenge will be putting these options in the hands of KB publishers and allowing them to experiment and ultimately learn from community feedback.

This post isn't actually about the Star Wars movie. But the title somehow seemed fitting.

Efficient Web content managers utilize page templates to rapidly provision new pages. The page cloning feature in i-Dialogue supports the management of page templates and cloning of existing pages in the "New Page" wizard.

Wiki article is here. It's worth noting that *any* page can be cloned. The template creation step is not required.

Video below...

Reminder: I'll be presenting at this month's XPDX Users Group meeting. Looks like I may be competing with the American Idol final, so be sure to program your Tivo or just enjoy the presentation slides below

What: The Art of Ware-as-a-Service
Who: Mike Leach Founder/CEO Cubic Compass
Where: Cube Space
622 SE Grand Ave
Portland, OR 97214

http://cubespacepdx.com/directions
When: Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 6:30PM Gathering. Talk starts at 7PM

Description:
The first wave of Agile software development challenged "waterfall" project management methodologies and traditional Quality Assurance. The next wave of Agile challenges on-premise software through what is known as Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS)

Using Sun Tzu's timeless classic "The Art of War" as a framework, Founder/CEO of Cubic Compass, Mike Leach, presents principles and practices for creating and leading an Agile SaaS organization that challenges the status quo of software development and delivery.

Pardon the deconstruction here, but I've had several people ask me "What is Twitter?" and "Why should I care?" (thanks Oprah).

Without getting into the myriad details involved with how an organization can engage in personalized, one-to-one, real-time dialogues in the public domain, I simply tell people to think of Twitter as a stream of news headlines, except everyone in the world is qualified to submit any headline they wish.

Marketers should continue to develop and publish Marketing materials, but should consider including the following steps in their publication process:

• Create an account for your brand on Twitter. Keep the name short (reasoning below)
• When publishing, add an additional step for writing a 100 character headline
• Use a URL shortener, such as tinyurl.com or bit.ly, to create a short link to your marketing material
• Post your headline and URL link to Twitter
  

If further discussion ensues on Twitter, great. If not, well it's another opportunity for people to find your message if they happen to search for keywords used in your headline.

Twitter has a 140 character limit per message. If you want your message to "go viral" or enable others to share your message, then your headlines will need to be less than 140 characters to accommodate some additional information.

There's no hard rule, but people commonly "re-tweet" messages on Twitter by simply adding RT and your account name before the original message.

Here's an example character count breakdown of a re-tweeted message (including spaces):

RT @dlog [headline here] http://tinyurl.com/ajskeu

3  +     6     +          107            +              24            =          140 characters

You can see that the URL and retweet information consume 33 characters on their own, leaving only 107 characters to write a strong and compelling headline. The longer your account name, the less room for headline characters.

There is much more to Twitter than simply writing headlines, but this is a good fundamental skill to practice and master for starters.

Happy Tweeting!

Dialogue Script now supports CAPTCHA. One line of code on any web form will now prevent bots from submitting bogus forms.

Great for Salesforce web to lead forms, event registration, or any other publicly accessible web form.

Wiki article is here. Example video below.

Web development is at an interesting inflection point. Hosting applications in "the cloud" is gaining momentum, but the tools used to develop and customize these applications are still dependent on traditional Integrated Development Environments (IDE), like Visual Studio .NET, Eclipse, Adobe CS4, and Dreamweaver.

So what is cloud development? First, it's important to distinguish between developing "for" the cloud and developing "in" the cloud. When developing "for" the cloud, you are creating easily accessible applications with the intent of letting end users customize the "last mile". When developing "in" the cloud, you have the agility and mobility to modify an application from anywhere in the world, at anytime, using (almost) any device.

There is a "roaming" quality to cloud development. Cloud development tools become just another application, like Google mail/calendar, that are accessible from anywhere.

There is also a disruptive quality to cloud development. Everyone is now a "programmer" in the 21st century. Whether it's programming a DVR, iPhone, or building a MySpace page; everyone has a new found creative capacity and means to develop in the cloud. This is the natural progression of technology (it's important to note that Developers in the 90's opposed "Visual" development tools because they put distance between the programmer and the actual low-level code.)

Cloud programming languages must carry forward traditional traits; such as function, target, construction, and expressive power; but also be accessible by the masses.

Some common characteristics of cloud development include:

• Emphasis on declarative configuration over customization
• Inline browser editing
• Dynamically typed
• Interpretive
• Custom event declarations
• Stream management
• Mobile accessibility
  

April 1, 2009

Cubic Compass today announced today the release of a new ground breaking technology for creating and managing interactive websites. Dubbed "Neural-Interactive Content Creation", or NIC², this patent-pending technology allows content creators to interact with an i-Dialogue Content Management System (CMS) via a neurological interface that instantly converts thought patterns into web content, dialogue script, and workflow rules.

"The pace of change in today's environment is just too fast for simple tactile interaction with a web CMS", said Cubic Compass Founder Mike Leach. "Today's websites and portals must respond at the speed of thought".

Beta test user Samuel Anders (pictured below) successfully utilized NIC² technology to provision, develop, and launch a fully functional website and customer portal in 17 seconds. "I consider myself a 'power user' of technology, so I was eager to plug-in to NIC² and translate my ideas into a working solution. The results were simply amazing."

The following tasks are just a small example of what can be accomplished in milliseconds using NIC²:

• Provision new landing pages
• Change passwords
• Grant permissions to portal users
• Publish a press release
• Add/modify workflow rules
• Update style sheet
  

NIC² is licensed per user and requires a lengthy pre-qualification questionnaire and note from a Doctor before use.

(Actual results may not be identical to those experienced by Mr Anders. NIC² is not FDA approved and is currently not legal in many countries. Please contact sales for more information)

Graham Hill has a thoughtful blog post on Five Challenges that Keep CMOs Awake at Night with some insightful thoughts on the future of CMS software.

Some bullets:
"Marketing is inexorably becoming more decentralised"

I sometimes have to remind myself that the "web" is a reference to it's intrinsic structure and that applying centralized, hierarchical, and org chart models to the web is often the source of some people's stress.

We, as a CMS vendor, make no promises that we can help manage all web content. It's just not possible or practical today. I am, however, passionate about centrally managing all marketing investments and tracking/correlating their responses. CRM mixed with CMS is a good solution for this.

Customer-responsive model.... A model that biological systems have perfected billions of years ago. In this model, broad rules are developed centrally for universal use at touchpoints with customers, which are then interpreted locally in real-time using all the contextual information available.

This is exactly correct, but how does a CMS address this need? Our response is to create languages at a higher level of abstraction than basic HTML and let marketers seed page templates with rule intentions that allow for specific types of dialogues to emerge.

The CMS of tomorrow will be addictive, much like Google, Facebook, or Twitter. Marketers will actively monitor point solutions and rely on the CMS to spot trends in real-time and allow organizations to respond to comments, ratings, and tags.

The concept of 'reports' will gradually disappear and be replaced with real-time 'trends'.

Web Statistics 2.0 will emerge around social metrics. Legacy metrics like impressions, unique visitors, and browser type by region will have decreasing value.

Customer Co-creation is the next big thing.

When websites are effectively configured to support community input, then marketing's ability to "listen" becomes extremely important.

As CMS‘ have grown larger, more integrated, more unwieldy and more expensive, some organisations have responded by going for simpler, leaner, right-sized CMS tools

In designing i-Dialogue 9.0 I've come to several "forks in the road". Should we make a particular feature simpler or add more advanced functionality? Is there a compromise between the two?

For example, the concept of a "discussion forum" is one that should be as simple as adding a <dlog:Discussion /> tag to a page template that let's a thread ensue. But there will be those that criticize that simplicity. The old way of thinking is that you're 'supposed' to deploy a forum as a separate, and often expensive, solution.

There is such a huge gap between what analysts are telling people they need and what companies really want. In economically challenged times you see purchasing committees emerge that are trying to play it safe and manage all possible risk by purchasing a complex CMS system that has been around for several years.

Graham goes on to use Clayton Christensen's "Disruptive Technology" model as a means of understanding next-gen CMS's. If that is the case, then bottom-up adoption of faster, simpler, cheaper solutions are on the horizon.

... is to invent it (to borrow from an Alan Kay quote)

Given that my 2007 and 2008 predictions were too dependent on other people or organizations (don't follow those links. It was painful enough for me to re-read them ), I'm taking a different approach this year and simply "predicting" what's going to happen in 2009 based on variables within our control.

"Year of the Cloud"
I like to think small businesses are a leading indicator of the broader economy, and if that's the case, then 2009 will be a strong year for cloud computing as small businesses move to both produce and consume cloud based services. Future Fortune 500 companies will start in 2009 with SaaS and cloud computing baked into their DNA.

"CRM 2.0 = Community Relationship Management"
"Web 2.0" features, such as democratization, user-generated content, tagging, and rating will find their way into B2B portals and websites. "Social networking" will be a feature of web content management systems, instead of a silo application.

Customers will increasingly want go online and manage the relationship with their suppliers/vendors through their portals.

The job title of "Community Manager" will become common. They'll need tools like the Community Graph to gauge customer demands and needs.

"Browser Is the New IDE"
Web development will increasingly be done with lighter weight tools, such as Firefox and FireBug, allowing for a completely browser-based integrated development environment. Developers will have the agility to access and modify their applications from anywhere in the world using netbooks.

Websites will no longer be seen as being discrete deliverable projects. Instead, websites will become fluid entities that morph and adapt to the clients and organization's needs. The browser IDE will enable this agility.

Visual Studio .NET and Eclipse will remain powerful, essential, yet "old school" tools. The inherent conflict of interest between SaaS and traditional IDE's will result in more browser IDE adoption.

"Useful Metrics"
Online solutions will break away from the legacy of "Business Intelligence" and "Marketing Analytics" and provide real-time metrics that are pragmatic, useful, and actionable.

"Gaming As A Metaphor"
CRM and call center workers will adopt line of business applications much more readily if the user experience is aligned with video game design elements. Responsive, real-time, and graphical UI's will be favored over forms-based applications.

Employees will prefer to "interact" with their customers online in much the same way they interact online in PVP games. Learning curves will be reduced and adoption will increase.

Company goals and missions can be more easily visualized and real-time feedback provided through rich game-like interfaces.

"Collaborative Development"
An extension of the IDE will give web developers direct access to an online repository of pre-built scripts and cloud connectors, from Google Charts and Maps, to Salesforce web to lead forms, and StrikeIron tax services.

Principles of open source and Creative Commons will encourage this "remix" and mash-up of web services to produce new and unique solutions.

"Dynamic Languages"
More than half of all new web development projects will choose to use a dynamic languages, such as Python, Ruby, PHP, or Perl. Browser-based IDEs will accelerate this adoption. Javascript and JQuery will become essential tools for building responsive and interactive web applications.

"Domain Specific Languages (DSL)"
New languages will continue to emerge that are suited for specific tasks and domains. Our own language, Dialogue, will enable web developers and business users to think abstractly about their website/portal/community and easily interact with their online constituents.

"Amazon EC2 Will Rock"
The ease of provisioning an operating system and storage through Amazon and paying for resources based on usage will make EC2 the status quo platform for cloud developers.

"3rd Party Google Apps Get Serious"
Google Apps are at the threshold of being adopted by several organizations, large and small. The only obstacle being industry specific configuration, monitoring, and auditing. 3rd party partner apps will start to move in to help verticalize Google Apps and replace existing email/calendar productivity applications.

A core tenet of i-Dialogue 9 is that all website entities inherit the following social interfaces and behaviors:

• Comment
• Rating
• Tag

Objects integrated with other systems, such as Salesforce.com, automatically inherit these social extensions.

Once a community becomes active on a website, how does this information become actionable for a Product or Marketing Manager? How do you visualize a plethora of comments, ratings, and tags on a website? i-Dialogue 9 solves this problem by providing a graphical analytics application for visualizing the online community.

The community graph is interactive and supports high-level visualization of the community and the ability to zoom in on any entity. Graph nodes are color coded to indicate increased activity or negative ratings.

Graph nodes may be modified or removed (for community moderation).

Graph nodes may be ordered by time (most recent at top), rating (highest rated top to bottom), comments (most commented at top) or tags (most tagged at top).

Internal employees may assign a Task to any entity for follow-up.

Default Social Entities:

• Knowledge Base Article
• Trouble Ticket (aka Case or Issue)
• Discussion Forum / Topics / Post
• Document
• Article (Blog or Webpage)
• User
• Chat

Alerts:
Any user may initiate a 'Watch' anywhere within the object graph hierarchy. A watch results in email notification when any child entity is updated.

Product Roadmap Notes
Technology: Silverlight
Anticipated Release Date(s)
Social entity behaviors= Winter 2009
Community Graph=Spring 2009

Recent articles and events have been making waves about the integration of CRM and social networking. I personally don't see the "sales mining" approach being a very good idea. In fact, it could outright backfire.

So how does an organization effectively leverage social networking? The answer is.... (drum roll please... are you ready?) ... "socialize".

5 things you can do right now

1) Read the ClueTrain Manifesto
It all started with this. "Markets are conversations".

If your corporate culture is not conducive to a majority of the 95 ClueTrain Theses (it's not entirely palatable), then social networking may not be a good fit. But it could also indicate your organization is on a path to extinction.

2) Own your brand
If a company is going to get into social networking, then ideally several employees will belong to that network. However, if it's possible to register your organization's name as a username, go ahead and reserve that account (or someone else will).

3) Be Informative
Break news for your company on social networks. Keep micro-messages informative by always linking to relevant pages and articles.

If people ask questions, point them in the right direction (don't respond if you don't have an answer).

4) Be Personal
You'll very quickly figure out that http://twitter.com/dlog is just me, tweeting on-behalf-of our service. Most days, I'm sharing links relevant to our service or industry. But if my dog dies and I'm having a bad day, I may share that too.

Upload a personal picture, even though you're representing a branded profile.

5) Manage Your Twitter SNR
Potential followers only have your last 20 tweets as a basis for your signal-to-noise ratio (Twitter SNR), so you need a reasonable balance of information-to-socializing.

I find myself intrigued lately with the possibility of using OpenID in B2B marketing campaigns and portals.

The idea is simple. Let your customers/partners use their existing Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, or AOL account to login to your website.

For a consumer website, this is a no-brainer. I would not be surprised if I could click on a Yahoo! banner ad and log into a sponsors website using my Yahoo! username.

But does this necessarily apply to a B2B website? I'm sure Marketers managing a complex sales process will continue to want to own the relationship end-to-end and collect as much information as possible upfront. But if a Marketer is willing to collect a minimum amount of information upfront and invest in cultivating the lead to incrementally collect more information over time, then this might work.

Less complex sales cycles might actually have quite a bit to gain by letting leads self-identify with an existing identity, given they're "in the hunt" and scanning 5+ competing site at one time. The site offering the path of least resistance is most likely to win.

RPX has a freemium service that supports OpenID (RPX is also an Oregon-bred company, so it must be good ). I'm going to experiment with the free version of this service and play with integrating it with i-Dialogue membership management (and by proxy, CRM Lead/Contact management). 

So what do you think? Would you support OpenID on your website? Why or why not?

(With respect to Aerosmith)

Amazon just announced CloudFront; an Akamai-like service for hosting web resources closer to end-consumers of websites and portals.

How can CloudFront improve my i-Dialogue hosted solution?
i-Dialogue solutions are hosted in Plano, Texas and the Pacific NorthWest. When a visitor to your site in Europe requests a web page or document, that file must travel half-way around the world to the requesters browser (where it is typically cached for future requests).

CloudFront allows commonly accessed files, such as images, cascading style sheets, and javascript libraries, to be hosted and cached at various locations around the world to minimize the distance travelled to serve these resources.

How do I get started?
This service is currently in beta. We will initially pass through Amazon's CloudFront subscription costs directly to subscribers (setup and configuration fees may apply). Contact info@cubiccompass.com to learn more and get started.

How does CloudFront impact the content publishing process?
We are still researching how CloudFront impacts a typical content publishing workflow and what extra steps will be required by content publishers.

The long term goal is to manage CloudFront as a black box and any files/images copied to a specified folder on the i-Dialogue CMS are immediately replicated to CloudFront.

Dynamic pages will still be hosted on i-Dialogue and real-time data will still be retrieved from their content source (such as Salesforce, Google, or Microsoft services).

Where are the edge network locations?
Here's the info from Amazon's website on available network locations:

The Amazon CloudFront Network

To deliver content to end users with lower latency, Amazon CloudFront uses a network of edge locations world-wide. Amazon CloudFront uses the following edge locations:

United States

• Ashburn, VA 
  
• Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
  
• Los Angeles, CA
  
• Miami, FL
  
• Newark, NJ
  
• Palo Alto, CA
  
• Seattle, WA
  
• St. Louis, MO
  

Europe

• Amsterdam
  
• Dublin
  
• Frankfurt
  
• London
  

Asia

• Hong Kong
  
• Tokyo

In times of economic pressure, web developers commonly take one of 2 paths.

Option a) Recede with the recession and fall back on known technologies and solutions (such as open source CMS's, databases, HTML, Javascript). (ie "Play it safe" or "ride it out")
Option b) Make progress, learn new skills, and invest in the next wave of technology.

Unfortunately, the majority of Developers chose option A, not realizing how diluted their skills become by competing with a global marketplace taking the same strategy.

Those investing in new skills during a recession are best positioned to capitalize on the inevitable next wave.

A recent Forrester Research article highlights the oncoming commoditization of Enterprise 2.0 applications and foreshadows the need for developers to leverage services outside their organization. Web developers must start adding value to their organizations by looking beyond the capabilities of a single CMS or portal.  We live in a service oriented world and horizontal integration with other services on the web is often times only a cut-n-paste away.

So what will be the next $100K+ salaried position in Web Development? "Mashup Developer" may be a contrived and temporary term, but it correctly communicates in spirit where the market is going and what skills will be in demand.

Web developers need to work in cross functional teams across all business lines and enable online communication between customers, partners, and employees using a multi-dimensional Internet navigation framework, so to speak (ok... shameless plug for the origin of "Cubic Compass" ).

Cubic Compass developers that are investing in mashups involving "Google/Salesforce/StrikeIron/Amazon/OpenID" will emerge as the next CTO's and CIO's when the economy rebounds by chosing "option B" and investing in new skills.

Some recommended next steps for capitalizing on this opportunity:

• Understand Open ID
• Learn Dialogue Script
• Learn a new language, such as Python
  
• Apply your Python skills at Google Apps Engine
  
• Get a Salesforce Developer account
• Create an Amazon Web Services account
  

Congratulations to this years Navigator Award winners! There were so many to choose from and we ended up adding a couple extra categories to showcase some truly magnificant i-Dialogue solutions.

PORTLAND, OR (October 27, 2008)   

Cubic Compass Announces 2008 Navigator Awards

Cubic Compass, a provider of on-demand web content management solutions, today announced the recipients of the 2008 Navigator Awards. Navigator Awards recognize organizations who have made significant contributions to enabling one-to-one online "dialogues" with their customers, partners, or employees through the use of CRM and the i-Dialogue Web Suite.

Best Overall Solution
www.LeftHandNetworks.com

LeftHand Networks (LHN) utilizes the i-Dialogue Web Suite for their main website, partner portal, customer portal, and product discussion forums. The portal staging and high-availability capabilities of i-Dialogue Unlimited Edition are employed to apply a disciplined multi-stage content publishing process that ensures the right information is available to the right person at the right time.

As an early adopter of Salesforce, LHN defined all facets of their business using custom objects in Salesforce and needed a highly customizable CMS to leverage their existing CRM investment. LHN's internal staff used the i-Dialogue API to develop a variety of online web applications, such as event management, license management, product pricelists and quoting, and a site-wide search engine.

LeftHand Networks was acquired by Hewlett Packard in October 2008 for $360M and continues to be recognized as an industry leading provider of iSCSI SAN solutions. 

---

Best Web Design
www.ConfigureSoft.com

ConfigureSoft makes use of rich multimedia and informational collateral to provide an interactive and personalized experience for their Customers and Partners.

Other online features deployed by ConfigureSoft include webinar event registration, discussion forums, partner portal, and customer portal.

---

Best B2B Portal
portal.iGrafx.com

iGrafx manages the entire customer life-cycle using i-Dialogue; from demand generation and lead cultivation to providing an online eStore and customer support forums.

iGrafx automates the lead cultivation process by providing self-service to case studies, user guides, and product downloads then follows up with automated emails using i-Dialogue drip email marketing. All online interactions and downloads are captured in Salesforce and used by Marketing and Sales to gauge customers interest in online resources.

---

Best Partner Portal
Planar

Planar has grown in recent years through the acquisition of new businesses. Planar deployed a partner portal for their digital signage business unit in 2007 and continues to expand their channel marketing efforts in 2008 by deploying partner portals for their home theater and control room business units.

i-Dialogue Premier Edition allows Planar to deploy multiple, uniquely branded partner portals that provide channel partners with 24/7 access to product marketing materials, news, events, software updates, and training resources.

Planar IT staff were early adopters of Dialogue Script and leveraged their in-house web development skills to create a dynamic and well organized online experience.

---

Best Non-Profit Portal
www.RISENetwork.org

RISE - Resources for Indispensable Schools and Educators

RISE is a national nonprofit organization that helps K-12 public schools in low-income communities attract and retain experienced, talented teachers so all students can achieve at high levels.  www.RISENetwork.org facilitates online dialogues between Teachers and Schools using i-Dialogue and Salesforce to manage contact identities, applications, and workflow processes.

Online features include application management and screening, Job Search, Application Search, Google maps, Survey response metrics, teacher-school communications, and Job/Teacher interest level tagging.

---

Best Consumer Web Solution
my.ColoradoPlasticSurgery.com

Like most small business and practice managers, Dr. Nick Slenkovich of the Colorado Plastic Surgery Center, was inundated with solicitations from pay per click and referral networks promising new Leads. Most referral partners provided information on how many leads were referred, but Dr Slenkovich required more insight into what kinds of Leads and Opportunities were produced from each referral source.
 
By using Salesforce Pro Edition with Campaigns integrated with i-Dialogue, Dr. Slenkovich deployed an intelligent landing page management solution and created unique tracking codes for all referral partners that resulted in detailed campaign influence reports in Salesforce. Google AdWords, banner ads, and referral partner marketing expenses are all now evaluated by the quality of opportunities they produce instead of the quantity of Leads.

Inevitably, some Developers need to apply advanced business and content manipulation rules to web/portal pages that display collections of Salesforce records.

This trick of using Javascript Arrays works very well. The basic components of this pattern are:

• Create a Javascript object that mirrors the Salesforce object and fields to be managed
• Use a Dialogue Script Repeater control to select a collection of records from Salesforce and package them into a client-side Javascript array.
• Render the web page using the Javascript collection of objects.

Very powerful technique. I can foresee the need to extend DScript controls to return results in a format such as JSON, which is already in use in our AJAX library.

You can view a source code example in the Developer Sandbox.

Congratulations to Cubic Compass customer LeftHand Networks for surpassing 3,000 customers and their continued 110 percent year-over-year growth.

Their iSCSI SAN line of products plug right into any existing IT infrastructure using commercial off-the-shelf disk storage devices and existing IP networks.

LeftHand Networks iSCSI solutions are playing in key role in the evolution of virtualized server environments.

Initially an adopter of our i-Dialogue Channel Management solution, LeftHand Networks recently deployed their 'www' domain on an i-Dialogue web content management system.

Key solution components:

• Online Membership Management (Accounts / Passwords / Roles)
• Single-Sign-On between portal and www domains
• Salesforce.com CRM Integration
• Online discussion forums
• Channel partner deal registration and opportunity management
• Online product price sheets and quoting
• Document management
• Role-based access to documents and product binaries
• Event tracking and reporting of all document downloads
• Training and event management
• License key management (for activating product licenses)

LeftHand Networks internal IT staff developed several of the custom online applications using the i-Dialogue .NET API.

Apple has been quite successfully at using secrecy to their advantage prior to a product launch. They prefer to build suspense around a new product then let loose with a "Big Bang" announcement and (hopefully) a product that surpasses all expectations.

But their recent launch of MobileMe did not go so well using this strategy. Steve Jobs acknowledged that Apple should have launched MobileMe in beta to a select group, then evolve the product prior to broader distribution.

This "iterative, incremental" approach to launching web services, websites, and SaaS applications is pretty much a universally accepted practice today.

After all, software is "soft". It can be easily crafted, modified, and evolved over time. Software-as-a-Service is arguably even "softer" than traditional software with concepts such as declarative configuration, multi-tenancy, and single code bases becoming the norm.

My personal experience working on several eMarketing and portal projects over the years is that projects that start out overly ambitious and strive to launch with a "Big "Bang" with lots of new functionality are prone to either a) outright fail and be abandoned or b) re-correct themselves, but proceed demoralized.

It's no surprise that our most successful clients and projects are those that started small and evolved their solution over time. The pattern is quite clear. That is why we've designed our subscription levels and services around iterative, incremental development.

Many people talk in terms of "SMB" or "Enterprise" software and make immediate assumptions based on price. We don't see it that way. It's perfectly acceptable for a Fortune 500 company to start with a $195 per month microsite and evolve that solution over time to several redundant/load-balanced servers.

Maybe it's the ego of legacy IT and marketing organizations that persist this notion of "Big Bang" projects. "My new eMarketing platform is $30K per month with 3 full-time consultants" sounds much more powerful than "I'm upgrading my $595 per month microsite to manage all our campaigns once I've established a consistent cost-per-opportunity metric."

Sounds odd coming from me because I don't make more money giving this advice, but I would rather have a satisfied customer start with our $195 month microsite edition and see immediate ROI rather than risk a dissatisfied customer pursuing an overly ambitious goal.

You can have massive scale aspirations and scope. Just make sure the software you're using is "soft" enough to support iterative, incremental development and plan for many small releases along the way to achieve larger goals.

 A new rating control has been added to the Dialogue Script library that supports the rating of Salesforce objects through i-Dialogue hosted web pages and portal applications.

I haven't dug too deep into the details, but apparently this control can be provisioned in a variety contexts, such as a Thumbs Up/Down rating control (it's derived from this open source Rating control, so anything that can be achieved through the documented samples is portable to the DScript control).

Customer ratings are typically captured in a junction object that intersects a Person with an Object and records their rating.

For example, here's what an example DocumentRating object might look like in Salesforce for capturing individual ratings of documents.

DocumentRating__c.LeadId__c Lookup (Lead)
DocumentRating__c.ContentId__c    Lookup (Content__c)
DocumentRating__c.Rating__c     Number (1,0)

Unlike other Dialogue Script controls that can be deployed using minimal attributes, this one needs some extra guidance to define the junction object source and related lookup fields.

Here it is July and I feel like a kid on Christmas knowing that the next release of SmarterStats includes advanced charts and graphs using Silverlight. Very cool!

SmarterStats is one of many applications included with every i-Dialogue subscription.

The "Milestones" feature in i-Dialogue CMS can really save your bacon if you ever need to rollback a particular web page to a previous version.

Here's a quick walk-through of this feature (click the "Play" button below to view).

What is the future of search engine optimization (SEO) now that consumers and customers can interact with Google like this (click play below)?

Google Charts are the way to go if you want to spice up your i-Dialogue web pages with charts and graphs.

Check out this screencast for a quick demonstration on our new Google Chart integration.

A couple Cubic Compass customers on the US East Coast are seeking Interactive Web Developers to take their i-Dialogue websites/portals to the next level.

These are full-time, onsite positions located in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida and Philadelphia. See details here and here.

Those following my recent video blog entries have probably noticed a pretty concerted effort on our part to improve the user experience (UX) of our CMS.

You can pretty much single-click your way through the most common functions today as we've converted to a 3 tier UI that progressively reveals advanced features and functionality as you descend into the dialog windows.

It's amazing how many experiences we tolerate in Windows on a day to day basis. This Windows UX Ideas site has started a constructive dialogue on the topic.

(No, that's not a Salesforce Ideas site. Even though it looks identical, the author custom developed the site in PHP... very nice)

In this video, I walk through the creation of a simple "Contact Us" web page that inserts Contacts directly into Salesforce. Contact me at mike@cubiccompass.com if you'd like a more personalized demonstration.

Full screen version here

This video was inspired by a Salesforce.com customer asking how to create a search page similar to Salesforce's Partner Finder using Dialogue Script.

(I apologize for the video cropping....Full screen video here)

Check out this new Wiki article if you have a need for publishing RSS feeds from Salesforce-driven data.

The context of the article uses a "Jobs__c" custom object, but I'll leave it to your imagination and creativity to truly leverage the full potential of this feature.

If The Big Switch can be said to represent the centralization of computing resources, then Microsoft's Live Mesh may signal the path towards the big switch back to a decentralized model (albeit with some centrally hosted Microsoft infrastructure).

Some ideas for using Mesh with our CEM platform and Salesforce:

• Real-time notifications when Leads/Contacts enter your website
• Sync and offline access to CRM data and documents across several devices
• Rich development of email campaigns and web page content
• Social networking with employees, partners, and customers

 

Hands on with Live Mesh

Keeping Real Estate websites up to date with the latest property listing information is a challenging task. IDX implementations vary across the industry and provide little support for structured CRM integration. Fortunately, several Multiple Listing Service (MLS) vendors in the US have standardized on a transaction standard called RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) for describing real estate properties and listings.

Cubic Compass is excited to announce a RETS/Salesforce integration solution that synchronizes MLS listings with Salesforce in near real-time (AppExchange package). RETS Import Fieldmaps (documentation here) are used to map MLS fields to Salesforce custom objects

The combination of RETS/MLS data and the Force.com platform gives real estate development and sales professionals a single environment to manage the entire real estate sales process, from listing to website publishing, demand generation, scheduled showings, email marketing, contract management, and close.

Lookup relationships to Properties and Listings give Realtors one-click capability to manage a detailed database of Leads/Contacts and their specific interests. Web-to-Lead forms automatically relate Leads to their primary property Listing of interest.

Web Event activity tracking displays which properties and listings customers are viewing on the website. Page views are rolled up on the Listing records for visibility on most viewed listings.

Property history tracking gives Realtors a detailed database of prior listing transactions, long after the MLS hosted listings are gone.

Contact info@cubiccompass.com for more details and a demonstration.

• Product catalog management
• Shopping Cart
• Globalization / Multi-currency
• Localized Taxes
• Discounting
• Membership management
• Secure online payment
• PCI compliance
• Product / service fullfillment
• Financial accounting / Back office integration
• Recurring payments

 

Luke Wroblewski has a thoughtful article on why Sign Up Forms Must Die.

His examples of "gradual engagement" are pragmatic, applied customer experiences that reflect concepts outlined by Rogers and Peppers and many others.

We all deal with Salesforce Web-to-Lead forms on a daily basis, but it's not often that we think of breaking a Lead form down into several smaller forms and seek to gradually learn more about prospects over time.

Granted, most of the examples in Luke's article are in a B2C context, but B2B sites with more than one case study or several pieces of collateral can apply the same concept.

Our new Director of Sales and Marketing, Jennifer Clark, has really hit the ground running and deployed a fantastic new website for www.CubicCompass.com.

Brian Rhinehart (of www.KineticShadows.com, a local parther) and Joe Garber, our resident Interactive Web Designer/Developer, played key roles in the transformation of our new image.

Some changes in our web site and overall strategy:

* RSS Feed Subscribers should update their feed to this URL. The old Blog RSS feed will continue to redirect for a few more weeks.

* www.i-dialogue.com now redirects to our main corporate website at www.cubiccompass.com. i-Dialogue continues to be the brand of our hosted suite eMarketing and Customer Experience Management solutions.

* i-Dialogue is now available in 4 editions to serve a variety of CEM needs.

Traditional web design and development are rooted in the concept of a Multi-Page Layout, or MPL. Contemporary web design and content management systems have transitioned towards a Single Page Layout, or SPL.

MPL web sites store their content in individual web pages. Adding more content requires adding additional pages. SPL web sites use a single web page template that derive their content from a database. Salesforce.com makes a great database for managing both content and Leads/site members.

Many organizations gradually wade into developing unique landing pages for Google AdWords or publishing products and services. At first, the MPL approach provides the path to least resistance since initial development and deployment costs are fairly low. The cost of change remains fairly linear at first as each new page is cloned from an existing page and modified to suit the campaigns needs. But over time the cost of change begins to increase. It takes longer to provision new pages and development becomes much slower.

A form of "technical debt" is accrued whereby a developer must eventually externalize common UI elements to server side include (SSI) files, such as headers, logos, navigation, and footers. Even with SSI best practices in place, a developer/programmer still remains in the critical path for each new campaign and the skills required for ongoing maintenance remain high.

SPL templates may take 3-5 times longer to initially implement, but successive pages may be easily provisioned by business users, such as Marketing and Support admins. The time to provision a new page remains linear over time as each new page is defined in a database and immediately available for use in PPC campaigns.

SPL page templates are actually very simple to develop. They may look slightly cryptic when opened in a common web page designer because they contain "merge tags" to be replaced by the database when the page is displayed. The URL typically contains some kind of unique ID to give the page context as to which content to display.

i-Dialogue 8 now supports a new scripting language called Dialogue Script that removes the need for a physical page template. The SPL template can be created directly in a web browser and the merge tags can define any Salesforce object or field.

The Professional Services group at Cubic Compass Software has extensive experience with SPL design and hosting. Contact me for more information. I'd be happy to help.

Which Super Bowl ads made an honest attempt at initiating a two-way dialogue? Here's my scorecard.

The Scorecard

Compelling Call To Action: Did the ad provide a memorable URL and call to action?
Continuity: When I go the URL, is the message in the context of the TV ad?
Fulfillment: Does the website answer my questions or deliver on any promises made?

	Time	Company / Product	URL	Compelling Call to Action	Continuity	Fulfillment	Notes and Comments
	4:33:00	Audi	http://www.truthinengineering.com	B+	A+	C	Talk about pressure. The first super bowl ad after kick-off, and this one delivered really well with a take-off on the Godfather. The web site picks up where the commercial leaves of and highlights what is, in my opinion, one slick looking car. Can't actually configure a new Audi online or order one, so not the highest marks on fulfillment.
	4:45:00	SalesGenie.com	http://www.salesgenie.com/tv	B-	B+	A	The first of a couple peculiar animated commercials from SalesGenie.com that appear to have a theme of "If ethnically diverse business owners in America can get free sales leads, so can you." How many people will ever type in "slash TV" after the domain name? I did, which is why they get above average continuity points for keeping the landing page message relevant to the SuperBowl ad. Very fulfilling. I was able to immediately start taking advantage of my 100 free leads and walked through a target demographic wizard that produced 26K prospects (I chose mid-market manufacturers of electronic equipment for the fun of it)
	4:48:00	Under Armour	http://www.underarmour.com/	C	B	C	The TV ad took too long to get the point, but was visually very stunning and entertaining. The Flash web site is actually very nice and loads extremely fast, but really just plays several ads in a loop.
	4:03:00	GoDaddy	http://www.godaddy.com/	C-	B+	B-	No real surprise here. GoDaddy goes straight for the 18-35 Male demographic and this year uses IndyCar racer Danica Patrick as the "bait". Nothing too revealing here. "Exposed" is more of an ironic description of what actually occurs in the video (the Super Bowl is, afterall, a form of family entertainment). GoDaddy uses a cleverly designed image map of Danica such that if you click on certain hot spots, it takes you to a web conversion form instead of directly to the video.
	5:07:00	Tide	http://www.mytalkingstain.com	A	A	A-	I probably spent more time on this site after the SuperBowl than any other. Humorous ad with a memorable domain name / call to action. You can hover over various shirt stains on the web site to hear them "talk". What is that? It's like a mix of Arabic, French, Italian, and.... well.... if you think you can create a better talking stain, Tide provides the platform ala YouTube to "Be the Stain" and upload a picture of yourself and create a voiceover. Crazy.... but if this takes off, it could be entertaining in an amateurish sort of way. For those inclined, Tide even invites you to film your own stain video and upload/share it.
	5:23:00	Sobe Life Water	http://www.thrillicious.com/	C	B	C-	Probably the most over thought TV ad and Flash based website of the whole lot. I seriously thought it was a Geico commercial for the first 26 seconds until the Sobe brand appeared. The domain name is not very memorable, especially for those that are grammatically challenged (I know it took me a couple attempts to enter the domain name). Once I hit the web site I'm faced with a strange "hide and seek" Flash navigation where I need to move the mouse around and "discover" the navigation links. I'm prompted to "disable my popup blocker" (no, are you kidding?) Sadly, the best material is buried in the site under an "Episodes" section that tells the back story behind the dancing lizards as they prepare their Super Bowl ad video shoot. Very clever elements. There clearly is some genius behind this campaign, but it became a horse designed by committee. No fulfillment here. What is life water? Can I read the label? Does it have any sugar (I don't like water drinks with fructose added)? Where can I try or buy it?..... nada.... no answers on the site.
	6:18:00	Chrysler	http://www.chryslerlistens.com	C	C-	C-	The www.chryslerlistens.com  domain looked like it had potential. A community site perhaps? A viral video site about cars? Unfortunately Chrysler is not actually listening. The domain simply redirects to http://www.chryslerllc.com/  which has links for "Community" and "Blog", but they're actually artificial links to contrived pages that give the illusion of an interactive Web 2.0 site, though the blog does appear to have an open comments section. Overall, disappointing.
	7:03:00	Jack In The Box	http://www.makeajacksandwich.com/	A-	A+	A	This microsite was obviously created specifically for the SuperBowl ad, which employed a tongue-in-cheek double entendre about making a Jack sandwich in a hot tub (of course Jack has his mind on literally making a sandwich). If you get tired of manipulating your uploaded picture with an array of Mr Potato Head accessories, you can click on the Location link to find a location near you. Yeah..... how simple is that? That's the way it's done.
	7:05:00	Sunsilk	http://www.lifecantwait.com/	B	A-	C	A nice attempt at associating a unique domain name with a brand. Both the TV and web ads put Marilyn, Madonna, and Shakira in a new light, but as I am not in the ads target demographic of Females 25-55 (it's a broad reaching ad??), I was compelled to follow up just out of curiosity since they setup a unique URL. I was a little puzzled by the "Feature Coming Soon" on the home page. Guess they didn't have the interactive components in place before the SuperBowl.

The Winners

Based on the scores, Tide and Jack in the Box come out on top. As far as most functional campaign, SalesGenie.com is the most likely to get visitors to self-identify and enable an ongoing dialogue.

Interesting that in such a consumer driven B2C Internet world that a B2B site would have such strong positioning in the Super Bowl.

Dialogue Script (or DScript for short) provides a simple scripting language for developing interactive web pages, forms, and applications integrated with Salesforce.com. In this series of articles, I'll cover some basic scripting concepts to address the most common use cases.

Dialogue Script Articles:

1. Master Views and Lists
2. Details View
3. Web Form

What is a Master View?
"Recent News" is an example of a Master View. It is simply a list of items that are dynamically queried from Salesforce.

Here's an example Dialogue script that displays a top 5 list of the most recent press releases:

<dlog:repeater id="LatestNewsRepeater"
SOQL="SELECT TOP 5 * FROM Content__c WHERE Type__c='Press Release' ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC" runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
<dlog:HyperLink ID="HeadlineLink" TextFieldName="Headline__c" NavigateURL="~/News.aspx={oid}" runat="Server" /><br/>
</ItemTemplate>
</dlog:repeater>

Example Output: (example links only)
ACME Corp Announces Q1 Financials
Jane Smith Joins ACME as VP of Operations
ABC Sees Record Growth After Using ACME Solution
ACME Announces 2008 Product Roadmap
Wall Street Journal: Inside Look at ACME

This example uses a Repeater control and SOQL Plus to query Salesforce and format the repeating layout of each item in the query result. Dialogue Script supports Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) plus adds support for tokens like "TOP", "ORDER BY", and "IN".

You can query any object in Salesforce. Master Views and Lists are a great way to provide customers with high level information and get them started in a general direction. Adding an ORDER BY CreatedDate DESC clause ensures the web page always stays up to date and displays the latest press releases, meaning you never need to update your web site when a new press release is launched. Query results can be cached to improve performance by adding a CachedDurationMinutes attribute to the Repeater.

In the next article, I'll demonstrate how to use Dialogue Script to format the actual Press release page using Salesforce data, plus some bonus script on creating a dynamic Google AdWords landing page.

Happy scripting!!!

I'm still waiting for the big one. That well coordinated campaign that starts with a 30 second commercial during the super bowl that inspires consumers to continue an online dialogue. A campaign that demonstrates true ROI and actually measures the value of a $3M investment.

Last years super bowl left me wanting, but there were some success stories. Some might say GoDaddy owes it's market position exclusively to Super Bowl advertising with a call to action that brings people online (eventually) to have some presence on the Internet super highway.

SalesGenie.com, voted worst ad of last years Super Bowl, drove 25,000 visitors to their site. They'll be back again this year with 3 more ads. Did anyone else notice the timing of Mark Israelsen's departure from Salesforce.com to head up SalesGenie starting February 1st? Looks like he'll hit the ground running.

Here are some dialogue tactics/strategies I'm hoping to see this year that convert a one-way broadcast into a two-way dialogue:

• Easy to remember domain name. Here's the pitch.... go here to learn more. That's the 30 second objective. www.GetItNow.com wants "mid 6 figures" to purchase this domain (Let me know if I can help negotiate this ). What is the value of a short, easy to remember domain if your current URL will result in higher abandonment?
• Relevant Landing Page. You just paid $3M for a 30 second ad. Please make the next step in the dialogue relevant to the upstream message. Don't just drop me on your home page.
• Immediate Gratification. The super bowl is all about entertainment. Keep the online dialogue rolling. Keep it entertaining. An interactive Flash game or video perhaps.
• Keep the First Date Simple. Need to know something about me before fulfilling an offer (such as free 30 day demo)? That's fine. But keep it simple. Why do you need more than an email address and name on our "first date"? I'm not applying for a home loan. Keep the conversion forms short and incrementally ask for more information over time.
• Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Keep me engaged. Continue and evolve the story. The Super Bowl ad is only the beginning. I need to go online to learn the middle..... keep the dialogue going and engage me in the ending.
• Cross Channel Boundaries. I have a mobile phone. Let me subscribe to SMS alerts as part of the dialogue. Coordinate Television, Internet, and Mobile to facilitate a dialogue.

From Entrepreneur.com "The Hottest Marketing Trends for 2008".

1. Engage the customer. The move toward alternative advertising versus some of the more traditional methods coincides with the emergence of technologies that enable a one-on-one dialogue with customers. For example, follow the trend of social media by posting your products on sites that encourage customer or peer reviews. Social media add an element of impartiality and are increasingly looked to as reliable sources of information.

Read the entire article online.

On-Demand software has revolutionized how enterprise software is deployed. Declarative customization provides line of business managers with an unprecedented number of options from which to "declare" how a CRM record is defined or presented in a page layout. But let's face it... at some point, all enterprise software solutions require some level of programmatic customization. Enterprise software vendors simply cannot anticipate each and every business requirement.

Salesforce customers, having reached the limits of declarative customization, now have domain specific programming languages such as Visual Force and Apex to programmatically customize their CRM system.

Content Management Systems (CMS) and Enterprise Portals already have a strong legacy of supporting programmatic customization, but achieved this flexibility through integration with existing development environments and the modification of physical files and templates.

Many CMS's have attempted to offer purely browser-based declarative customization environments, such as Wiki's and Blogs, but failed to meet the demands of creative and marketing professionals, which require detailed control over the presentation and branding of web pages and emails.

It's time for a new scripting language that meets the unique demands of Customer Experience Management (CEM). It's time to offer an optimal balance between declarative and programmatic configuration options. It's time to recognize that there is a new generation of workers entering the workforce that embrace Domain Specific Languages (see Fowler: DSL) and expect programming the web to be as easy as programming their iPod, Tivo, or DVR. It's time for a language like "Dialogue".

"Dialogue" is a new scripting language designed specifically for helping organizations to interact with their customers and partners online using concepts familiar to both the web (HTML, CSS, Javascript) and CRM (Lead, Contact, Opportunity, Case records).

The key tenants of Dialogue include:

Creativity / User Interface: Dialogue is primarily a presentation language that resembles HTML and is used in the creation of dynamic web pages, landing pages, and emails. Graphic designers and web developers have control over each pixel in the presentation of Dialogue scripts.

Business User Support: Business users can easily modify Dialogue scripts to present information most relevant to customers and partners. Changes can be made to Dialogue scripts without the assistance of a web programmer.

Multiple Development Environment Support: Dialogue scripts can be managed using either a web browser or rich client. Todays content management professionals are accustomed to working with tools such as Dreamweaver and Expression. Dialogue plug-Ins for web development environments (starting with Expression) will be developed to enable the remote persistence and management of Dialogue scripts using a locally installed rich client. But the flexibility of storing and managing content entirely on the web will remain the primary focus.

CRM-Driven: Dialogue scripts provide direct access to CRM records and data for maximum personalization.

Agile: Dialogue scripts support an agile methodology that allows organizations to go from concept to deployment within a matter of hours or days. Campaigns can be modified on the fly and no longer suffer from the constraints of "waterfall" project management methodologies where considerable upfront planning is required to reduce the anticipated cost of change.

The Dialogue scripting language will help organizations transition from static, brochureware web designs common in the 90's, to highly interactive and personalized online experiences. It is our goal that all Salesforce customers will unlock the capabilities of their CRM system to delivering these rich online experiences. Dialogue is the final link in enabling this level of interaction.

Yet another great customer experience (CE) faux pas from WorseThanFailure.com. Doubtful many customers would be patient enough to wait until the year 3000 (below) to receive their discount

I can empathize with the Developers of this site. We learned the hard to always check Salesforce managed date/times when using them in CE applications and campaigns after discovering that the absence of a date actually resulted in displaying a default date (something like January 1, 1900).

Steve Andersen has developed a really interesting metric in Salesforce based on actions taken by Activists/Donors in response to nonprofit campaigns. His solution exercises some new features in Winter '08, such as hierarchical campaigns and Apex scripts.

Anyone following my "tweets" on Twitter during the Salesforce.com Dreamforce '07 conference probably saw my references to lead scoring. The presentations and discussions inspired me to revisit this topic and explore how to implement lead scoring in Salesforce using an existing i-Dialogue web event data mart.

My past experiences with lead scoring were based on assigning "A", "B", "C", or "D" scores to leads derived from their online interactions. This prioritization gave sales reps some insight into which leads were supposedly more qualified than others.

A much simpler approach to lead scoring is to simply assign a score to each interaction and let the cumulative score provide a relative indicator. For example, in the illustration below, 2 leads enter a web site and initially appear to be equally qualified. But over time, and with enough data collection, we see that one lead was actually more interested in seeking employment with the organization rather than becoming a customer.

Defining lead score rules in Salesforce is possible through the use of a "Web Event Scoring Rule" custom object (see below), which is a prototypical definition of an existing Web Event object (already included with i-Dialogue).

A periodic evaluation by the i-Dialogue-to-Salesforce integration process evaluates each interaction and checks to see if it matches a lead score rule prototype. A match results in a Lead's score being increased or decreased by a defined amount. Rule prototypes may have any number of evaluation parameters, allowing for simple or complex rule definitions. If it can be captured in i-Dialogue, it can be evaluated.

A custom field on the Lead record named "Lead Score" is updated by the scoring process. Scores in Salesforce are updated in near real-time and are accurate to within 30 minutes.

This score then becomes the basis for Salesforce Reports and Dashboards. Once the technology is in place, an iterative/incremental relationship marketing process is implemented to routinely review and adjust scores and online event collectors. Lead scores will never be perfect, but the balance of online interactions and evaluation rules can achieve an 80% "good enough" state to be widely trusted by Sales Representatives and Marketing Managers.

Nearly one-third of CRM projects fail because of non-adoption, according to AMR Research.

I'm guilty of this problem myself. I get off the phone with someone, look at my scribbled notes on some paper and think "I really should enter this call into Salesforce for future reference." But do I do it? Maybe 50% of the time I do.

Many more people visit Facebook than their CRM system. Why? Because your relationship with people on Facebook is dynamic, just like in real life. If a Facebook friend does something online, you know it. And their action, such as joining a group, may inspire you to pursue joining that same group.

Now imagine opening up a Lead or Contact record in your CRM system and seeing the following information:

• Bob downloaded the case study "ACME in Manufacturing".
• Bob opened his email from campaign "Product Announcement"
• Bob forwarded an email to a friend 'Nancy'.

The list could go on, but you get the idea. It's much easier to adopt CRM when the process of collecting information about customers is less manual or more automated.

That's the premise behind i-Dialogue and Customer Experience Management (CEM). Extending CRM with online interactions so that Sales and Marketing reps will regularly use and adopt CRM to learn about and interact with customers.

Hey... if a survey has only 3-5 questions and can be taken quickly, I'm more than happy to provide feedback. These surveys, however, may make customers think twice.

... as if there is such a thing.  Humorous video from Microsoft digital advertising group.

I started reading Edward Tufte's 'Beautiful Evidence' (BE) over the weekend. This is the 4th book in a series (he says a quintet is to be expected) dedicated to the craft of information design.

Tufte's books have withstood the test of time with a high level of integrity. His work quite simply reveals "The Truth" of information design as he identifies great works from centuries past (and modern era) that have fought to change mankinds beliefs through the power of the pen and paper on thinking such as "the world is flat" and "the earth is the center of the galaxy".

I personally borrow heavily from Tufte's "let no pixel go to waste" philosophy. There's is most definitely an art to depicting thousands of data points within a single image.

My only complaints with this book are:
a) material from previous books is recycled, such as Joseph Minyard's March of 1812 (to Tufte's credit, he does spend considerably more time on this piece than in previous books)
and
b) the chapter dedicated to PowerPoint bashing takes away from the overall integrity of his work. It would have sufficed to say that PowerPoint templates and charts are the cause for much misinformation, and many people would tend to agree. But just about everyone uses PowerPoint occasionally, so this chapter does little more than to alienate everyone to a degree and denies PowerPoint it's key utility of being a framework for discussion rather than an actual informational artifact.

Those who work with massive datasets in Salesforce.com understand the "If we only knew what know" feeling. But it is the work of Tufte that helps us focus on mining these databases and unearthing hidden information through heat maps, graphs, and other types of multi-variate charts.

A few years ago, when this book was in pre-publication, I wrote a simple sparkline program based on Tufte's latest research, but alas it was abandoned as a solution looking for a problem. I'm inspired to start using VisualForce to implement some of these concepts again.

I recommend catching Edward on one of his many book tours. All of his books are typically included in the registration fee and he explains the concepts in a very entertaining manner. This is a must attend event for anyone in Graphic Design or BI Visualization.

Information Week has been running a series of articles on the changing, and perhaps disappearing, role of the CIO.

The most recent edition published a list of "Top 12 Reasons the CIO Role is Disappearing", and one item in particular caught my eye:

Reason #9: Never ending need to improve the customer experience.

Now, I can't say I follow the reasoning why this trend would contribute to a reduced need for a CIO. I do know that more line-of-business marketing and support managers are now more empowered than ever to procure, configure, and manage their on-demand CRM and CEM solutions with less dependence on IT.

I also know that there are "old ways" and "new ways" of doing things, and perhaps this trend could be attributed to CIO's hanging onto "old ways" and not embracing the "new ways".

Old Way	New Way
Bottom-Up delivery of IT	Top-Down alignment of IT with business
Internal identity management/SSO	CRM driven membership management
Online interactions separate from CRM	Online interactions integrated with CRM
Build, own, host one big web site	DNS / SSO management of multiple, horizontally aligned, solution-specific portals
IT managed web site/portals	Delegated authority to LOB managers
One-way customer messaging (Broadcasting)	Two-Way customer interactions (Interactive)
9am-5pm Weekday customer support	24/7 Global Support
Centralized command and control of IT infrastructure	Decentralized, distributed control, social networking infrastructure

What do you see in the "new way" column that indicates that the CIO's job is now any easier? I see nothing. If anything, the job is much more complicated and difficult than before.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) fundamentally is a Marketing activity, but CEM that provides a competitive advantage requires significant IT guidance and coordination. It's just that the day to day operations of specialized services are becoming increasingly easier to outsource.

I sometimes wonder if we've forgotten the original purpose for CAPTCHA images, which is to prevent the repeated, automated submission of web forms by non-humans.

This CAPTCHA engine (original here) has apparently become a little lazy. It simply displays the challenge code un-obfuscated and calls the end user a "twit". Wussup with that?!

Quick note to follow-up to my recent nonprofit related blog post... the Salesforce implementations for all our recent nonprofit web sites have been delivered by Exponent Partners (ExP), a Salesforce consulting partner committed to growing the capacity of Nonprofit organizations via effective use of technology (and pretty much spending 90%+ of their time on Salesforce like us).

Rem Hoffmann of ExP will be at Dreamforce in the Nonprofit pavilion. We're only about 20 yards away. Come talk to either one of us about implementing Salesforce in conjunction with a web content management system or portal. After jointly working together on a few projects, I think we have several great lessons learned about how to efficiently integrate the web with Salesforce.

Rem Hoffmann brings more than 15 years’ experience in building and operating information technology organizations and in consulting to the nonprofit, government, and commercial sectors.

CRM Chump has a great post on An Introduction to Customer Experience Management (See related blog post on Does CEM replace CRM?).

When you describe CEM as a customer-centric approach that focuses on the needs of the customer rather than the company, it's very easy to get onto the topic of Marketing in general. Is CEM really new, or is it what marketers have been doing along?

It's not enough for a marketing agency to broadcast one-way, outbound messages anymore. The Internet allows for much greater interaction than traditional TV, print, or radio and marketing agencies must think in terms of long running, interactive, online dialogues to generate leads, cultivate, and acquire customers.

Some other questions that arise when on the topic of CEM: Is i-Dialogue a software company? An interactive marketing agency? Our core competency is certainly in technology, hosting, and on-demand content management tools. We do get very involved with our clients business goals, marketing message, and help them evolve their web site beyond simple, static web pages. But ultimately marketing functions like graphic design and copy writing fall into the hands of our partners and other agencies.

To emphasize this synergy between CEM and marketing, we are busy developing an i-Dialogue Agency Edition that allows marketing agencies to outsource the marketing automation tools, CRM, and hosting infrastructure and focus on what they do best... branding and product/service marketing. This effort requires marketing agencies to persuade their clients to use Salesforce.com CRM to monitor and report on marketing campaigns. My experience is that even one SFDC enterprise seat bundled with i-Dialogue returns extraordinary value relative to existing marketing automation platforms.

On the heels of my previous post, I forgot to mention the English/Spanish localization by i-Dialogue customer www.ArcoProperties.com. Perusing their site really makes me want to spend a couple weeks down in Panama

i-Dialogue customer iGrafx recently localized their interactive online resource center with German content.

Salesforce.com CRM is easily configured to capture customers language preference. Just add a custom field to Lead and Contact named something like "Preferred Language" and map the field to i-Dialogue's "Language" field.

Whenever a customer clicks on the language bar at the top of an i-Dialogue page, or submits a localized web form, the customer's language selection is automatically updated in Salesforce.

iGrafx has also localized their email auto-responders to German for a truly relevant and localized dialogue. Future plans are in the works for Italian and Spanish sites too.

Just posted this new Quick Start Guide:
Creating Effective Customer Experiences with i-Dialogue for AppExchange.

This guide covers some basic topics, such as

• Creating a Simple Web Page
• Creating a Web-to-Lead Form
• Creating a Landing Page
• Creating a PPC Advertising Campaign

Lately, I've been re-exploring the possibilities with component-based workflow in the development of online marketing and customer portal sites. The concept is simple. You drag components onto web pages that allow interactive web developers to define actions and behaviors in response to web page events.

This is in contrast to the current convention in i-Dialogue, which currently implements workflows through the explorer interface.

As an example, a basic lead nurturing campaign requires the triggering of a long running email auto-response campaign when a web lead form is submitted. Using the i-Dialogue explorer I would have to define a dialogue rule that associates the form with an auto response campaign. But I can also add a smart component, called a "Form Submit Handler", to the landing page that intercepts form submit events and triggers the autoresponder on its own.



Granted, not a significant decrease in developmnt time, but it's much more apparent when looking at the landing page that "Oh... when the web form is submitted these events will be triggered and I have the ability to configure them".

A component-based approach does have it's associated challenges:

1) Atomicity Yields Complexity. Smaller, more granular components yield more flexible solutions and reduce need for programmatic customization. But if 3 different workflow components on a web page are required to process a lead form, trigger an auto-responder, and intelligently redirect the page, then the complexity of the page design is increased. Pre-built page templates are the best way to address this problem.

2) Process Visualization: The i-Dialogue Explorer allows me to see across multiple campaigns, landing pages, and auto-response rules at once. I can see exactly which landing pages have auto-response rules and which ones don't. But if workflow is embedded into pages in the form of active components, I need to drill down to the individual page to learn which workflows are active. The answer is in a new generation of campaign reporting tools (if there were only 26 hours in a day, I would add this and a dozen other features ).

3) Creative-Business Collaboration: Interactive Web Development requires a unique set of skills. Part graphic/web designer and part marketing/business user. It's rare to find these skills in one person, so you often find different individuals taking responsibility for various components. For example, one person provides the HTML, layout, and graphics. Another provides copy writing, workflow and auto-response rules.

The bottom line? We'll need to support both approaches and give campaign designers the freedom to choose which approach works best for them.

Complex problems and concepts must be broken down into smaller problems in order to manage them. The Customer Experience Management Maturity Model, or CEM³ (based on the Capability Maturity Model), provides a framework for understanding and improving processes implemented to manage the customer experience.

I'll be expanding on this model over the course of several articles, but here's a high level description of each maturity level.

Initial
Customer experience is typically limited to static HTML or a basic web site describing products or services. Processes are ad-hoc. Success is dependent on the heroics of individuals.

Repeatable
Basic project and content management processes are put into place to make customer interactions repeatable. Customer experience workflows and processes are documented. Management has visibility into major milestone accomplishments and project status.

Repeatable customer experience processes may be limited to a single group within an organization, such as Marketing. Different processes may be implemented for different projects.

Defined
CEM processes are tailored from organization wide, cross-functional standards and processes. Standard processes are used to establish consistency across all customer touchpoints.

Managed
All interactions are measured within the customer life cycle. Dashboards are created to monitor CEM Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Management can identify ways to adjust and adapt the process to particular projects without measurable losses of quality or deviations from specifications. Organizations at this level set quantitative goals for customer experiences.

Optimizing
Maturity level 5 focuses on continually improving process performance through both incremental and innovative technological improvements. Quantitative process-improvement objectives for the organization are established, continually revised to reflect changing business objectives, and used as criteria in managing process improvement.

"Is Customer Experience Management (CEM) a replacement for CRM?" This is a very good question, and from my perspective the answer is "No".

Most CRM systems today were designed for call-center phone interactions and therefore the software itself was only used by employees. The "customer experience" in call-center environments are actually initially managed by IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems, or what are commonly referred to as "phone trees" (you know... "Press 1 for English, 2 for Espanol").

But in the Internet era, online customer interactions can be highly personalized, relevant, and tightly integrated with CRM. I always tell people that CEM is "IVR for the Web".

Hence, Customer Experience Management is a logical extension to CRM that incorporates technologies and best practices that ensure each customer interaction is relevant and personalized.