CRM

Overheard: Salesforce - GoogleApps marriage takes place in the cloud

When it takes just a mouse click to open Gmail and have the message saved with the prospect record, it won’t take long before Gmail becomes the default email system for most Salesforce users… For Google, the combination brings Google Apps into big enterprise accounts and also expands its footprint among smaller businesses. For Salesforce.com, it expands the reach of its Salesforce application and further validates its Force.com integration and development platform. But more importantly for both of them — and for the rest of us who are committed to the on-demand model — it puts extra weight behind the gathering trend towards running business applications and computing in the cloud. Phil Wainewright, Salesforce and Google team to conquer the enterprise

I’m not so sure about the first statement I grabbed from Phi’s excellent post — but I’m pretty sure he’s got it right about us looking back and seeing this as the beginning of the tipping point for enterprise computing in the cloud.

Overheard: Google platform-as-a-service (PaaS)

“Google could parlay its search and advertising technology, market dominance, and its infrastructure prowess into a powerful engine that runs and monetizes thousands or millions of externally developed applications. Salesforce.com provides a more mature example today with its Force.com platform. It allows developers to write applications, mostly CRM-oriented, in a variety of languages that can run natively on the Salesforce.com software platform and data centers.” Dan Farber, Web 2.5: The emergence of platforms-as-a-service

I like this analogy. Hadn’t thought of Salesforce this way before.

Overheard: Why page views are important for lead generation

A better gauge of a Web entity’s user profile would be to look at the composition of PVs, because heavy users will drive PVs and tend to counteract the diluting impact on the core target that a UV metric can have. In December 2007, for example, Media Metrix reported that 62% of Unique Visitors to aarp.org were age 50+ (eligibility for AARP kicking in at age 50); but 77% of their Page Views were accounted for by persons 50+, and 79% of their total minutes. But there is another important reason to think in terms of pages when assessing a web entity’s audience make-up. Ads are distributed across pages, not UVs. The more pages one consumes, the more ads one is exposed to, and the more likely that consumer is to see your ad. If an advertiser runs a campaign on a site, the audience profile of the exposures to that campaign will tend to mirror the profile of the Page Views, not the Unique Visitors. In the AARP example above, then, let’s restate thusly: 62% of the aarp.com unique audience is comprised of persons 50+, but these persons see almost 80% of the ads. Josh Chasin, Where The Buys Are: Ads Live On Pages

Something else I want to remember that Tris Hussey wrote: Don’t look at a link away from your blog/web site as asking people to leave, think of it as building a larger network of people who will link to you.

Overheard: Top 10 ways to kill your server

Scalent Systems builds software that can take 1 or 1000 machines “From Dead Bare Metal to Live, Connected Servers in 5 Minutes or Less”. But we were sitting around on April Fools’ day thinking about how many ways we’ve heard of hardware dying… and we came up with our own interpretation.

Overheard: Your life is a cartoon

Microsoft is running another viral marketing campaign — this time they’re creating a comic strip about IT pros. The strip will run for six months and they’re inviting readers to send in story ideas. That’s right — you think up the situation and they’ll create the strip for it (if they chose your idea).

The HHH Comic Series is a daily web comic that adapts tech stories from actual IT Professionals and Developers - a web comic that reflects the real lives of IT Hero’s such as you. Every business day we will release a new episode driven from suggestions from the IT community. Make sure you sign up for the RSS feed so you can have it delivered straight to your RSS enabled inbox or favorite RSS client when a new episode has been released. And remember - We want you to help drive the story!

You can submit your story ideas here. I’m going to submit one about computing in the cloud.

Overheard: Forget CPM — the new buzzword is “performance management”

Performance management is the new battleground. And we’ve been saying that for six years, at least. There’s sort of a category collapse going on where CPM and BI, reporting, and analytics are kind of starting to merge. The lines are getting very grey and I think customers are broadly viewing all this stuff now as performance management. Rob Ashe, Working Under the IBM Umbrella

So…IBM buys Cognos, Oracle buys Hyperion and SAP buys Business Objects. Hmmm.

Overheard: Why marketers love virtual trade shows

Online marketers are fans of virtual events because it costs less and often results in more targeted leads. The virtual version of trade shows don’t usually completely replace regular trade shows but are a way to cut costs or add value. Perhaps the biggest advantage of a virtual trade show is that you can track what people at your event do. Janet Meiners, Trade Shows Go Virtual

Overheard: Microsoft is hot on viral marketing

Extreme Makeover–Server Room parody. I just wish it was funnier.

Overheard: Mommy, why does Microsoft want us to buy a server?

This children’s book parody is a viral promotion for the Windows Home Server campaign. The author, Tom O’Connor, and his PhD are bogus. The small print on the title page explains that he’s made up. Whoever did write this deserves credit, IMHO. Very clever. Yes, that’s me reading the book.

The campaign is indicative of unusual creative approaches by big advertisers as they seek to break through in cluttered categories like technology. Among the most popular are so-called viral campaigns, so named because they are intended to be passed from one computer user to another with an endorsement implied by such personal sharing.

Stuart Elliot, What Next, Having the Office Christmas Party at Home?

Overheard: Biting the hand that feeds you is not good for CRM

One of the biggest challenges facing many organizations is that the Internet and, more specifically, Web 2.0 tools are helping to make customers more informed than employees. Sharon Richardson, Google Reader For CRM

Whilst customers have become more informed thanks to the Internet, too many organisations are ensuring their employees become less informed by banning access to the very tools that customers use - Facebook, Myspace, Wikipedia, Google, the Internet…