Hosted by the Cambridge, Mass.-based marketing firm HubSpot, the four-day Inbound conference drew nearly 3,000 professionals, all eager to review the latest in inbound marketing tools and techniques.

Those ninja tips weren’t about breaking concrete blocks, but rather were marketing activities infused with wisdom for inbound marketers. Author Susan Cain spoke about how corporate culture underestimates the value of introverted leaders. And Cyndi Lauper sang new material but also gave the crowd what it wanted: 1980s hits such “All Through the Night.”

HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah used the conference to pitch the company’s latest product: a new version of its marketing software. HubSpot 3 offers an “Amazon.com-like” personalization with 10 new or rebuilt tools that allow users to tailor their websites and marketing to the unique interests of customers.

In one of the many smaller group talks at the conference, Paul Roetzer, founder of the inbound marketing firm PR20/20, advised attendees to revisit their company’s mission and procedures.

Roetzer recalled how his Cleveland-based firm had 15 new campaign clients in 2009. He estimated these new clients would bring his company more than $500,000 in revenue. But within a year, 13 of those clients had left for various reasons and PR20/20 let one go.

That quick churn of clients led Roetzer to review what went wrong. He found the firm had promised too much. Roetzer recognized PR20/20 would have to choose the “right clients,” committing to “people who want to commit to you.” He recommended watching for red flags with clients — like sensing a contact is unhappy in a phone conversation.

Roetzer also advised his audience to take a sophisticated approach to growth by assessing business and marketing strengths, preparing an honest forecast for potential success, determining talent needs and team structures, and allocating resources to avoid burnout.

Jean Tang, founder of MarketSmiths, a copywriting collective for industries and individuals in New York, enjoyed Roetzer’s talk but “respectfully” disagreed with one suggestion: offering clients a questionnaire to assess her company’s performance. She prefers unscripted conversation to gauge their opinions.

The Scotland-based SwordCiboodle surrendered its unusual corporate name this week after being acquired by Kana, a Sunnyvale, Calif., provider of customer service solutions. The company will move forward with only “Kana Software” in the masthead.

The Kana brand name “is stronger and more mature in key markets,” according to Mitch Lieberman, the vice president of market strategy for SwordCiboodle.

“That said, Ciboodle will be missed by some. There is no middle ground, though, people loved it or hated it and the ‘Sword’ in front made it tougher to say,” Lieberman wrote in an email.

SwordCiboodle started in 1986 with a softer name. Whereas Sword and Scotland conjured visions of battle, initially the company was known as Graham Technology (think crackers.)

When the Sword Group bought Graham Technology in 2008, the company first switched to “Ciboodle,” recognizing the name of its flagship customer interaction platform. Later it added the weapon, with “SwordCiboodle” reflecting its corporate parentage.

Lieberman said KANA and Ciboodle are a good fit, both centering on customer service solutions for the enterprise.

“Ciboodle has built a reputation providing contact center, agent desktop, business process management and case management solutions,” Lieberman wrote. “KANA has built a reputation providing email response management, knowledge management, Web self-service and chat, and more recently social listening.”

Everyone at Ciboodle and Kana looks forward to the days ahead, Lieberman wrote, particularly one minor advantage to the deal.

“I will not miss the ‘No, Key-boodle, not See-boodle’ conversations, though.”

On Monday, as Oracle Corp. announced it will bundle its CRM, marketing and other software products into a suite that focuses on customer experience, news continued to spread like volcanic lava that the company’s CEO was about to buy an island.

Big nui (Hawaiian for news) indeed.  Larry Ellison had an eye on purchasing most of Lanai, an island near Maui. Word of the real estate deal broke June 20, and by Thursday, Ellison had closed the deal.

Ellison bought 88,000 acres of Lanai, about 98% of its 141 square miles. According to the Maui News, the former owner – Castle & Cooke Inc. — had asked for as much as $600 million for this American slice of paradise.

The deal landed Ellison control of the island’s tourism, as well as ownership of two golf courses, two resorts, commercial and residential buildings and lots of open space.

Meanwhile, on Monday night – with tech reporters already briefed days in advance on Oracle’s product announcement – company co-President Mark Hurd held court on a Gotham Hall stage in New York to unveil Oracle Customer Experience (CX).

The suite enables businesses to respond to a market centered on the customer experience, Anthony Lye, the company’s senior vice president of CRM, told SearchCRM in an interview. It includes familiar Oracle products — such as the Fusion CRM platform — and offerings the company recently captured through acquisitions, including FatWire, RightNow and Vitrue.

Although it couldn’t complete with visions of sun and surf, the product announcement wasn’t completely buried in the news cycle.

Tech publications covered the new strategy. And the unveiling spawned a fair share of tweets – including, “You say you want a (customer experience) revolution?” and “Is the whole greater than the parts yet?” –.

But a Google search during Monday always first offered scores of results about Ellison’s purchase. And most of Twitter was abuzz about Ellison’s new digs

Among those tweets, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, a Web content sharing company, wrote: “The shocking news today should be that Larry Ellison didn’t previously own an island.”

And former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich offered: “Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is buying Hawaii’s 6th-largest island. Other billionaires are buying the rest of America in the 2012 election.”

That’s right. TechTarget has released its annual survey about all things CRM to better understand its readers.

The 2012 SearchCRM.com Reader Challenges and Priorities Survey attempts to get a sense of the staffing and operational challenges facing CRM professionals this year.

Answering the questions will enable the editors of SearchCRM.com to write articles and create online resources that are targeted to your CRM needs.

For instance, the survey asks what CRM system your call center uses, how your organization will approach customer experience management and what kind of analytics technology your CRM, sales and marketing departments use.

Additionally, survey respondents will receive copies of the results and get a chance to benchmark CRM initiatives against their peers.

All survey responses will remain anonymous, and no personal information will be shared with advertisers or other third parties. TechTarget simply wants to better understand your role as a CRM professional.

So don’t hesitate. If you complete the survey and provide your email address, you’ll be entered into a drawing for a special gift.

Click here to take the CRM survey.

Ombud is still in beta form, but registered users can already submit reviews, statistics and more about anything and everything in the social CRM field.

Ombud intends to eventually cover other fields in the IT industry. But for now, it hopes its user-driven offering will become the go-to venue for advice and observations, supplanting the thoughts of paid analysts like those at Gartner.

The product review section at Ombud already features 366 products, with most of them related to social CRM, including software suites and services such as Salesforce’s Radian6. Most of the products haven’t been reviewed yet, but web pages already illustrate how users can provide details on a product’s strengths and weaknesses.

Ombud takes a poke at research companies by remarking on its site how its industry research is “transparent.” Computerworld is even wondering if Ombud could one day take down Gartner.

Users of Ombud must use real names and their accounts can be tied to their LinkedIn profiles. The site promises to vet its user community with the hope of keeping commentary pure.

More than 1,100 call center agents have gathered at the annual ACCE conference and expo to review trends, learn new tricks and share ideas on how to deal with the never-ending task of helping customers.

On Monday, the opening day, former ICMI President Brad Cleveland led a workshop overviewing basic strategies to make contact centers effective. Cleveland’s session focused on contact centers, and not call centers, for a simple reason. More than half of the 60 people at the session identified themselves as contact center employees. With social media and email, they’re not just answering telephone calls.

But no matter the means of contact, Cleveland reminded the audience they work for time-driven organizations that can’t keep customers waiting.

Customers have by now established patterns, or set times, with which they reach out to contact centers, Cleveland said. An efficient center should break down to the half hour when the most and best agents should be available.

No agent has a 100%-occupancy time, Cleveland noted. Calls come in randomly, he said, and companies need to accept that and prepare for it.

Veteran agents picking plum hours can help morale, but that doesn’t mean new hires should work peak calling hours late in the evening, Cleveland suggested. He also urged the audience to handle customer interactions as they arrive and not to delay communication.

Cleveland also warned those not yet handling social media to get ready. “Social media will begin to work (its) way into your environment. Be prepared and start following the patterns you follow now for calls,” he said.

“It’s a crazy level of dialogue. People are using all kinds of language…You’ve got to meet them with quiet and confident service. There’s no alternative.”

Janea Janke is attending the conference in only her third month managing a 100-employee contact center in South Jordan, Utah.

Her company, MonaVie, sees very little social media contacts; mostly the organization gets calls, and all at random times. She hopes to learn some call center basics, such as what to track and how to coach.

When Janke returns home, she’ll have an opportunity to use some new knowledge. As she attended the conference, MonaVie was installing a new call copy system that will record agents calls and screen interactions from start to finish.

BOSTON – Salesforce.com customers liked what they saw: a detailed view of the most recent enhancements to the company’s CRM software.

But they loved what they heard: The improvements would be free of charge.

This was old news. Salesforce.com announced in late January that it wouldn’t charge to upgrade its new analytics features – reversing course after customers complained about the company’s initial plan to sell the enhancements.

Still, hearing a Salesforce.com executive acknowledge the company’s changed stance triggered applause last week at the most recent gathering of the Salesforce.com Boston User Group.

Kevin Sciolino, a Salesforce.com senior customer success manager, told the audience of several hundred people that the company heard the complaints loud and clear.

The company planned on tacking on an additional $40 per user per month for the new functions, and had packaged the new functionality as an Analytics edition. But Sciolino said Salesforce.com saw what happened last year when Bank of America customers revolted at a proposed $5 debit-card charge, prompting the bank to not implement the fee.

“We listen,” Sciolino said before demonstrating how to use the upgrade.

Even though Salesforce.com announced its reversal earlier this year, and made the enhancements available in February, not everyone had tried them.

Ed Ruzzo, the director of shared financial services for Open Solutions – a Glastonbury, Conn., company that develops software for banks — said he didn’t realize how simple the new options were to use. He also appreciated that they were free.

The changes apply to Salesforce.com’s CRM software packages Enterprise (which costs $125 per user per month) and Unlimited ($250 per user per month).

The new features include:

· Bucketing: This allows users to group data and place the information in categories.

· Cross-filtering: This filters related objects. For example, in a report on accounts, it shows all contacts in open accounts. The update allows three cross filters per report and 5 sub-filters per primary filter.

· Joined reports: Users can merge reports to show multiple children of the same parent. For instance, a report on a product can now be joined with one showing team members working on the product. As many as 5 reports can be merged. The drawback to this function, Sciolino said, is charts can’t be merged into other reports.

The half-day-long user conference also featured a talk by Jonathan Jenkins, the senior Salesforce.com administrator for the consumer deal Website Groupon.

Jenkins touted Groupon’s implementation of the AppExtremes Conga suite and the EchoSign program, both for Salesforce.

Conga has simplified data for Groupon, and EchoSign has made ordinary sales contracts “living, breathing” documents, Jenkins said. The programs have allowed salespeople to concentrate on sales and not worry about programs, he said.

For a brief moment Friday, around 12:30 p.m. EST, “the death of the call center” ranked alongside Justin Bieber’s Danish fan base and National Cleavage Day in the Twitterverse.

Electronic chatter about the demise of the decades-old call center industry took hold thanks to a Mashable column written by Zor Gorelov that predicted mobile phones will make the call center all but irrelevant.

Gorelov is CEO and a co-founder of SpeechCycle, a provider of self-service solutions for customers. So it goes without saying he benefits from a diminished call-center industry much as Ma Bell cheered the end of the telegraph.

But Gorelov’s column echoes an ongoing conversation in the industry, one that examines how mobile and social CRM have become crucial forms of customer engagement – so much so that call centers are now being called contact centers.

Experts – including those at the recent Gartner Customer 360 Summit earlier this month – predict that companies that fail to harness customer interactions on the Internet and through mobile apps will lose ground.

Consumers like to do business online, preferring to deal with a quiet Website instead of a talking call center agent, the experts say. And people increasingly like to tweet or post on Facebook a question or social commentary about a company’s offerings and service, more than they do calling the company itself to share praise or complain, experts say.

In his column, Gorelov remarks that with consumers always on the go, mobile CRM functions will define a company’s fate, possibly rendering the call center to secondary status.

Then again, similar sentiments were voiced when FAQs, email, and chat came about. Yet companies are still spending to staff contact centers and train the employees who work there. In fact, in some cases the addition of technology only served to make the cases agents did handle more complicated, demanding stronger skills – and more pay.

Is the call center on its way to a death bed, or will it still have relevance in the future?

But it’s going to have to wait a couple of releases before it shows up in the business application giant’s CRM product.

While Microsoft released Activity Feeds, a Facebook-like social networking program, with Dynamics CRM last year, but that is used primarily for internal collaboration. Meanwhile, the forthcoming release, which is scheduled for availability in the second quarter, focuses on multi-device and multi-browser support.

The fall release, however, will feature integration into public-facing social networks like Facebook and Twitter for customer service processes as well as LinkedIn and InsideView integrations into sales, CRM executives said.

While there were few details on the Twitter and Facebook integration with customer service — and those are areas Salesforce.com, SAP and RightNow already provide — executives were happy to show off the LinkedIn and InsideView features, something we haven’t seen much of from other enterprise CRM vendors.

InsideView feeds social media information, news and other data about leads and opportunities into the CRM system and is available as an add-on by most major CRM providers. However, with the release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM in the fall, it will come free and integrated out of the box.

The LinkedIn integration essentially serves up LinkedIn Premium from within the CRM application. Sales reps will be able to click on a lead or opportunity and, through the LinkedIn network and the TeamLink feature, determine if someone else in the organization knows that person to help with an introduction. LinkedIn could also potentially be used to hunt for prospects, without leaving Dynamics CRM.

“This is basically taking premium LinkedIn and wiring it directly into CRM,” Craig Dewar, director of Microsoft Dynamics CRM said. “[Sales reps are] probably doing it in LinkedIn premium today but they’re not tracking all that information in CRM.”

Microsoft Windows 8 Samsung tablet wins out over iPad?

Microsoft was also eager to show off a customized CRM application for Windows 8 on the Samsung tablet at the event.

New Belgium Brewery's Microsoft CRM Beer Ranger app

The New Belgium Brewery, makers of Fat Tire Ale, among other brews, recently began piloting a program with its “Beer Rangers.” The Beer Rangers act not only as salespeople, calling on bars, restaurants and liquor stores in their territory, but also act as quality control, testing taps, lines and generally making sure the beer is prepared and served correctly. They need to sample it to ensure it tastes the same in all locations.

If that job wasn’t hard enough already, now they have shiny new tablets to access the CRM system. Designed in conjunction with a pilot of 10 Beer Rangers and Sonoma Partners, a Microsoft partner, the application is stripped down to show only what the employees need. That includes custom images for the type of business that they call on (bottles for liquor stores, glasses for bars and restaurants), pictures of key decision makers at client locations and a fairly standard Google Maps mashup directing them to nearby clients when they’re out on the road.

Additionally, the app lets them access quality assurance documentation and the Samsung tablet lets them take and share pictures of the places they visit. Rangers capture things like creative marketing displays within the CRM application or post pictures from events to the brewery’s Facebook page. The mapping, GPS and camera capabilities of smartphones and tablets is something sales organizations are beginning to take advantage of.

Perhaps the biggest draw for Microsoft: The Beer Rangers chose to build out its application on the Windows 8 tablet instead of Apple’s iOS and iPad.

Oklahoma City Thunder fans apparently love connecting with their team, win or lose.

The NBA franchise on Wednesday won a CRM Experience Excellence Award for winning with their fans. The team picked up the prize at the Gartner Customer 360 Summit conference held outside Orlando.

The Thunder was one of several big names to score an award at the event. The honors are presented annually by Gartner and 1to 1 Media.

While NBA All-Stars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook set the tone on the court, Thunder management “built an enterprise-wide customer-focused organization from the ground up” to win the gold Customer Experience Excellence Award, according to judges. Match.Com was the silver award winner in this category.

The gold Customer Service Optimization Award went to Symantec, which reengineered its service portals, integrated multiple channels and simplified support processes, “allowing the high-tech company to improve its customer experience,” judges said.

Corel, a software company, won the silver award in this category.

GameStop won the gold Integrated Marketing Performance Award. The national retailer of console and computer games won because its PowerUp Rewards program produced customer loyalty and has become one of the company’s primary business drivers, judges said.

Health care provider Highmark won the silver award in this category.

Harry Rosen Inc., a Canadian men’s wear retailer, won the gold Sales Effectiveness Award by giving personalized service to customers in the store and to those outside it, via communications for new items and private events, judges said.

The computer protection company McAfee won the silver award in this category.

The gold Social Engagement Award went to Husqvarna Professional Products, an outdoor power product manufacturer. The company’s AnswerArmy program promotes community and self-service, enabling customers to find the “reliable help they need,” judges said.

Random House Children’s Books won the silver award in this category.

And the Las Vegas Valley Water District won the gold Customer Analytics Award. The water district “used customer analytics to gain an understanding of why contact center call volumes were spiking and proactively resolved those issues—helping struggling customers and cutting its own costs in the process,” judges said.

FedEx won the silver award in this category.