Salesforce.com tries to bring social networking to the workplace

Salesforce.com built a billion-dollar company by allowing companies to ditch their CRM software and bringing CRM to the cloud. Now it has its sights set on perhaps an even bigger feat: bringing social media to the enterprise.

Yesterday, the company announced that it will be launching a new service called Salesforce Chatter in 2010. Think of it as Facebook for the enterprise: a social networking service for companies with an application platform to boot.

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Posted 19 November 2009 12:20pm by Patricio Robles with 2 comments

Is NDA culture hurting developers?

Ars Technica has an interesting post revealing some sordid tales from the world of iPhone development. The tales center on iPhone app developers who claim to have developed apps that they really didn't develop. And they're getting away with it because of an NDA culture that permeates much of the development world.

NDAs, or non-disclosure agreements, of course, are those pesky little agreements that you've probably asked been asked to sign a million times if you work in the world of technology. In some markets, just about everyone asks that an NDA be signed for the smallest of things. Sometimes I half expect to be asked to sign an NDA if I ask where the bathroom is when working on-site with a client.

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Posted 06 November 2009 08:59am by Patricio Robles with 0 comments

PayPal turns to developers in its quest for world domination

When Steve Ballmer repeated the now-famous and parodied words, "Developers, developers, developers", he may have been far more sane than he looked at the time.

From Apple to Facebook, some of today's most successful and popular internet companies are taking advantage of third party developers to extend their products and make them more useful and appealing. In many cases, these companies owe some of their success to developers.

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Posted 04 November 2009 09:53am by Patricio Robles with 1 comment

The NLA explains why it is going after the news aggregators

The Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA) licenses companies to copy from national and regional newspapers and collects fees on their behalf.

I've been talking to the NLA's commercial director Andrew Hughes about the fees newspapers are asking web monitoring services such as NewsNow to pay in order to index and link to their content...

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Posted 03 November 2009 15:23pm by Graham Charlton with 10 comments

Econsultancy's Peer Summit: What we learned.

Econsultancy held its first American Peer Summit this week, and we learned a lot from the marketers who gathered in New York at the Metropolitan Pavilion.

We brought together about 100 digital marketers from such brands as Conde Nast, The Wall Street Journal, JP Morgan and Yahoo, and sat them down together to discuss their issues and upcoming plans in roundtable discussion led by experts on such topics as email marketing, social media, user experience and site optimization.

It was an off-the-record event, but there were some themes that continued to pop up. Many digital marketers at large brands are seeing a shift in acceptance of online marketing in their companies, though getting their online and offline teams to cooperate on advertising buys and large decision-making is still an uphill battle.

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Posted 15 October 2009 03:29am by Meghan Keane with 0 comments

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This article covers what I've learned from working with hundreds of customers on improving the results that they get from email marketing by optimising the subject line.

Whatever software you use for your email campaigns, these tips are worth reading...

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Posted 16 September 2009 11:01am by Marc Munier with 11 comments

Why integrate your email marketing software?

“Marc have you got a minute?” It always starts that way, I take my headphones out of my ears slowly to try and emphasise my disdain at being interrupted from whatever I am doing...

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Posted 14 September 2009 16:24pm by Marc Munier with 7 comments

The workaround: technology strikes back

People have been finding workarounds for poorly designed systems for many years.  Although both the technology and the workarounds have become more sophisticated, the problem, and its solution, remains the same.

Many years ago, before web-based interfaces, we were asked to investigate why an online ordering system wasn’t delivering the promised productivity benefits.  Our research, which involved videoing staff dealing with telephone orders and then interviewing them about the process, soon revealed the problem.

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Posted 27 August 2009 10:00am by Tom Stewart with 0 comments

Boost your quality score with these simple tips

There are many elements of an effective paid search campaign. While much of the discussion often centers on bidding, there is an equally important component: quality score.

Quality score was introduced by search engines looking to receive maximum yield from advertising. By understanding the search engines’ approach, search marketers can take steps to improve their ROI, independent of their bidding strategy.

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Posted 25 August 2009 11:01am by Ed Stevenson with 7 comments

Traffic segmentation: humble or sliced, which pie are you having?

pieOK so the idea of segmenting your customers and prospects isn't breaking news. What would make for some interesting headlines would be the percentage of businesses using segmentation effectively.

With this in mind, and with the continued increase in knowledge based content around social media and the importance to businesses being published online, I've taken a step back.

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Posted 04 August 2009 10:09am by Paul Rouke with 4 comments