Archive

May 21, 2012 | Preston Johnson: Deciding What’s Most Important: Support Triaging

It’s true - being a support professional is sometimes stressful. When disaster strikes and an important system goes down, we’re the ones summoned to get it fixed quickly. Our specialty is digging feet first into complicated problems.

May 21, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Making Validaiton Rules work with Integrations

Validation rules are great for trying to keep your data clean and valid.  But what happens when bad data can flow into your system from other systems? In this blog there is a solution that works will in some situations.

May 17, 2012 | Alex Berg: Designing Solutions with Visualforce Mobile Components

I’ve started looking heavily into the Visualforce Mobile Components, a community-maintained set of Visualforce components that make it easy to develop Visualforce pages designed for tablet browsers. It’s open source and has an above average set of docs on both Github and on a Developerforce wiki. While these docs are certainly useful to devs, I was looking for an evaluative look at the solution as a whole and a judgement of its architecture.

May 15, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: Book Review – Grouped by Paul Adams

This past month I decided to pick up my reading skills and dig my nose into a good book. In this blog, I want to share what I have learned and also recognize certain points from the book in relation to social media.

May 15, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: The People in your Social Media Community

After watching the video below, I got excited about tying this theme to business and social communities today.

May 15, 2012 | Benjamin Myhre: Pinterest is for guys too

I am going to do my part to dispel the rumor that Pinterest is a women’s social application and not for men.  I have been guilty of this thought myself. I have mostly seen my gal friends as the ones that use Pinterest and I have even poked fun at the guys that I have busted pinning things to their Pinterest board.  That all changes now….. I am opening up a Pinterest account.

May 15, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Five Steps to Easier Deployments with Salesforce

There are some best practices which, if followed, will make your Salesforce deployments much easier.  Read on for ideas on how to keep your phone from ringing late at night and during the weekend during deployments.

May 14, 2012 | Lee Schwartz: The Social Network ROI Winner? Pinterest.

Pinterest has achieved a status that very few other social networks (Facebook included) has reached. It sells product.

May 13, 2012 | Sara Kalinoski: The Patents and Trademarks of Steve Jobs: Art and Technology that Changed the World

An overview of a current Smithsonian Ripley Center exhibition on the product and packaging patents from Steve Job’s impressive career.

May 13, 2012 | Rob Burke: Behind The Scenes – Timelapse Product Shoot

As part of the Doosan shoot in Tucson (yeah, it’s fun to say) we shot two product timelapse’s of Doosan’s excavator and dump truck. With perfect weather and perfect stars, the desert was a perfect place to pull it off

May 11, 2012 | Lon Keller: I Want ALL of my HDTV

When creating commercials or other content for broadcast television, production companies need to adhere to certain standards. These standards have been driven from two primary sources: the Federal Communications Commission and the owners of the broadcast outlets.

For many years, the technical process of creating commercials or other content for broadcast television was fairly straightforward. There were no widescreen plasma or LCD screens. All television sets contained a cathode ray tube, which beamed an image onto a phosphorescent screen.  The size of the image, measured in scan lines, was 720 x 486, a 4:3 aspect ratio. All television cameras and video tape recorders captured 4:3 images. Producers, photographers and editors practiced their craft inside the confines of that 4:3 image and all networks and local stations broadcast an analog standard definition signal.

May 10, 2012 | Craig Isakson: Responsive?

Here at Sundog we create a lot of responsive websites.  Essentially you create one site which scales its size and changes its layout and content based on the browser resolution.

May 10, 2012 | Greg Ewing Lee: Implications of Salesforce’s Government Cloud

A few weeks back, Salesforce announced the creation of its own “Government Cloud”, a cloud platform dedicated to the Government sector.  This platform is intended to provide a fast-track for all levels of government to reach the cloud.  Not only does this prime Salesforce to take over another market for their cloud-based services, more so, it helps the public sector to make traction toward an elusive goal of evolving the technology and services of the public sector.

May 09, 2012 | Preston Johnson: Here’s How to be a Great Support Professional

We recently hired a new support coordinator here at Sundog. It’s an exciting time for us and Chris seems like a cool guy so far. It also got me thinking about what it takes to be a great support professional. Here’s my short list of top skills that accomplish just that.

May 09, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: Listening then acting in Real Time

The importance of Social Media Listening is nothing new. However, it’s important not to forget how to listen and turn what you’re listening to into action. For the basics of social media listening, please refer to this post.  In this blog today, I want to talk about how to use that information you gain from listening.

May 08, 2012 | Sara Kalinoski: The black and white of the color trademark

Yes, even the use of color can face trademark infringement.

May 08, 2012 | Benjamin Myhre: 1 percent rule and an army of 99

Has your brand ever been discussed on an internet forum, social tool or virtual community? If it has, it is important to understand how that exposure may be impacting you. One or two comments may seem innocent enough, but those same comments may have an army of hidden watchers that could be influenced. Today, I will review the 1% rule and how it may be impacting your brand.

May 07, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Integrating Salesforce and Marketo

Integrating Salesforce and Marketo is a great way to create synergy between marketing and sales. This blog contains some integration options that are available once the connection between the two has been set.

May 03, 2012 | Sarah Deutsch: BREAKING NEWS FROM THE CDC: How to Tweet

Great Social Media advice from an unexpected source - the CDC.

May 02, 2012 | Craig Isakson: comScore Releases New Smartphone Numbers

In a recent press release, comScore has released data from their comScore MobiLens service used for reporting key trends in the U.S. Mobile phone industry.  The data is derived from an average of a three month survey which surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers.

May 02, 2012 | Lee Schwartz: Writing the Perfect Website RFP

How do you write an RFP that delivers the best responses? Here are some “do’s” and “don’ts”—and some just plain rants.

May 01, 2012 | Alex Berg: Shared Salesforce Sandbox Issues

Sharing a Salesforce org for development can be a challenge. I’ve heard about some teams successfully using version control and continuous integration in their Salesforce development, but their process may not work for every team for a variety of reasons. I’d like to point out a few issues in particular when sharing development sandboxes with other developers.

May 01, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Authentication with Salesforce

When starting a project in Salesforce one of the first discussions is usually around how to authenticate the users. There are many options and I would like to list some of them for you….

April 30, 2012 | Charles Rowland: 1366, 768 and other random numbers

As of march 2012 a new study from StatCounter taking place from March of 2009 to March of 2012 shows that 1366x768 has overtaken 1024x768 for the top screen resolution used on the internet world wide. Looking at analytics data on the Sundog Interactive site from Feb 26, 2012 to March 27, 2012, 12.07% of visitors were using 1366x768 as their screen resolution and 8.7% were using 1024x768.

April 30, 2012 | Renee Cook: Top 5 Online Video Rankings for March

comScore, a global leader in measuring the digital world, recently released the March 2012 online video metrics for the U.S. Here are the top five findings from comScore Video Metrix.

April 30, 2012 | Greg Ewing Lee: Extending Beyond Salesforce Analytics

There are few things more frustrating to organizations than the inability to effectively analyze the data that they are capturing. Salesforce provides a great deal of flexibility for capturing data and executing business processes in the cloud, but reporting/analytics seems to always come up short for many organizations’ needs.  With this understanding, what options do organizations have to leverage the power of their investment in the Force.com platform and get effective and flexible analytics?

April 30, 2012 | Ron Lee: Good news, bad news in annual banking satisfaction survey

J.D. Power and Associates just released its 7th annual U.S. Retail Banking Satisfaction Study, and the headlines show a mixed-bag of good news/bad news:  While consumers are still very dissatisfied with fees, banks generally are offsetting that by reducing the number of problems experienced and making improvements in problem resolution.

April 30, 2012 | Chuck Tomanek: New Dataloader For Salesforce.com Has Some Very Promising Features

There’s a new Dataloader application out from a company called Jitterbit that looks to be lightyears beyond the current Dataloader applications for Windows and Mac.

April 30, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: The Shift Happening on the Web

As people are spending more time on social media the behavior of our online activity is changing. Time spent in these social networks is nothing new as you can see from this 2010 Mashable article. It’s the shift we are beginning to see on the web in how we gain our information that is changing.  In December of 2011, Comscore reported that social networking ranked as the most popular content category in online engagement, accounting for 19% of all consumer time spent online.  Instead of finding a website and looking at a webpage on your own, you are more likely to find one through friends who send you a message or notification.

April 30, 2012 | Dean Froslie: Image Optimization: The Often-Overlooked SEO Tactic

Image optimization is often overlooked as part of SEO, and at least three explanations come to mind.

April 27, 2012 | Kevin Barthelme: Web-to-Print Marketing

We recently launched a new set of web-to-print tools for use by the client’s product and services dealerships. The goal was to create a new service where dealers can browse, customize, preview and download client-approved, print-ready marketing materials.

April 26, 2012 | Shawn Tennyson: Stop the Texts. Stop the Wrecks.

“Stop the Texts. Stop the Wrecks” is a campaign to educate drivers about the dangers of texting while driving. It utilizes a website, three powerful videos, outdoor and social media to reach drivers.

April 26, 2012 | Sarah Deutsch: Take Three (Apps) and Call Me in the Morning

A recent article recommends three very different healthcare apps - what do their similarities tell us?

April 24, 2012 | Benjamin Myhre: Difference between memes and going viral

In a previous post I defined what a meme is and also some examples of how memes have impacted businesses. It is very difficult to talk about memes in a business environment without talking about the concept of “going viral” or viral marketing.  Today, I am going to review some of the similarities and differences between viral marketing and memes.

April 24, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Automating the APEX Data Loader

The graphical user interface (GUI) for the APEX Data Loader is great for manual data loads.  But when you need to automate data loads some more detail needs to be worked into the process.  Read on for more ideas.

April 23, 2012 | Preston Johnson: Support Should Be Proactive, Not Reactive

I’ve been referred to as “the guy to call when things break” more than once. As a support professional, often our work is only noticed when things aren’t working as they should. That should’t be the case and here’s why.

April 22, 2012 | Rob Burke: Is 72ppi a thing of the past?

With higher resolution displays being put into devices that are viewed at arms length; standard web graphics will soon start to look less finished and more pixelated than ever. There are some options; when I met with Shannon she talked about how Sundog is already using vector graphics for the web due to their small file size and scalable nature. Video and photography is a little more complicated though.

April 20, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: Facebook Fans Are Valuable

After reading, “Who Are Your Facebook Fans? Your Best Customers.” I was able to see Forrester Research apply the number of fans from a Facebook page, determine who these people are, and what they mean for each company.

April 20, 2012 | Anthony Suda: Automatic Amazon EC2 snapshot backups

Amazon Web Services EC2 platform has a great snapshot feature that can be used as a backup for your server and files. Here’s how I’ve automated the process so there is a backup around in case something bad happens.

April 17, 2012 | Anthony Suda: Bonjour Printers Over VLANs

So there’s an inherent flaw with Apple’s Bonjour service that, among other things, allows for quick sharing and setup of shared printers over a network: it won’t talk across VLANs. So if your network has different VLAN segments, printers (and computers) in one, can’t use Bonjour to talk to computers in another.

Here’s a way I’ve found to fix this headache.

April 17, 2012 | Preston Johnson: Supporting the Cloud: 5 Tips for Success

As I outlined in previous blog post, Support Challenges in the Cloud, the move from traditional infrastructure to cloud technologies has dramatically changed how support teams operate. Now onto some actionable items. Here are 5 tips for success in the cloud.

April 17, 2012 | Benjamin Myhre: Impacting social media in the wrong way – A Story of Rampart

Social media and popular culture can be a very powerful tool, but the internet can also be a fickle creature.  If social media is not properly handled, it can harm a business or brand.  Today, I am going to talk about Woody Harrelson, the movie Rampart, and a story that might help you better engage with internet culture.

April 16, 2012 | Terry Luschen: The Importance of External IDs in Integrations

External IDs are an important way to tie Salesforce data to data in an internal system like SAP, Oracle or Siebel.  Read on to learn about external ids and how to use them with the Partner API.

April 13, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: Finding the Happy Medium

In order to grow your social media networks, there has to be an effort from the company creating conversations and the users willing to join your communities. Within each network, there is a happy medium about how often a company should post.

April 11, 2012 | Jonathan Wurtzler: Using Android ICS New Layout

Android’s latest release, ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.3), has made some major design changes to the overall layout.  This means that some existing apps may run into some interesting UI issues for those users that upgrade to it.  Let’s take a look at the new layout and identify some of the issues.

April 11, 2012 | Anthony Suda: Desk Phone Exodus

Here at Sundog we’ve seen a recent reclamation of desk space. More than 10% of our users have chosen to forward their work extensions to their mobile phones so they not only free up some desk space, but are easier to reach when they’re away from their desk.

April 11, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: At your company, who is in charge of your social media accounts?

When looking for someone to run your company’s social media accounts, you need the right person. The size of the company determines whether this should be someone’s full time or part time job. Today, I am going to help you determine what you should be looking for in a Social Media Community Manager.

April 10, 2012 | Benjamin Myhre: Five brands that have been impacted by memes

I previously defined what a meme is and today we are going to examine five companies and brands that have been impacted by memes.  Whether these companies and brands have successfully used memes to generate and help business is a different story, but that will not be looked at today.  In future posts, I will look more closely at these examples and more closely review each of these as a case study.  For now, let’s look at five brands that have been impacted by memes:

April 10, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Requirements Gathering for Integrations

When estimating integrations with Salesforce during the discovery phase of an implementation what questions should be asked? Read on for some ideas.

April 09, 2012 | Preston Johnson: 8 Lessons Facebook Can Teach Us About Release Management

Recently, Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul got an unprecedented look inside Facebook’s release management process while the company rolled out the new timeline feature for brand pages. He spent two days alongside Facebook’s Chuck Rossi, Facebook’s release engineering team lead, and learned how the site’s aggressive development changes are pushed to the 845 Million people who use the world’s second most popular website. Here are 8 lessons we can learn from Facebook about release management.

April 09, 2012 | Lee Schwartz: Keep or Drop the TLD In Your Advertising?

Is including your TLD (Top Level Domain) in your ad still important? Here are some quick questions to help you decide.

April 08, 2012 | Sara Kalinoski: Considering trademark infringement when creating a logo.

As a designer, when I approach a logo design project I think about what makes the brand unique, colors, typefaces, and scalability. While I consider the market competition, I’ve never actually thought about ensuring my logo does not infringe on a registered trademark. This blog includes an infringement “test” and other resources.

April 07, 2012 | Sara Kalinoski: TM, SM or ®? Understanding Logo trademark symbols

Welcome to my series on Legal Guidelines for Design! In an effort to understand all of the legalities designers face, I will be breaking down the guidelines, one by one. As with design, the best place to start this discovery project is with the logo! What is the difference between a trademark, service mark, and registered trademark?

April 05, 2012 | Damie Berkey: Content Marketing – Like Bell-Bottoms to Boot Cut?

The ability to adapt (often quickly) is a characteristic of many successful organizations. Along with this ability is an inherent knowledge that new technologies and methods are continually emerging from earlier approaches. What worked in the past will most likely need to evolve in order to be effective in the future.

April 04, 2012 | Rob Burke: Creative interface and user interaction is expected

Have you ever been to a website and your first thought is “this site is shady?” Have you ever downloaded an app only to open it once and never again? This is what I like to call Back Alley Design Syndrome (or BADS for short).

April 03, 2012 | Preston Johnson: Support Challenges in the Cloud

It’s understatement to say that the move from traditional infrastructure to cloud technologies has dramatically changed how support teams operate. Here’s why.

April 03, 2012 | Benjamin Myhre: What is a meme

In today’s post, I am going to define the word meme and show you why it might be important to you and perhaps your business.

April 02, 2012 | Craig Isakson: iOS Salesforce SDK Tips

Recently I have had the opportunity to start to use the Salesforce SDK for iOS.  So far this has been a great tool which takes care of a lot of the leg work in dealing with the Salesforce REST api.  Until now I have mostly concentrated my efforts in the Android arena.  When I did start to write an app in iOS I had found that there were a couple of issues that I was having troubles with.

April 02, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Using APEX to call Salesforce Web Service

There are times where one Salesforce Org needs to communicate with another Salesforce Org. Please read on for details on forwarding messages between Orgs.

March 31, 2012 | Renee Cook: Digital Outlook

The comScore 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report examines key insights from 2011 in digital advertising, social media, online video, mobile, search and e-commerce and what the trends mean to the current United States marketplace. Some key insights from the report include:

March 30, 2012 | Ron Lee: Goodbye coupons, hello hashtags

Would you Tweet to save money? American Express is betting its customers will do just that. As part of a broader Membership Effect strategy, Amex is using social media platforms to add value to its cardmembers by allowing easy redemption of merchant offers without the need for coupons or special codes.

March 30, 2012 | Lynlee Espeseth: Marketing Your Business Shouldn’t Be All Business

An interesting article recently appeared on Social Media Today that suggested newer, image heavy social sites like Pinterest are popular because people need a “vacation” from their usual social routines on Twitter and Facebook. In other words, being able to mindlessly skim through images is a nice way to take a break from your sister-in-law complaining on Facebook or businesses vying for your attention on Twitter.

March 30, 2012 | Alex Berg: Salesforce DE Org - Great Javascript Sandbox

Compared to other sites, Salesforce can feel a bit sluggish. I’ve seen some web apps, such as Gmail, Grooveshark, and the new Twitter site, that feel quite responsive, making them more fun to use and explore. I found that the enabling tool at use in these sites is Ajax and lots of Javascript to move the application logic into the web browser instead of the server. These highly responsive apps inspired me to start playing with Javascript and other HTML5 features to see what’s possible client-side to make the web site experience faster. I chose to test these Javascript ideas in my Salesforce Developer Edition org, and looking back, I’m pleasantly surprised with how good of a choice this was.

March 29, 2012 | Shannon Luney: Responsive or Mobile?

When making a responsive website isn’t currently possible, mobile websites can serve as great in-between point and provide a great start to creating a responsive website in the future.

March 29, 2012 | Dean Froslie: Does Your Site Pass the Credibility Test?

When organizations create (or redesign) their online presence, they often overlook a powerful, broader audience objective: credibility.

March 28, 2012 | Shawn Tennyson: If Video Killed the Radio Star, What Did the Smartphone Kill?

The Smartphone is rendering many of the products we use obsolete, replacing them with a simple app that is usually free.

March 27, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: Importance to Engage in Real Time

Towards the end of February, Sundog held an event at the Plains Art Museum called Social.Mobile.Cloud. Sponsored by Sanford Health, Sundog partnered with Salesforce and Google who brought representatives to speak at the afternoon gathering.

March 27, 2012 | Preston Johnson: Support Should Be a Top Budget Priority

Annual budgeting in any organization is something almost every manager loathes. Every department wants a piece of the pie. With all these new projects begging for attention, it’s easy to overlook support budgets for existing technology systems.

March 26, 2012 | Danielle Naboulsi: Live Blog: Best Company To Work For, Part 2

Sundog was just named one of Ad Age’s Best Places To Work for the second year in a row! Follow along as I live blog the day’s events.

March 26, 2012 | Brent Teiken: Getting Culture Right

Hundreds of books and thousands of articles are written about corporate culture – from how to define it, design it and improve it, to how to survive it, change it and lead it. Culture is a tricky thing, and when it starts to go bad in the eyes of the employee(s), something like this can happen.

But other companies like Google, Facebook and Zappos continually redefine the idea of office, work and career. They’re getting culture right. In fact, Zappos is so dedicated to its culture and core purpose of “Delivering Happiness” that the company has a bus tour and website to promote it.

March 23, 2012 | Greg Ewing Lee: The Clouds are Shifting: Trends Toward Increased Cloud Adoption

As the cost of cloud solutions continues to decrease, the desire to move more core business functions to cloud is increasing. However, the quest for a cloud-centric enterprise has several roadblocks, many of which continue to lower.

March 23, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: Top Social Media Videos for a Business

Over the past year I have compiled a list of Social Media videos that tie directly to the business. Some videos are new and some are old but I think watching them can help one understand how social media really ties into business. Below is a list of my favorites; some are more advanced than others. Take a look and hopefully these videos can be a resource to you and educating your team on the power of social media.

March 22, 2012 | Lynlee Espeseth: Social Media Is Happening (Whether You Like It Or Not)

The buzz about social media for business has grown to the point where it seems silly to even talk about it. It’s commonly understood that using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. can help a business grow. Despite this, there are still many businesses that don’t get it. Or (in my opinion) they get it, but it’s just too frightening for them to consider. 

March 22, 2012 | Preston Johnson: 5 Essential Website Support Questions

As a support professional, it’s easy to get caught up in the chase for a resolution. That’s our job, right? It’s especially true when it comes to solving issues on a client’s public-facing website. After all, website support requests can often be some of the highest-priority issues support professionals face. But before digging into the trenches, there are a few important questions any support professional must ask the user before delving into that broken image or endlessly buffering video.

March 22, 2012 | Chuck Tomanek: Force.com Unit Testing Improves With Spring ‘12 Release

Unit testing on the Force.com platform has always been one of its biggest challenges. Data differences between orgs as well as governor limits have made it difficult to write valid, reliable tests that work in all orgs. With the Spring ‘12 release, Salesforce is implementing some changes that aim to alleviate some of these pains.

March 21, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: What Social Media can do for a Business

After analyzing, demoing and listening to reps for multiple social listening tools, Radian6 has been our choice for social listening and engaging for the past year and a half. I have worked in the tool for multiple clients and using it more towards its full potential each day.

March 21, 2012 | Adam Konieska: 6 Tips to Make Your Web Forms Easier to Use

We’ve all been there, trying to complete a web form that was clunky and difficult to use.  Fortunately, there are some simple (yet often overlooked) steps you can take to improve the user experience on your forms.  Most of these are quick to implement and will provide incredible benefits to the end user.

March 21, 2012 | Alex Berg: Uninterrupted Workflows with Open Source Tools

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a multi-file upload tool for Visualforce pages that a member of the Force.com community had written. In a lengthy blog post, he summarized the challenges involved with designing and implementing his Javascript upload tool. I found it to be quite an interesting read, so interesting, in fact, that I promised myself to return when I had free time to clean up the code. I finally found free time last weekend, and when I finished refactored the code and reflected on the experience, I saw a huge benefit when using an open source code tool.

March 20, 2012 | Damie Berkey: Latest Findings From Pew Research Indicate News Media Continues In A State Of Revolution

How Americans get their news is an ever-changing topic.  I found out about Peyton Manning coming to Denver today through Twitter. An article on parenting was brought to my attention by a friend on Facebook. I learned of an upcoming  community event through my local television news. Some of my news is gathered via mobile platforms, some through social channels, while I continue to find additional information through traditional local television and newspapers.

March 20, 2012 | Alyssa Dahl: Facebook Timeline for Pages

After a few weeks of getting used to Timeline on our personal profiles, Facebook shortly launched Timeline for business pages. As I have anxiously awaited the transition, the switch happened over night and caught me by surprise.. I had to push back a few projects and dive into the Timeline articles and reviews. Please, if you haven’t converted your page to Timeline, do! Without staying up to date with the most recent changes as a business, it reflects the lack of social knowledge with your social strategy.

March 20, 2012 | Craig Isakson: Underdog

This past weekend I had the opportunity to attend Mobile March in the Twin Cities.  During the conference, I attended a four hour long Microsoft Windows Phone training session.  My reasoning for attending this session was to learn more about a platform I have little experience in.

March 20, 2012 | Terry Luschen: Using Excel with APEX Data Loader

The APEX Data Loader is a great tool for moving data in and out of Salesforce, but what should you do when your data needs to be cleaned before it is uploaded to Salesforce? Read-on for some ideas on how Excel can help you.

March 19, 2012 | Lee Schwartz: Let’s Get Back To Where We Once Belonged: Meeting Etiquette

Multitasking used to be a badge of honor. Now it’s a character flaw.

Are you reading this during a meeting? Then you should read on.

Are you reading this while you’re running a meeting? Then it may be too late.

March 16, 2012 | Lynlee Espeseth: How To Avoid Being A Content Snob

By now you’ve probably heard about the review written by Grand Forks, North Dakota reporter Marilyn Hagerty about the “largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating:” the Olive Garden. 

March 16, 2012 | Alex Berg: Salesforce’s Vision of HR’s Social Future with Rypple

Just prior to the Cloudforce 2012 event today in San Francisco, Salesforce unveiled more details about integration with their recent acquisition of Rypple, and how it plays a key part in their vision for the future of human resources management and for the Social Enterprise. I’d like to take some time to share this news and its place in the Social Enterprise.

March 15, 2012 | Alex Berg: Force.com vs OS - Complexity of Web App Platforms

I’ve been working with the Force.com platform for quite a while now. I’ve been working on the platform for so long that it seems I’ve forgotten about the state of app development before Force.com. However, since I’ve shifted gears and taken some responsibility for maintaining some of our Java web apps, the world of traditional web app development, and all the responsibilities and details that accompany it, have landed on my plate. Due to this change, I’ve reached a viewpoint from which I can see some of the benefits of working on a platform like Force.com.

March 15, 2012 | Lynlee Espeseth: Go Beyond the Basics When Blogging About Popular Topics

Imagine walking into a party where every single person is talking about the exact same thing in the exact same way. For a few minutes it might hold your attention, but after a while it’s bound to get boring. Do you ever feel that way when you’re reading blogs? Sometimes it seems as though everyone is talking about the same topic all the time.

March 13, 2012 | Rob Burke: HD Video - The Rise or Demise of Quality over Quantity?

In the last seven years we’ve seen the birth of a new generation of content and consumption.
HD video has fast become integrated into consumer equipment from cameras to phones. So how does this translate into the rise or demise of professionally created content?

March 13, 2012 | Damie Berkey: Content Governance – When, How & Why

Creating and maintaining good content is a continual process. Unfortunately, all too often a majority of efforts fall into the creation phase and the governance phase is overlooked. This has major implications for your website. While the creation of relevant and useful content is important, if there are no logistics or guidelines in place to govern that content, it will quickly become outdated, unorganized or inaccurate. This does not give a good impression of your company. In fact, it usually contributes to a decline in credibility for a website that you just invested a significant amount of time and money into.

March 08, 2012 | Lynlee Espeseth: Publishing Controversial Content: Proceed with Caution

It seems like you can’t turn on the TV, scan through your Twitter feed or read a newspaper without being inundated with controversial topics. From political issues to parenting methods, everything seems to be up for debate, and hundreds, if not thousands of people appear to be more than happy to chime in. 

March 07, 2012 | Damie Berkey: A Majority Of Americans Find Web Content Unreliable

I spend my days deep in content. As a content strategist, I work with many different types of content and know that it comes in many forms – it is not just the text on your website. However, to those outside of the industry, content often translates into “website content.” It is for this reason that my jaw dropped at this latest infographic.

March 01, 2012 | Lynlee Espeseth: Pinterest, Spending Power and the Importance of Marketing to Women

With the enormous growth of Pinterest over the last few months, there has been an equally enormous number of articles written about the site. Those that aren’t “how-to guides” usually fall into one of two camps: 1) Pinterest is dominated by women looking for craft projects and isn’t really the best marketing tool, or 2) Pinterest is much more than that and could serve marketers well.

What’s interesting about these opinions is that they seem to suggest that the two ideas can’t be combined. That is, a social site couldn’t have a strong female appeal and still be a valuable marketing tool (at least for anything outside of sofas and jewelry). The fact is, however, ignoring the amount of financial influence women hold is not a smart marketing tactic.

March 01, 2012 | Greg Ness: Marketing Execs Struggle To Keep Up With The Pace Of Change

Key marketing execs have had to cope with massive changes in the marketing ecosystem over the last decade or more. Most of the changes have been enabled by the Internet and related technologies. While this has provided wonderful new tools to fulfill marketing goals and objectives, keeping up with the amount of change, and the rate of change has been overwhelming for many marketers.

February 29, 2012 | Renee Cook: Facebook Announces Changes to Premium Ads

Facebook held its first Facebook Marketing Conference today. Along with the announcement of Timeline for Pages, they also introduced Reach Generator and changes to Premium Ads.

February 29, 2012 | Ron Lee: Bank defections rise as consumers say “no” to fees and poor service

2011 saw bank customers voting with their feet and deposits as they switched banks in search of lower fees and better service.  Confirming that, J.D. Powers and Associates this week released its U.S. Bank Customer Switching and Acquisition Study, and the results are not pretty for many large, regional and midsize banks.

February 29, 2012 | Shawn Tennyson: Finalists for the OBIE Awards Announced

The OBIE Awards is the ad industry’s oldest creative design award. It recognizes designs produced for outdoor advertising campaigns and is awarded by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA). Check out some of the finalists.

February 29, 2012 | Chuck Tomanek: Migrating Profiles on the Force.com Platform

When migrating changes between environments on the Force.com platform, one of the most frustrating components to move is easily the user profiles. Here are a couple of ideas to help alleviate some of the pain of migrating these critical components.

February 29, 2012 | Alex Berg: Various Force.com Development Editors

There has been a bit of news lately in the domain of Force.com development tools. There are more options for developing Force.com code than just the Eclipse-based Force.com IDE. Some newer options include the beefed up Salesforce Developer Console, the soon-to-be-released BrainEngine browser-based IDE, and a plugin for the lighter-weight Mac OS X editor, called MavensMate. If you’re interested in some of these options, read on. I’ll give an introduction to these options as well as provide some extra resources for you to find more info.

February 28, 2012 | Damie Berkey: How To Mitigate Google’s Panda Content Filter

Much has been made of the Panda search algorithm update, implemented by Google in February 2011, with several additional updates over the past year. Panda was created to devalue low quality content in search rankings. 

February 24, 2012 | Alex Berg: Incredible Statistics of Salesforce’s Growth

Let’s talk about innovation and its payoff. Salesforce was ranked the world’s most innovative company of 2011. As a Salesforce developer, it is certainly motivating to be working with the winning team. There was a time, however, when Salesforce was just an ambitious startup. In its early days, Salesforce was a simple CRM tool in the cloud - satisfying the very basic definition of Software as a Service and offering only the most basic of CRM functionality.