Wednesday’s Top Dreamforce 2011 Session – Hands-on: Exploring Radian6 Social Insights
Hands-on sessions always seem to add a different dynamic, and this year was no different at Dreamforce 2011.
This session on Radian6 provided an overview of the many capabilities available in the platform from a social insights perspective and was a follow-up to the ‘Getting Started With Radian6′ hands-on session I also participated in (each of which provided access to a 30-day trial ‘sandbox’ for play).
The focus here was on understanding the ‘who’ and ‘what’ behind social media conversations to better grasp strategic implications and key influences for your company. Several third party providers offer expanded insights – such as demographics, sentiment, Klout, etc. This is indeed powerful. Combining this with another session I attended, ‘How Salesforce.com Listens to the Social Web with Radian6′, you can really see the power of social monitoring technologies.
As Marc Benioff remarked in the opening keynote, we have already witnessed an Arab Spring. Don’t let a ‘Corporate Spring’ fall on your company. Listen. Engage. Analyze. See this excellent post by Joshua Minton for more details on the ‘Corporate Spring‘. Don’t be left behind!
Dreamforce 2011 – The Show Is On
Deep inside Moscone Center, Dreamforce 2011 officially kicked off today. With 5 Hour Energy handed out like candy at the door, you know it’s going to be an intense week!
There were several events this morning, including an unbelievably exciting Community Conference packed with great advice for reaching out to the vast array of resources brought together at Dreamforce all year long.
I’ll plan on posting daily highlights throughout the week. I’d also like to make a shameless plug for the two sessions I’ll be presenting in. Feel free to stop by and connect in person if you would like. Here are the descriptions. Hope to see you there!
Accurate Data: Increase Marketing Effectiveness While Lowering Marketing Cost
Thursday, September 1 1:15 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Data is the backbone of your marketing campaigns: the fresher the data, the better the campaign. Learn how Jigsaw’s unique, socially generated contact information can double your response rates and reduce the amount you spend on email, direct mail, and telemarketing. Hear from leading marketers about how they have improved segmentation and enhanced campaign ROI, all using the one-and-only data cloud!
Putting Dreamforce to Work for You
Friday, September 2 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
You convinced your management that there was a ton to learn at Dreamforce, and although you wanted to sit in the mobile lab and play with the latest cool toys, you actually sat in sessions and learned amazing new ways to transform your marketing. Now how do you take these ideas and make them a reality? In this session we’ll break into small groups, brainstorm on some key things we learned, and then spend the time helping each other develop the best ways to adopt new concepts into our day to day jobs. Up for a challenge? Then join us!
Three Tips for Getting the Most from Your Dreamforce Sessions!
Along with more than 40,000 others, I’ll soon be making the annual pilgrimage to Dreamforce (the Salesforce mega-conference) and I can’t wait! It really does live up to its namesake The Cloud Computing Industry Event of the Year.
This year’s Dreamforce theme is Welcome to the Social Enterprise.
From a Customer Intelligence perspective, the session lineup is filled with countless opportunities to consume knowledge from key thought leaders across Marketing, Sales, and IT. With this year’s social theme in mind, here are a just few I’m looking forward to the most:
- Killing It: How Inbound Marketing Can Help You Crush the Competition
- Driving Extraordinary Growth Through Sales and Marketing Performance
- Hands-on: Exploring Radian6 Social Insights
- Accelerating the Revenue Engine: Driving Revenue with a Single View of the Buyer
In fact there are so many great offerings, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Here are three tips for getting the most out of your Dreamforce experience.
- Focus on attending the sessions with the most opportunity for active engagement, particularly any hands-on sessions. Being in the room for these sessions is an experience that cannot be replicated by viewing slides or video based on the in-person interaction with the speakers and Dreamforce community.
- If you haven’t yet locked down your agenda, hurry! Many sessions are currently at capacity, though some are adding additional offerings based on waitlist requests. An additional tip – if a session you really want to attend is full, show up anyways. After admitting the registered attendees, stand-by attendees are allowed in to fill seats from no-shows.
- Don’t forget about session videos. You can always catch up sessions that ‘didn’t make the cut’ or were full once the week is over via YouTube. This is also a great way to review information from a session you attended and enables the Dreamforce experience to live on throughout the year!
If you keep these three tips in mind, you should able to consume as many Dreamforce sessions as you wish.
See you there!
PS: I’ll also be speaking in two sessions this year (titles below, more to come in a future post). These are focused on the importance of data and integration to marketing and sales execution. I hope to see many of you there!
- Accurate Data: Increase Marketing Effectiveness While Lowering Marketing Cost
- Putting Dreamforce to Work for You
One Week ‘Til Dreamforce 11
One week from today, the magic begins all over again. That’s right, it’s time for what Salesforce calls The Cloud Computing Event of The Year!
It really is amazing to see how much the event has grown over the years and how broadly it has expanded in scope beyond core CRM functionality aka the Sales Cloud. That’s a testament to the integrated partner ecosystem Salesforce has carefully crafted alongside its expansion of integrated offerings (clouds).
This year, focusing almost exclusively on a Marketing and Social track, there is a rock star lineup of industry thought leaders.
Dreamforce has essentially created a conference within Dreamforce based on attendee personas.
Customer intelligence? You bet!
The post-PC era? No!
There’s been a lot of talk recently about HP’s abandonment of the TouchPad tablet and its openly expressed desire to spin off its larger PC business signalling the beginning of the ‘post-PC’ era, especially given its leadership position in the industry.
I firmly disagree.
Tablets are cool. But they only go so far. From a content consumption perspective, the user interface is great. But what about heavy lifting applications – content creation, graphic design, hard core analytics? The list goes on and on. This is where the role of a tablet as a complementary or extension device, not a replacement, becomes clear.
Multi-tasking, security, durability, upgradabilty…the tablet clearly is not here. How many people have abandoned their PC’s *completely* in favor of a tablet?
The PC still has a place in this new world. And it’s certainly evolving to meet the challenge. But it’s definitely not dead.
Disclaimer: I work for a PC company. This expresses only my personal view, not that of my employer.
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