Posts tagged Planning
ReadyTalk Adds Conference Planning, Meetings to Salesforce
Aug 30th
If you’ve seen the ReadyTalk conferencing platform at work, you know it has one key feature that distinguishes it quite well over certain conferencing competitors: It can run entirely in Flash. That means it’s not bound to Java, and up to now, it’s meant that ReadyTalk runs well with minority browsers such as Apple Safari for Windows, and Opera.
What it means today, though, is something quite different and a sign of the new times we live in: A new version of ReadyTalk for Salesforce, released this morning at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, embeds both conference ability and meeting coordination not into a Web browser, but instead into the fast-growing, cloud-based CRM platform.
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The Salesforce app is the first to use the ReadyTalk API, released last month, to come directly from ReadyTalk itself. The platform was designed to give developers direct access to the stages and steps involved in crafting a conferencing workflow, including generating the invitations, accepting registrations, automating reminders to participants, and distributing post-event surveys. All of these stages have been implemented in the Salesforce rendition, so that users can conduct conferencing workflows with Salesforce contacts.
Anita Wehnert, who directs product marketing for ReadyTalk, gave RWW a complete demonstration. “The whole goal with this application,” she tells us, “is to make things easier for people doing scheduling of meetings or webinars or online training sessions or sales demos. We automate getting that data into Salesforce versus having it locked into a conferencing system.”
The initial screen, shown here, reveals a very Salesforce-friendly environment with a ReadyTalk tab added to the usual mix of Chatter, Leads, Contacts, and Campaigns. Here, a user can see the ongoing status of meetings already scheduled, by both the user and others throughout the organization.
The Conference Center screen (familiar to anyone who’s used the standard ReadyTalk UI) is where a new meeting is scheduled. It’s actually a view of the continually updated Conference Center Web app, within what Web app developers call an IFRAME element. All the other elements of this app, Wehnert tells us, were implemented in Force.com. You may add any number or sequence of fields to the registration form. After that’s set up, you then import the meeting into Salesforce using the controls in the Meetings tab.
Once imported, all the information may be shared explicitly with others within the organization – for instance, they may see whom you’ve invited and whether they’ve responded, if you so desire. It’s important to note here that the meeting creation data is registered and entered into ReadyTalk’s database first, and then the Salesforce app uses the ReadyTalk API to import the data and populate the Salesforce database.
“The Salesforce application is going to sync with our database once per hour,” notes Wehnert, “or every time I click on that Sync with ReadyTalk button.” Individuals are invited to a meeting from within ReadyTalk, and they can be sourced from the Salesforce database. When that happens, those invitees are then synced with ReadyTalk, again by way of the API. Invitees who happen to be using Salesforce will see a form like the figure below.
The various activities triggered by the application are tracked through Salesforce Chatter, its built-in messaging service. Any Salesforce user will be familiar with the output, which looks a bit like one’s Twitter page:
Licensing this software will be a fully automatic deal. “We offer the ReadyTalk for Salesforce AppExchange application as a value-add to our customers,” remarks Wehnert, “so any of our customers are free to use it. There’s no charge for downloading the application and installing it from AppExchange, and there’s no additional fee for the software. ReadyTalk offers its conferencing service in tiers, with the fee per minute starting at 20¢, and an option to pay a flat fee of $49 per month for up to 25 participants, or $99 per month for up to 3,000.
“Salesforce has a well-documented API; we worked with a third party to develop the integration,” Wehnert tells RWW. “We’ve been working over the last two years to make sure we got it right, but we think it’s great that Salesforce can help companies like ReadyTalk to build AppExchange applications.”
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How to Think Like an Art Thief When Planning Your Next Social Media Campaign
Aug 17th
There are lots of suggestions on improving your social media campaigns out on the Interwebs, but this post from Jesse Stanchak caught my attention. He describes how to plan a campaign like an art thief.. Now Stanchak isn’t advocating actual larceny here, but his suggestions are good ones and worth repeating.
He says, “a lot of the potential of social media is tied up in being willing to think big and then plan small, just like an art thief.”
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Here are his tips, and no, they don’t include avoiding the law:
- Dream big or don’t bother. Nobody ever steals paintings of dogs playing poker, or the velvet Elvis genre. Unless you’re willing to actually put in the work to create something of value for your audience, they’re just going to ignore you.
- Know what people like. Art thieves don’t just steal works by artists they personally appreciate; they target artists whose work will sell. Don’t know your audience? Then step back and do some research and get a better understanding. When was the last time you looked at your server and chat logs, for example?
- Remember that simple plans are best. Look at your social media presence. Is it more complicated than it needs to be? How many moving parts does it have, and what can be eliminated?
- Sweat the details. Don’t mistake simple for easy. The little things don’t seem very sexy, but when a social media campaign goes off the rails, it’s usually because someone got careless and sent a tweet from the wrong account, or something just as trivial. Find someone who is Type A enough to care about the details.
- Recognize you can’t control everything. There is no such thing as a perfect plan. Putting a plan in motion means involving other people and these other people can be unpredictable. Keep this in mind and make plans for dealing with the unexpected.
- Think about the day after. Law enforcement officials say that most art thieves get caught not while stealing their prizes, but when trying to sell them later. Similarly, too many social media campaigns focus on attracting a ton of fans and followers without any consideration being given to what the brand will do with these relationships once they’re formed. Those of you who have quickly gained followers know that you can quickly lose them too.
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Apple Opens iCloud to Developers, May Be Planning Google Docs/Office 365 Competitor
Aug 1st
Apple today opened iCloud.com beta to members of the iOS and Mac developer programs. 9to5Mac was the first to report the opening, and also noticed that Apple may be including a Google Docs/Microsoft Office 365 style Web-based document editing service. The page contains a teaser for iCloud iWork, which says “iCloud stores your documents and keeps them up to date on your devices and the web. To get started, launch Pages on your iOS device and turn on iCloud.”
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Here’s the teaser:
Besides the promise of iWork in the cloud, iCloud is already sporting hosted, iOS-like calendar and contacts apps.
Developers who plan to work with the iCloud Storage APIs can sign up for a developer program here.
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Is Google Planning an E-Book Rental Service?
May 25th
There are some conflicting stories coming out the BookExpo America today about Google’s plans for Google Books: one story speculating that Google may be planning an e-book rental service and another speculating that Google may be closing its e-bookstore.
The shuttering of the e-bookstore was something that Melville House Publishing wrote about today, contending that publishers are finding it difficult to get started in the bookstore and that Google has pulled its developers from the project. When ReadWriteWeb asked Google to comment, the company responded, “We refuse to comment on rumor and speculation,” pointing to a blog post from Monday touting some of the successes from the first 6 months of the Google Books program: three million free Google eBooks and 250 independent booksellers selling them, for example.
But more interesting – although difficult to say if more plausible – is the possibility of an e-book rental service.
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Talk about this came from a panel at BEA called “Three R’s of Google eBooks: Reading, Regions and Retailing.” paidContent reports that there may be a fourth R to add to that list: Rentals.
Speaking on the panel, Google Books Director of Product Management Scott Dougall wouldn’t confirm that the company would unveil some sort of rental program, “but his tone suggested it’s on the way: ‘We haven’t announced anything like that.’ [pause] ‘Yet.’” And when ReadWriteWeb reached out to Google for a comment about this rumor, the response was quite different than the one above: “We haven’t announced any plans.”
Could Rentals Be a Better Way to Complete with Amazon?
As the paidContent story points out, Amazon currently controls about 60% of the e-book market and Barnes & Noble has between 20 to 25%. Apple’s iBookstore has about 10%, and Kobo has less than 10%. “That leaves very little room for Google.”
But stepping into the e-book rental business might be a new avenue for Google to make inroads into the e-book market. Although consumers can loan (some of) their Kindle and Nook e-books to each other, that’s a very different thing than a Netflix-like or a library-like rental system.
Last month, Amazon announced that it would be launching a “Lending Library later this year, giving Kindle owners the ability to check out e-books from their local library.
Could Google get into the e-book rental game? What sorts of deals with publishers would this require? And would users choose to go to Google for this service, rather than some of the other e-book publishers and providers out there?
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Wireframe planning for SEO success – Brafton (blog)
May 24th
 Brafton (blog) |
Wireframe planning for SEO success
Brafton (blog) As product research becomes almost synonymous with typing a query, SEO is increasingly a focus for businesses. In fact, as Brafton has reported, 86 percent of marketers are investing in SEO this … SEO Software by Link-Assistant.Com Creates and Manages Google-Friendly Sitemaps |
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Cheezburger CEO Planning WordPress-Style News 2.0 Software
May 23rd
Once you’ve built an empire of funny cat pictures and other user-generated comedy ephemera, what do you do next? Ben Huh, CEO of the sprawling Cheezburger network of comedy websites, has begun discussing a side-project he’s working on called The Moby Dick Project. The Project’s aim is to rebuild online media in a format that’s suited for a changed media world.
“Why are we still consuming news like it’s 1899?” Huh asks in a blog post this morning. “I want to rethink how we read breaking news,” he told me by phone today. He’s talking with a small group of well-known media innovators and sent us a first wireframe he’s playing with. He’s got some very interesting ideas.
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Huh cites problems like seeing the same information in story after story, a news experience poorly suited to make use of the newly available media diversity and a failure by the news industry to make the best use of its editorial talent because of the structure of the news consumption experience.
As the leader of a network of sites that serve up nearly 400 million pageviews each month, Huh’s got a uniquely well-informed perspective on the changing world of media consumption. The thought of him building a content management system that’s like one part Huffington Post, one part I Can Haz Cheezburger and one part WordPress is a pretty awesome thing to imagine.
The ideal system would help media outlets present news to readers that is genuinely new to them, from diverse perspectives, with time, veracity and a living editorial process all emphasizing maximum value from the reader’s time. I do wonder if that’s really what people want, but Ceiling Cat may know best, after all.
“I’m trying to blow away our common conceptions about what the news experience is,” Huh says. The initial conception seems like an open source curation/aggregation Content Management System, but Huh says that fails to capture many of the subtle features he thinks such a service would need. You can see in the wireframe below that he’s thinking about far more than just aggregation.
Why the name? “Project Moby Dick was originally a US program designed to gather news and intelligence on the Soviet Union using high-altitude photography,” writes Huh. “I think it’s pretty fitting.”
Below: one of Huh’s first wireframes, outlining imagined features like “I’ve seen this already” content truncation buttons, a left-to-right array of information from different sources on a news story, a historical view of coverage at times of peak traffic and user voting over the verification status of details to a story. Huh emphasizes that he doesn’t want this initial vision to limit the directions the project can go. Click to view full-size.
Huh emphasizes that he doesn’t know the solution to these problems; he wants to convene a conversation to discuss a wide array of ideas. Some of the people he’s put his head together with so far include people like Stanford educator Elizabeth Stark, Dan Sinker (author of @MayorEmanuel), John Bracken of the Knight Foundation, the prolific Cory Bergman of MSNBC’s Breakingnews.com and other projects and the chronically cool engineer/superhero Harper Reed.
Huh would like you to participate in the conversation, too. Especially if you’re a journalist or UX person. He’s listed his email adress on his blog and The Moby Dick Project has a Twitter account for updates. Huh is working on the project as a hobby, separate from his day job wrangling LOLCats.
“We’re still in the identifying problems stage,” Huh says. “It might be a little ambitious to solve all those problems in one software project but that’s what people get excited about. We’ll get started by poking a few holes in news aggregation and editing and see what happens.”
“Ideally i would like something built [out of all these discussions],” Huh said. Would that software be deployed like WordPress? “We admire Automatic and WordPress a lot,” he said. “That would be an amazing model to follow.”
As the leader of a network of sites that serve up nearly 400 million pageviews each month, Huh’s got a uniquely well-informed perspective on the changing world of media consumption. The thought of him building a content management system that’s like one part Huffington Post, one part I Can Haz Cheezburger and one part WordPress is a pretty awesome thing to imagine.
Photo: Ben Huh at SXSW 2009. Photo generously published under a Creative Commons license by Robert Scoble.
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Google Maps Vs. Bing Maps: Summer Vacation Planning Showdown
May 20th
Wouldn’t it be great if there was one mapping service that offers everything you need to plan a trip to somewhere you’ve never been? Sure, map sites are generally pretty similar. You can see maps, find business listings, get driving directions, see images and stuff like that. But…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Intimidated By Travel Planning? Check Out Plnnr
Apr 14th
When it comes to traveling, I’m a terrible planner. Figuring out the logistics of going from one place to another leaves me flustered and frustrated to the point that I avoid planning at all costs. For my next trip, however, I’m going to give Plnnr a try.
Plnnr asks you for a couple simple preferences and a location and puts together a full itinerary for a trip to any of 18 cities around the world.
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To get started with Plnnr, you can login with your Facebook account, choose a destination and dates, and then the mood for your trip. First, you select a theme, outdoors, culture, “with kids” or a best-of selection of activities. After that, you set the “Intensity” level and the “Luxury” level and you’re all set – Plnnr lays out your entire itinerary.
I gave Plnnr a quick test run for San Francisco – a city I recently moved to and still feel a bit like a tourist in – and it put together a great looking itinerary…that I may just follow this weekend!
As you can see, the entire day is plotted both as a schedule and as a Google Maps mashup, taking into account travel time, whether walking or taking a cab, and time at the attraction. Plnnr creates a day-by-day agenda for your trip but, if the itinerary generated doesn’t suit you, you can change, add and subtract attractions to customize your trip.
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