Salesforce Ideas
The New Visualforce Base Theme is the Real Deal
The new Visualforce Theme is now available in limited release. For those who have been tracking Ideas closely, this is the missing piece which makes the "My Starbucks Idea" or "Dell IdeaStorm" experience available to virtually anybody. The Visualforce Theme is a set of pages which are installed as an AppExchange package. I gave it a try the other day, and while I'm not a developer, I was amazed how quickly I had a professional looking site up and running. To see the Visualforce Base Theme in action check out the new lookatideas.com site or flip through the presentation below.
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The One Year Aniversary of My Starbucks Idea
Dell Explains How They Gather Ideas from their Employees
Sign Up for the Ideas Free Trial
If you want to give the Ideas Product a try, the best place to start is to Sign up for the Ideas Free Trial. In less than a minute you can sign-up for your fully configured account, complete with demo data, Ideas in Action, and the Ideas Dashboards.
If you are going to start small, don't start weak...
Kingsley used this line in a Forrester Webinar today titled "Creating Successful Customer Communities," and I thought it mades a lot of sense.
When talking to people about online community they often ask, "Is there a way to start small and grow it over time?"
The tone of your community is set very early, and as they say you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. If it feels vibrant and full of activity, then your visitors might be inclined to post a comment or bookmark it. So what makes a community vibrant?
- No matter what the size, make sure you seed it with 10 ideas to kick things off.
- A good looking UI goes a long way towards helping people buying into the vision.
- Typically the bigger the audience the better. If you invited 1,000 people to your community might get 40 ideas a month. A community which is generating 2 new ideas a day is more interesting than one that generates 1 a month.
- As much as possible concentrate your community. Salesforce offers multi-site administration but it is often better to create a new category vs. creating a new community.
- If at all possible go external. You typically have a better audience when you open it up to customers and partners. You can also open up a line of communication for a disenfranchised group who can't wait to be heard.
- Public sites are the way to go if you can. It's much easier to drive awareness and people are more likely to link you to. You also get picked up in search creating inbound referrals.
- The more images you can use on your site the better.
- Join the conversation. Use the moderator icons and let people know you're there. Commend them on their good ideas and let you know you appreciate the feedback. You can also ask question in the comment stream and let them know when something's being delivered.
- Create Dashboards to measure success. You're going to want to see the # of register users, logins, posts, votes, comments, and ideas by status to throw out a couple metric you might want to track.
I'm sure there are a bunch of other great best practices for creating a vibrant community. If you have one, post it as a comment below.
Change.gov: Citizen's Briefing Book
Today on the Change.gov Blog the transition team announced the "Citizen's Briefing Book" as a way to engage citizens in the political process.
The Citizen’s Briefing Book feature includes robust tools that let you explore a wide variety of submissions intuitively. By rating and commenting on the ideas on the page, your feedback will shape the final content of the Briefing Book. It’s a democratic way to highlight the issues that are the most important to this community and relay their importance directly to the White House.
- Salesforce CRM Ideas Chosen to Collect Ideas from American Citizens on Change.gov - Press Release
- Salesforce.com Powers Obama's Change.gov Citizens Briefing Book - ZD Net
- Brief Obama with Salesforce.com's Idea Generator - TechCrunch
- Obama Crowdsources Daily Ideas with Citizens Briefing Book - Web Strategy by Jeremiah
Harness the Power of Online Communities with Salesforce CRM Ideas
Description: Online communities shape brand perceptions and let you form deeper connections with customers. They can also be instrumental in increasing organic Web traffic, generating leads, and uncovering new sales opportunities. Hear how other customers are leveraging this exciting new app as a central part of their social media marketing strategy.
Speakers: Vida Killian (Dell), Matthew Guiste (Starbucks)
Implementing a Closed Loop Process for Innovation
Description: Many companies have a scalable process for generating leads and managing opportunities, but how do you track your innovation pipeline? See how Salesforce Ideas and the new Ideas in Action applications are being used by leading high-tech companies to harness innovation from the community and track the top ideas to fruition.
Speakers: Vida Killian (Dell), Navin Ganeshan (Network Solutions)
LookAtIdeas.com Public Demo Site
While the Dell and Starbucks sites are two great ways of experiencing the Ideas application, we have also set up a new demo site called LookAtIdeas.com.
It was built on the customer portal with a very modest amount of technical help. As a product manager I wanted to prove that a mere mortal could setup an ideas community. Based upon this experience I tried to create a step-by-step guide for setting up public sites.
The LookAtIdeas site also highlights what an internal or intranet community might look like. We have communities for Cost Cutting Ideas, Sales Feedback and Discussions, Employee Services, It Departments, and so on. You can browse the site to see what types of communities your company might implement and grab some sample ideas to get started.
This site is a demo site, but I encourage people to sign-up for a free account and help me make the site feel alive with activity. Feel free to post, vote, or leave comments. This is a great resource for sharing best practices with other members of the community.
Harness Customers and Employees for Innovation with Salesforce Ideas
Session Description: Invigorate innovation by harnessing the ideas and insights of your customers, employees and other communities that are consuming or contributing to your products & services. Join this panel discussion with Executives from Dell and Starbucks to hear how they are using Salesforce Ideas to harness the voice of the customer and tap into the imagination of their expansive global communities. Learn firsthand from their experiences and find out what it takes to create a community of your own.
Speakers: Jamie Grenney (Salesforce), Bob Pearson (Dell)
Dell IdeaStorm in the News
- Michael Dell Friends His Customers - Fortune Magazine
- Dell IdeaStorm - The Winner of Collaboration & Co-Creation Division - Society for New Communication
- The Idea Exchange -The Gaurdian
Public Sites for Ideas: Limited Release Is Now Open!
The Limited Release for Ideas Public Sites is now open for all companies who are interested in taking part. Contact your account executive if you are interested in participating.
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