Come on baby, do the Social-motion!

I know that I touched on it in my Dreamforce recap, but we feel it more and more each day – the Social Enterprise is here & it’s not going anywhere. Commercials now direct people to their Facebook page instead of their company website. Companies are now providing customer service via Twitter. Anyone who watched some of Benioff’s recent talks has seen what brands like KLM, Bank of America and Gatorade are doing. And just last week, a fellow Salesforce MVP had his own experience with the Salesforce Social Media team.

Personally, I’ve had some fantastic experiences with brands on Twitter too. When I had a question about my cable service, RCNConnects was able to answer it for me. When I tweeted that I was bummed about missing the honeymoon special at our hotel because our trip was too far from our wedding, Karisma Hotels tweeted right back & changed my reservation to include the package. And while on vacation, when I got a strange charge alert via email, I tweeted @BofA_Help & they were able to resolve the issue without me having to navigate the dreaded phone system.

And yet with all that, a recent study by Maritz and Evolve24 show that 70% of companies are ignoring complaints on Twitter. And get this – they also found that 83% of the complaints that received a reply, the individual felt more positive about the company afterward.

I think Angela Ahrendts, CEO of Burberry, said it best: “To any CEO who is skeptical at all, you HAVE to create a social enterprise today.You have to be totally connected with everyone who touches your brand. If you don’t do that, I don’t know what your business model is in 5 years.”

Howdy Partner!

For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you may have seen this post coming. For those of you who don’t, I will summarize by saying that the past few weeks, I’ve been struggling with an AppExchange partner (nope, it would be wrong to call them that) a vendor who is attempting to provide a service inside of salesforce.com. And they have gotten wrong on so many levels. So this week might be a bit off topic for me, but I want to share some tips on how to be a great AppExchange partner.

 

• Provide documentation – The first thing I asked for from this company was some documentation for the Admin install. Sure, I could wing it, but 1) I wanted to make sure that I was covering all my bases and 2) it’s one of our internal requirements for working with any AppExchange vendor. Guess what? They had nothing. Best that they could provide me with was the user guide. Total fail.
• Don’t be a tab hog – This is especially true if you aren’t an Aloha app (whose bits don’t count against your orgs limits). This install had SIX tabs, which already is far too many, but they all pointed to the same thing! Very few people besides UE orgs will be able to use your app, and even those of us on UE are going to be annoyed. (The answer I got when I questioned them about this was that Salesforce.com made them do it to pass the security review. I’m not buying it. My guess was that it was to avoid another security review and have it only be an ‘update’ to the previous version.)
• Know the difference between Leads, Accounts and Contacts – And truly, as a partner, you should know more than that. Please have someone who understand basic Salesforce.com architecture. And understand the customizable nature of the platform. One of their support people decided that he needed to see fields on my lead page layout (Why page layout  matters is beyond me anyway, shouldn’t you be asking about field level security? Oh right, you should be.). He asked me for a screenshot of the “top section on leads” – yes, because that’s exactly where I put all the fields you are looking for. No matter that we have HUNDREDS of lead fields. The ones you need will be *right* there. (Another gem – when looking at a Lead list view, they asked me to click on Company Name instead of the Lead name to see if that made a difference in whether their product worked or not.)
• Don’t ask me to change my security settings to get your product to work. – This should be another given. My internal security model shouldn’t affect whether your product works or not. Or, if it is, at least have that documented so that it doesn’t take you 4 days to figure out what the problem is.
• It’s not the “app exchanged”
• Don’t review your own product on the AppExchange. – I mean really…that’s just a given.

Now readers, please be honest – am I asking too much?