Seriously though, I helped put the presentation together, it went very well, generated a ton of interest for our friends at Genius.

So my two favorite sessions at Dreamforce focused on Salesforce Ideas and Facebook.

Ideas and Force.com Sites

The Ideas session was led by the owners of the Ideas projects at Dell (Vida Killian) and Starbucks (Matthew Guiste). Both Dell and Starbucks use force.com sites to expose the Ideas API. They each gave a run down of how they use Ideas to deliver the features/products their customers want and how they moderate their Ideas sites. Here’s an overview of what we learned from them

• Be prepared for an onslaught of Ideas when you first roll it out. Have plenty of moderators ready to resond to Ideas and put out fires when necessary.
• Be prepared for negative feedback through Ideas. Its going to happen. Not everyone loves everything about your products to death and wants to snuggle up with them every night. Take the negative feedback, respond to it in a constructive way, and turn it into a conversation about how you can make your customers happier.
• Expect a huge drop-off in activity on your Ideas site after the initial wave. Just keep responding to the ideas that do come in and folks will come back.
• Keep a blog on the site that talks about what ideas are being implemented and give Kudos to the people who submitted them.
• Encourage social networking with your ideas. When you integrate Ideas with Facebook, whole communities read the news that the people they know are submitting and voting on Ideas.

And speaking of Facebook, that provides a nice seguay to the next session.

Kingsley Joseph and Clara Shih of Salesforce talk about Social Media Marketing with Twitter, Facebook, and Blogs.

Kingsley’s role at Salesforce is to try to bring their marketing into the social realm. These guys covered so much ground, you really just need to watch the session to catch everything. Here’s an overview though

• Keep up with the metrics related to social marketing and your brand. It can be difficult to do, but its important to try to measure the effects and stay on top of trends.
• Use social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and blogs to get your name out in the social networks.
• Try Facebook ads to get your ads infront of targeted audiences.
• Use Salesfore business applications on Facebook.
• Distribute info about your product/brand virally.

For now though, a recap.

First TImers and Expo Reception

Sunday evening they held a short session on how to get the most out of Dreamforce. This was basically an overview of the guides and maps, some tips for getting the most out of the sessions, and an intro to some key players in organizing the event. It was a nice way to start the week.

Then we were off to the expo reception. I stopped by to chat with our friends from Genius, Jigsaw, and Instant Service and then started winding up and down the aisles to get a feel for who was there, what was new, and who would I need to be sure to spend some time with before the week was out.

Keynote: 1

The first keynote was by far the best. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, led the keynote which included the announcement of force.com sites and a reveal of Neil Young’s LincVolt project.

Off to the Sessions

After the keynote it was off to the sessions. I attended a session on AdWords that unfortunately didn’t teach me anything I didn’t already know. It also made me want to stand up and walk out of the room when the presentor claimed that organic SEO is a waste of time and resources.

We had some lunch with our Sr VP of Sales, Peter Grace, and helped him prepare for his own session based on our email campaign and reporting strategy. We were shocked to have a packed house of over 150 attendees, and very pleased with Peter’s presentation. We gave huge props to our buddies at Genius including a step-by-step demo of how their product works and then focused on how reporting and tracking throughout the sales process can help identify weaknesses and ways to help reps improve their close rate.

Foo Fighters and More Networking

After the sessions came the Dreamforce Gala featuring the Foo Fighters. Now this is not a concert I would buy a ticket for, I’m just not a huge fan, but the do put on an amazing show. Of coarse, loads of free liquor will make anyone seem incredibly entertaining…

Keynote 2

The second keynote featured some pretty cool stuff from Dell and some stuff that just confused us all. The whole theme of Dreamforce was cloud computing…and they were featuring some of their servers…so that was a head scratcher for us.

Sessions: Day 2

Lets just say I still didn’t see anything that totally blew me away.

Sessions: Day 3

There was no keynote on day 3, we just dove straight into the session. This was the day that rocked my world. I’m going to go into great detail here, I want to do that in individual blog posts, but what I saw was:

• All about Facebook: Ads, Ideas, Apps, anything from salesforce you want to expose to the masses
• Ideas: Dell and Starbucks featured their Ideas sites and explained how they use them, moderate them, and what makes their customers love them.
• Campaign Management through Salesforce: How Salesforce uses Salesforce to manage campaigns and track results.

Keep an eye out in the coming days for more info about these sessions.

All in all, Dreamforce was a great experience. I found out that we are doing something unique and innovative and that my skills are more marketable that I thought. It reassured me that I am doing my job of keeping up to date with my skillset and strategies. Even in an industry that doesn’t always support or encourage out-of-the-box strategies, we’re pushing the limits and so far its working for us.