19th Sep 2014 | Event Bridge, Eventbrite, Salesforce
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
John Wanamaker
Imagine if you were not wasting that money. Imagine your marketing is as tight and effective as possible.
Lots of marketing is done through events, meetings, presentations and so on. Events where it would be great to know who was in attendance, whether you had ‘touched’ them before and how you converted them to buy your product (and then evangelise it).
Eventbrite is fantastic for this – if you offer your events for free, then Eventbrite takes no money… but advertises your event, promotes it, handles ticketing and attendance. It is amazing!
Eventbrite has tools for analysing individual events, but you are serious about your marketing. You want to analyse ALL your data.
Event Bridge brings all of your data from Eventbrite into Salesforce CRM (the leading CRM package in the world).
You can then analyse it all. Find out which event converted whom, which events gave biggest ‘bang for the buck’. You can tune your marketing sinews to Olympic standards.
The graphic that tells the story. Click here for more information.
4th Sep 2014 | Consultancy, Salesforce
First – respect to Salesforce for their #AppAcademy training. I attended a 2 hour #ISVpartner session this week – absolutely brilliant. Their motto: Your success is our success.
I was talking with a prospective client this week and they came to me wanting to use Salesforce to manage their contacts. They then had a spidery diagram connecting to several different other services: Dropbox, a project manager and several others.
This was a true consultancy moment – you don’t need Dropbox – your storage needs are under 10GB – use Salesforce Files. This fabulous new service works like Dropbox (so, you can sync files between your computers) but it loads them up to your Salesforce Org, where you can link them to Accounts, Contacts or any other Salesforce object.
After a client signs up, I need them to do this then this… 35 steps, so I need a project manager app. So, I pointed them in the direction of Workflows in Salesforce. Their procedures did not change much – having everything in Salesforce saved them time and money.
I also need calendars… Salesforce has calendars… if necessary, you can use the Appirio Cloud Sync (at little money) to sync between Google calendars and Salesforce calendars. It is so good that I use it myself 🙂
Finally, they needed to collect information about their clients in a form and they wanted to do it online. Well they could have used Survey Monkey and dragged the information in… but they don’t change the forms much, so they will get a new Forms object (custom), which they will be able to fill in using Salesforce1… giving them a wonderful, slick interface.
… Oh, and they wanted Salesforce to drag information out of Xero, their accounts package. There is a lovely AppExchange product called #Breadwinner for that. Whereas other products get your information from Salesforce into Xero, this flows against the tide and gets it from Xero to Salesforce. Awesome!
They thought they needed 4 cloud apps, but Salesforce covered all their needs.
8th Aug 2014 | Event Bridge, Eventbrite, Salesforce, Security and Safety
You could say that it has been a good week, but that would be a lie. It has been a fantastic week! Bear with me… I will get to that security flaw.
I have to start with Salesforce – Cloud Genius Ltd now has registered partner status. This will let us give you even better service and give you sneak peeks at new features. It will also enhance our ability to offer training environments.
As you may have read before, we have been developing an Eventbrite -> Salesforce connector. Why? when there are others? Well this one has features that are unavailable in the others (and unlikely to be, because of their nature) and ours does not have the usage/limit costs associated with the others. We have finally come up with a name for the product (Event Bridge) and are in the process of developing a website that will tell you all about its features, pricing and why you could really do with using it. We are also in the process of re-vamping the CG website. (Yes, I know it is looking ‘tired’, but if you go to an electrician’s home and turn on the light the kettle boils.)
In the process of developing Event Bridge we discovered a subtle security flaw in Eventbrite. Talk about rapid reaction – within hours they had deployed a fix. I always say that you can just a company not in the good times, but in the bad. On that score, Eventbrite has certainly come up trumps. Even better, Cloud Genius will now appear on their security Hall of Fame… so we managed to help make the internet a safer place. (I always like it when a small company in Wales helps out a multi-national.)
So, that’s it for this week. Just off to get my super-hero uniform re-tailored.
15th Apr 2014 | Defeating spam, General Information, Salesforce, Security and Safety, Web Hosting, Websites
Some of you may have heard about a massive flaw in the security of the internet.
This is really serious and everyone should be aware of the implications.
Heartbleed is the sort of flaw that gives systems admins huge nightmares.
On vulnerable websites there is a significant possibility that your passwords have been revealed to hackers making use of the bug. Worse than that, if a site has been compromised there is no evidence!
It would be good practice to change all the passwords you use on the internet. Now.
…unless you have evidence that the services you use are not part of the problem.
At Cloud Genius, we have performed a full review of the services we use.
- Services to back up websites/update plug-ins. For clients that subscribe to this services one was not vulnerable, the other service has been secured and we have taken steps necessary to prevent any problems. No action required on your part.
- Website hosting – our provider has informed us that they are vulnerable. Until they update all their systems you may wish to change the password on your account at https://webhost.cloud-genius.com. Once their patching process is complete you should change your password again on the account. We will endeavour to let you know when this is.
- Paypal – our understanding is that Paypal is not affected.
- Teamviewer – our remote control solution of choice is not affected.
- Salesforce – To the best of our knowledge is not affected.
- LastPass – our password management software of choice is not affected. (And helped a lot in fixing services that were affected.)
Here is a list of other networks that were affected – these include people like Google, Yahoo and many others.
https://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/
This is really serious. Make sure you are not caught out!
One positive – LastPass was able to scan all the services we use, list the affected services and make password changing a doodle! Highly recommended… and much more secure than any other system we have come across.
24th Mar 2014 | Charity, Eventbrite, Salesforce
Lots of firms and charities use Eventbrite for their events and Salesforce for their customer relationship management.
Makes sense – Eventbrite makes it really easy to set up, advertise and sell your events. Once people turn up, there are lots of easy, quick, simple ways to sign people in.
Salesforce is the number one CRM system for keeping track of your donors, customers or anyone else who engages with your system.
You want to know how to import your Eventbrite data into your Salesforce. Easy, there is a free tool that will import your events one by one! To update your events you have to run it against each of your events – one by one. THERE MUST BE AN EASIER WAY!
There is!
The Cloud Genius connector will scan all your Eventbrite events and use the data to update your campaign members. If the people do not exist in your database you have the choice to either have them created as Leads or Contacts (with an associated account, too).
It does all your jobs in one hit, can run regularly throughout the day and is really economical in terms of API calls.
Better than that it uses advanced data cleansing techniques to reduce the amount of dud data brought into your Salesforce environment. (You can even set a list of account names to be ignored.) It also works with the Non Profit Starter Pack installed.
For more information, just contact us.
17th Jan 2014 | Salesforce
Where did you stick all the new stuff?
One of the (many) fantastic things about Salesforce is its amazing pace of development. It is one of the reasons why consultants, admins, etc are subjected to exams three times a year. Some of the changes are new features, others are refinements of existing features. Amazingly, well due to good planning and design, Salesforce manages to introduce these features without down time and without breaking existing customisation. BUT, and its a big but, all of these features have to go into the menu. For some time, the existing menu has been creaking with new features. Many items are in the locations they are, because it made sense when they were developed. It is time for a change!
In Summer 2013 Salesforce introduced a new menu. As with all their new features, it is not forced on you, you just have to switch it on when you are ready. New Orgs have the new menu ‘on’ by default, so it is time to get used to it.
Here, for admins, is a great guide to switching on the menu and, even better, a chart showing you where to find all the old items. (We may have hated the old menu, but we knew where everything was!)
New Salesforce Menu Guide
