Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff is a great visionary with a big appetite for change. From packaged software to the cloud, from CRM to platform-as-a-service, he's painted a color by number picture for businesses to emulate. But does his latest work, “the social enterprise" come with an easy enough guide for small businesses to paint it? The Paint-by-Numbers Social Enterprise Be...
Category: social business
Reflections on Dreamforce 2011: Now the Cloud Can Ride the Waves
This year, Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event--with a record-setting 45,000 attendees--got me thinking about the early days before the cloud was the cloud, how far its come, and how perfectly poised it is to ride the waves now driving technology adoption--mobile and social solutions. Traveling in the Way Back Machine ...
Social Media: How Does Your Small Business Stack Up?
Social media offers small businesses an inexpensive, relatively friction-free way to accomplish different business functions, from generating new leads to getting input for new product development. Consequently, it's not surprising that small businesses are rapidly moving to take advantage of it. How far along the social media curve is your business compared to your peers? We’ve picked some ke...
The New Dell and What it Means for SMBs: Takeaways from Dell’s 2011 Solutions for a Virtual Era Event
Twenty-seven years ago, Michael Dell launched Dell with $1,000 and a streamlined sales and manufacturing model that revolutionized the PC industry. Sticking with this playbook, Dell achieved similar success in the server market, once again disrupting the status quo. However, times changed, and Dell started to look like a one-trick pony. As Michael Dell himself acknowledged at last week’s Dell’...
Is There a Method to Social Media Madness?
By Sanjeev Aggarwal and Laurie McCabe, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials SMB adoption of social media for sales, marketing, product development and customer service is on the rise – but how are SMBs tracking, analyzing and measuring the success of their social media endeavors? In our joint SMB Group/CRM Essentials “2011 Small and Medium Business Social Business Study,” we su...
Changing Customer Service Channels: The Gap Between Social Media Haves and Have Nots
Co-authored by: Laurie McCabe and Sanjeev Aggarwal, SMB Group, and Brent Leary, CRM Essentials How quickly is social media catching on as an engagement channel for SMB customer service and support? It depends on who you ...