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Cloud Solutions for Small Business

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No matter your role in an organization, you've probably been frustrated trying to use technology to get your job done. Collabrax promises to promote growth, scability, and cost savings so that you can get back to what you do best, running a succesful and profitable business.

Marriage Between Social Media and Cloud Computing

The ability for businesses to use rich Internet application technologies, SaaS, cloud computing, business intelligence, social-media driven metadata — all leveraged, integrated, and automated business processes — is changing the nature of business. Companies now know that they can (and should) do business differently, but they don’t yet know how to pull all the services and parts together to do it.

Some organizations would benefit from utilizing outsourced consulting experts to help IT needs and social marketing to get to know each other better. The bottom line, however, is that successful businesses need to be able to merge IT and enterprise social software.   These solutions are increasingly aligned to integrate and leverage traditional IT strengths with the best of the web and social marketing.

In today’s market, businesses can’t have meaningful and scalable social business strategies without a solid and accessible IT infrastructure.  Companies need to make that essential but, to date, rare connection between the IT infrastructure and the social media marketing drivers.  The natural progression is moving business toward cloud computing solutions and integration with aggressive social media marketing tools.

“This gets us poised for what happens next: The coming half-decade is going to be a tremendously important and exciting one in the business world as organizations look to fundamentally retool for the 21st century, an era that has quite different expectations and requirements around business and how it gets done,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, an internationally recognized business strategist.

Salesforce ChatterAn example of the impressive marriage between technology and social media: Salesforce.com’s expansion of Salesforce Chatter, a Facebook-style social networking platform for enterprise. And now AppExchange 2, the next generation of Salesforce.com’s enterprise app storefront, will includes a “ChatterExchange” for social networking business apps.  To stay one step ahead of the competition, Google is continually expanding and improving it’s Google Apps for Businessplatform.  Google’s web-based messaging and collaboration apps require no hardware or software and need minimal administration, creating tremendous time and cost savings for businesses.  Google is also developing it’s social platform, “Google Me,” which is expected to be introduced this fall.  The service will introduce what Google calls “a social layer” into its existing product base.

The business world will one day soon no longer begin and end its days in an email in-box, but on a “wall” that defines business process through social interaction.

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13.Feb.11 CRM, Salesforce.com Comment (1)

Big News for Small Business: WordPress and Salesforce Team Up

WordPressThings just got a little bit easier for small business owners everywhere, especially those in need of a new or updated website. Recently, Salesforce for small business unveiled two free WordPress themes for small businesses.

The new themes are designed with all the bells and whistles, helping businesses attract more customers. You can use them to highlight your business information and easily update web copy. Plus, when it comes to blogging, you also have the ability to publish entries directly to your site’s home page or via a subfolder in your site’s navigation.

WordPress Benefits for Small Business

First of all, it’s free! Although your site may look similar in layout to the sites of other small business owners, there are still plenty of opportunities for customization. Because the sites are built on WordPress, they are also easy to set up and manage.

When it comes to site operation, flexibility and ease of use are two of the biggest benefits that come with the Salesforce WordPress themes. You’ll be able to build your site’s ranking through the search engine optimization (SEO) tools inherent in the WordPress platform. When search engines bring in more traffic to your site, you get more leads and more customers.

WordPress has been the go-to platform for individual bloggers for years because it is so easy to use. You can see just how easy it is to get going by watching these demo videos for the Turnkey and Green Stimulus themes:

WordPress can also help you with customer relationship management. More than 50% of consumer use search engines to find what they need. Since your website is the first point of contact for many of your company’s leads, finding a low-cost, professionally designed site that is visually pleasing is win-win for your business.

Advantages over Traditional Webmaster or Host Provider

Small businesses are notorious for being short on two things: money and time. Having a well-coded site used to mean paying a webmaster to make updates each time you needed to upload an employee photo or make changes to your web copy.

The new WordPress themes offered by Salesforce change all that, allowing you to install the theme and make content changes yourself through a user-friendly interface. There is no need to know developer coding. In fact, most domain hosts are set up to make WordPress installs on you site super easy. Fatastico De Luxe is a widely-used application that lets you setup WordPress and other scripts in just a few clicks.

But Wait! There’s More: Salesforce Plugin

If your small business is using Salesforce to power customer relationship management, you can install the WordPress-to-Lead (similar to Salesforce Web-to-Lead feature) plugin on your WordPress-powered site. People who visit your site will be able to contact you directly through your website, and the lead information is automatically entered in your Salesforce CRM. That means you no longer have to copy and paste lead information into your account.

Whether you use Salesforce to manage customer relations or not, this announcement is sure to make your life much simpler.

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12.Feb.11 CRM, Salesforce.com Comments (2)



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