Clint Lee

As these things often do, this project came about as I was searching for the solution to a problem. I couldn't find anything that worked so I decided to try and solve it myself. The Use Case I was working with one of our clients on a Salesforce implementation and since they're very active on Twitter they naturally wanted to take advantage of the Salesforce For Twitter app by ForceDotCom Labs. We decided to incorporate a Twitter Username field into most of their web forms and after a short time they had begun to capture a large number of twitter usernames for their Leads and Contacts. We'd also been discussing the idea of the emerging new science around measuring an individual's social influence. Tracking and understanding someone's social influence has broad applications for businesses and non-profits alike. For marketers wanting to spread information about a new p... (more)

The Salesforce IRC

If you're ever feeling a bit nostalgic about the mid-90's I've got the cure for you.  Go jump on the Salesforce IRC channel.  Despite reminiscing about your teenage days sitting in your parents' basement, tying up the phone line, and chatting online with babes (not that I did that), you might just learn a little something. Pat Patterson (aka metadaddy) did a how-to post on the Developer Force blog to get you going in case you don't remember how to access an IRC channel.  I use an IRC client for the Mac called Colloquy. There's usually a good-sized crowd on the chat including some... (more)

How-To: Create Leads from Twitter Conversations

Many franchisors utilize Twitter to communicate their products and services to would-be customers.  But how do you know if your social media efforts are paying off?  Can you pull up a real-time report to see just how many new leads you’ve created over the past week?  If you find an interesting conversation taking place about your franchise opportunity, are you able to effectively get a business development rep involved and respond in real-time? We’ve posted this video to demonstrate the powerful functionality that’s created by integrating Salesforce and Twitter together in your fr... (more)

A Business Use Case for Batch Apex

I want to share a recent real-world use case where Batch Apex was used to achieve our goal.  If you’re not familiar with Batch Apex you can find more here in the Salesforce Development Docs. Business Use Case An organization’s sales team is using Salesforce CRM primarily to manage their Leads, Contacts, and opportunities. This is akin to a retail setting whereby there are multiple physical locations and each location has its own sales team and sales manager (think car dealership).  In this setting, Leads (and/or Contacts) enter through multiple channels such as internet marketing,... (more)

Send SMS from Salesforce

Ever send SMS messages to your Contacts and Leads? I recently had a conversation with a fairly new Salesforce customer who wanted to send SMS messages to their leads and contacts.  They had been using another CRM system that gave them this ability and it’s an integral part of the way they communicate with leads and prospects.  The great thing about Salesforce and the Force.com platform is that there are multiple ways to achieve this goal.  A quick search of the AppExchange will bring up a number of options.  Or, if one of these options doesn’t fit your needs you could build it on... (more)