Mike Wolpert, Founder of Social Jumpstart with our social team at Dreamforce in San Francisco
Last week was Techcrunch Disrupt and this week an even bigger conference is happening in San Francisco as Salesforce.com took over the city with their annual Dreamforce convention. Over 72,000 are in attendance and the Social Jumpstart team are guests. As always, our focus is on sifting through 750 breakout sessions and dozens of keynotes to find what’s new and better for small businesses from this leader in web based customer relationship management.
The consensus is that the future of media, the future of relationship marketing is all Social. The conference is focused on cloud computing – but all the marketing chatter is online and social specific. The options and strategies seem endless (as Christopher Penn noted; “There are over 400 social networks with a million+ members” we suggest picking 2 that you like and get started) – when digging deep in the sessions, the most slack jawed members of the audience were from Big Brands and Fortune 500 companies – they struggle to “be real, authentic and transparent” while connecting with 27 million people on an email list. Bad News … it can’t be done.
Good News: we, the small business owners and marketers CAN – and do. One influencer at a time.
Salesforce.com is diving deep into social media marketing having acquired some top social media technology and services firms like Radian six and Buddy Media earlier this year. In addition – Dreamforce offered an entire section dedicated to small and medium size businesses as well.
The company is combining its recently acquired firms into a single unit dubbed The Salesforce Marketing Cloud. At this point – the product is aimed at larger firms and at a $5,000 minimum monthly investment – not really applicable to the average small business operator. That said – we will be watching closely as Salesforce will likely start to roll out lighter versions in 2013 which could be a useful tool for SMB’s.
We will focus and discuss some of the highlights for the small business owner in additional reporting this afternoon – stay tuned!
