When running blogs for community, and business interests, the important question of of “who” has visited has been a big challenge. This problem was one of the inspirations for the creation of OpenID and other approaches for identity sharing.
As corporate blog applications grow as operational business tools, the ability to respond to users who launch comments becomes a critical component of doing business. This requires being able to integrate this information flow into company processes as a natural extension of the blog.
SalesForce.com has been focused on aggregation of customer prospects across all channels a company performs in. So, this is a very natural extension to SaleForce’s destiny to consider the corporate blog an important touch point for consumers.
And, with the momentum of SalesForce’s Chatter platform – which enables enterprise collaboration and hooks to services like Twitter and Facebook, this integration both helps get comprehensive and in our opinion, increases the value of the blog as a tool for the enterprise.
SalesForce provided us screenshots of the application, we’ll walk through them here.
In the SalesForce dashboard, set up a WordPress receiver.
When configuring the WordPress integration, set up the system to auto-respond with a custom message.
Build a form in SalesForce.com to capture user contact information using the form builder.
Embedding the connection between the widget or page in WordPress by tying it to the SalesForce identifier.
Viewing the widget in WordPress.
Adding the contact widget to the Sidebar widget (for example) enables the blog to use it pre-defined presentation mechanics to bring the SalesForce powered contact widget to users. This can be done across the entire site (like shown in sidebar), or added to an individual page or widget that is controlled by the WordPress publishing process.
In this model of the universe, the blog owner is able to connect the blog viewer to company processes. We think this may be help blogs grow to being more operational tools, bringing the ease of publishing to the ease of customer relationship management.
Do you run WordPress and Saleforce.com today? What do you think about this merge of capabilities?
