Stubbleblog

Just posted my Using the Saleforce API article on the O’Reilly Network:

In this article I’m going to turn a blog into a Salesforce lead generator by integrating the blog comments with Salesforce Leads using the Salesforce API, SOQL (a Salesforce-specific, SQL-like query language), and some Salesforce object customization.

If you hear the phrase “lead generation” and picture a car salesman, then you should probably step back and think about what you do when someone posts a comment to your blog. Do you try to find their blog? Google them? Go as far as emailing them? If you comment on my blog, you can be assured that I’m going to email you back.

Lead generation and tracking is a big part of any sales process and a major concept inside the Salesforce CRM. Many businesses are adding blogs to their sales and marketing activities and will want to integrate these into their existing sales process.

The latest web trends are enabling incredible business opportunities at almost cost. The people hyping these trends as Web 2.0 are too immersed in the technology and the pundentry to apply the trends where the real value is, everyday problems and needs, most of which already have been solved but are ripe for improvement or replacement.

These trends are hot, their implementation costs low, and their business applications untouched.

That’s the theme behind my upcoming talk at Sonoma County Web Developers, “Web 2.0: Opportunities to Make It Big While Keeping It Small,” 6:30PM Tuesady April 11, Santa Rosa, CA

Official Announcement | Directions

The SCWD is the perfect group to have this talk with. They’re some of the most pragmatic and down-to-earth developers I’ve ever met and I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity.

I’ll focus mainly on three areas:

User Generated Content - Give people a voice and they’ll speak. Give them tools and incentives and they will fill your site with content. Hint: the incentive is not money.

Web Services/Components - Companies want to give you features for your website. For free. Most of these features are prohibitively expensive to build on your own.

Blogvertising - Blogs are fantastic for cheap marketing. You don’t even have to write a blog to take advantage.

This How Much Is My Blog Worth calculator is old news. My blog is currently worth $1693.23. What I want to know is how much individual in-bound links contributed to that. In other words what did one time links from Marc Hedlund on Radar and Hugh MacLeod contribute to that pricing. And how much should I pay them to link to me again.

Update: Now worth $7339.02. Does this vary by day or something?

Yay. Hugh is giving the ok to post your favorite GapingVoid cartoons. Here’s the six that I’ve kept saved in my RSS reader because I couldn’t stand to part with them.

And here’s more from Russell and Arvind.

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Seth Godin, well known marketing author and blogger, just released a forty-five page ebook. It’s free nice to read about blogging from a marketer’s perspective. Also, it’s free.

I had a nice talk last night with a friend who’s working on a web startup. I’m excited for him - the barrier to entry for starting your own company has plummeted.

Software and software techniques have solidified. An agile, keep it simple, release as soon as you have value development methodology is emerging from the bureaucratic promise everything and deliver crap, marketing driven dot-com mess. There’s also a much better understanding of how to get and keep users and how to market your company on the cheap.

Here’s the list of reading material that everyone starting a web company should be familiar with.

Ruby
Ruby on Rails is a web framework that lets you get web sites out fast. Very fast. And it has all the flexibility and robustness that you hope you’ll need down the road when your site becomes popular.
www.rubyonrails.com/

KISS Development
Ruby’s brought to you by 37 Signals, the company behind Basecamp. They’re also on the cutting edge of low overhead development methods. It’s worth following their blog (although they’ve watered down their content with generic blog entries).
37signals.com/svn/
37signals.com/svn/archives2/scoble_wonders_if_37signals_is_influencing_microsoft.php
37signals.com/svn/archives2/entrepreneurs_angels_and_the_cost_of_launch.php

Passion
Kathy Sierra, who created O’Reilly’s Head First Series, has great writing on what’s going to make your users enjoy their experience and come back for more.
headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/
headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/06/building_a_succ.html

Blogvertising
Hugh Macleod’s blog, gapingvoid.com, teaches blogvertising by example. You think he’s talking explicitly about blogvertising or maybe making crass commentary on society. Then you realize that you want to buy some stormhoek wine and a english cut $3000 tailored suit. You just got sold to. I’m still not sure how I feel about that. All I do know is that I want a new suit.
www.gapingvoid.com/