Dreamforce Day Two

By Jason Stewart  - September 18th, 2007

The Dreamforce Day Two Keynote is typically kicked off with a message dedicated to corporate America’s responsibility to the community. Last years speaker was Colin Powell, one of the best speakers I have ever seen. The main thrust of that talk was corporate responsibility to the community, but I will always remember his take on the differences between flying on Air Force One and taking a commercial flight. “I’m Colin Powell. How hard could it be?”

This year’s speaker was George Lucas, head of the George Lucas Educational Foundation. He also directs and produces movies.

Delivered in a conversational format with moderator Robert Thurman (Buddhist Monk and father of Uma), it was a thoughtful, articulate message about making education more interesting to kids. Don’t teach them something without also letting them know how they are going to use it in later life, maybe introduce it in the form of a project. Ask them to build something, and they will learn the math and science necessary to make it happen, because they understand why they need to know it and become engaged. Go to www.edutopia.org to learn more.

After that, it was back to the usual keynote fare, with executives from important partners and customers participating in a variety of panels. The panelist from Linden Lab (makers of the “Second Life” virtual world) seemed a bit out of place though. As he was talking, these animated Second Life characters in very tight pants were wandering around on the screen behind him. I was half expecting Marc Benioff to don one of those headsets my nephew wears when he plays Halo and start blasting.

There was a great film shown playing up the role of salesforce.com as an innovator, though, featuring a great shot of someone typing salesforce.com into Google and then clicking on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. My personal highlight, however brief, was when the CEO of Adobe showed Demandbase as an example of a stellar application developed using the Adobe Flex tool. Demandbase was also a finalist for the Appy Award for "Breakthrough App of the Year."

The first breakout session of the day was “Campaigns to Cash,” featuring Demandblog’s Kirk Crenshaw. Some great tips here focused on utilizing the campaigns tab to track return on investment of your marketing campaigns. An interesting point was the standardization of the information you collect from lead forms in order to better utilize formulas to automatically score leads as they enter your Salesforce.com.

I also attended a breakout session led by Omniture and featuring a customer case study from Red Hat. Really interesting stuff, homing in on the point that sheer number of leads generated is a faulty metric for marketing to base success on. Some of the metrics highlighted in their anayltics tool seemed worth checking out.

Something interesting touched upon in both of these breakouts was best practices in tracking campaign involvement throughout a lead's lifecycle. The two most important campaigns to track are the ones that brought the lead to you first, and the last one they touched before they became a customer. If there were 6 in between, they just aren't as important to remember and track as the first and last.

More tomorrow.