Dreamforce 2008: Notes from the Keynote : Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation

There’s a full house today for Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce 2008, the Salesforce.com annual user and developer conference in San Franciso. Considering the fate of most event marketing budgets during tough economic times I am hoping that it is a sign that things are not so bad, rather than the possibility that the market crashed after the final date to get a refund came and went.

Software as a Service and “Cloud Computing” (the utilization of servers and services hosted by third parties to handle your business needs) proponents will no doubt claim it is a direct reaction to a struggling economy, and they could be right. Some of the first words out of Mr. Benioff’s mouth were “There has never been a better time for cloud computing!...” And, of course, he could be right on the money.

Big Announcement One:
Force.com Sites. Salesforce.com customers can now host their websites on the Force.com platform. Existing Salesforce.com customers (Group Edition or higher) have generous page allowances for this service included in their subscription price.

Big Announcement Two:
Force.com integration with Facebook. "A new class of Business apps that leverage the social graph." Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg joined Benioff on stage to share how this is going to work...more and more businesses looking to understand and utilize social network marketing. Creation of Facebook Apps on the Force.com platform could be a great introduction to this, and a great way to capture info from those apps and quickly and easily get it into your Salesforce.com instance. The example the shared was a recruiting app that works on Facebook and sends the captured information into a Salesforce.com recruiting object. They also shared the example of Starbucks pushing their "My Starbucks Idea" site to Facebook, using Force.com. Slick.

Big Announcement Three
Integration/partnership with Amazon Web Services. Applications built and hosted on Amazon can be displayed on Force.com sites with easy integration into Salesforce.com. The example they used was an application called "Card Lasso" which allows you to take a picture of a business card, upload it at a Force.com site where it gets processed on an Amazon Web Services back end, and then the text from the business card gets populated into your Salesforce.com instance where you can actually use it.

Big Announcement Four:
A little anticlimactic, but still interesting...more and more companies running their businesses exclusively from the "Cloud" -- CRM, HR, ERP, Financials, Email, Office Productivity, etc. etc.

Rock legend Neil Young then took the stage to talk about...electric cars. Neil is involved with a company called LincVolt, which apparently has its website running on Force.com. For the big finish, they rolled out Neil Young's vintage Lincoln Continental which has been converted to run on 100% electric power with a very long range. It was a thing of beauty.

For the rest of the conference I’ll be looking for B2B marketing tips and best practices to share from the breakout sessions, and of course I'll be sharing details from any interesting partners and vendors with marketing functionality. I will share my personal favorite keynote moment, though - waiting for the speeches to begin, watching the dancing “NO SOFTWARE” button working the stage like a deranged college mascot, staring at the back of Scoble’s head two rows in front of me.