The past few weeks have been extremely busy and exciting as we prepare for Dreamforce, which is now only a week away! But today, I have some other exciting news to share, the launch of our new solution—the FirstRain Performinator!
Performinator is our newest solution for delivering strategically tuned customer intelligence for major account sales and marketing teams right into their existing CRM, social enterprise platforms, smartphones and tablets. Performinator helps your entire team of sales and marketing pros understand their customers’ business as well as your superstars do. And for the thousands of early-adopter users who are already getting FirstRain Performinator today, it’s the ‘carrot‘ that gets your people engaged in and drives value from your CRM and platform investments. Don’t YOU want to ‘Be the Carrot‘? 
Most sales and marketing teams don’t have the time to gather the deep knowledge of their customers and end-markets that’s needed to really challenge their customers, uncover opportunity and spot risks. FirstRain already delivers the right intelligence to help solve this challenge, but with Performinator we make it so easy, and so well-tuned to your customer markets that each of your users are transformed (no phone booth required) into your company’s go-to experts on your most significant customers.
In fact, at Dreamforce next week, leaders from GE Capital and FirstRain will be discussing the new solution and how they are embracing the carrot. If you’re interested in attending the session and learning more about Performinator, you can do so here.
Superman may use his super powers to fly, but Performinator uses its powers to transform your sales and marketing teams!
I can’t think of a better way to start a major conference then attending a conference sponsored networking event. From day one you are able to network and make connections with others, who can heavily influence the value you ultimately get from the conference.
On the eve of Dreamforce, Monday September 17th there will be a ‘Women in Tech’ event hosted by GirlyGeeks and the Salesforce.com’s Women’s Network (open to all Dreamforce attendees and Salesforce.com employees).
This networking event is sure to rally in many passionate, energetic and career driven women and certainly all the Girly Geeks at FirstRain are looking forward to meeting them all, as we kick off Dreamforce 2012.
Events like these are great opportunities to come together to network, share your own personal experiences, and hear some of the challenges and experiences women have faced in order to build their careers. In addition to networking and ‘cocktailing’ time, attendees will hear from:
Plus a special panel session moderated by Jill Rowley, Director of Key Accounts, Eloqua. The panelists will share their career stories and take questions from the audience. Panelists include:
We are very happy that Penny was invited to be part of the panel, because as a FirstRain Girly Geek, I know the benefit of her daily dose of inspiration, guidance and fortitude, that I am sure will come across in the panel. As many of you know, Penny is very passionate about the opportunities and challenges that women in technology encounter on a daily basis. She actively shares her thoughts on her personal blog as well as on the Huffington Post. Earlier this year Penny participated on a panel at Yahoo! on the myth of the work-life balance and spoke at TEDx Gunn High School on how coding is the new literacy.
Want to learn more or attend the Women In Tech Event? If you are a Dreamforce attendee or Salesforce.com employee, visit the Girly Geeks Dreamforce Chatter Group and then RSVP here (email me if you need a code: dbarbosa@ignite.firstrain.com).
And don’t forget, Dreamforce is only 10 days away and all of FirstRain is working hard to get #DF12ready! Most of the team will be present, whether they are at our booth (#1626!), wandering the expo and hosting meetups (interested in meeting up with us? Email us at DF@ignite.firstrain.com) or checking out the GE Capital Session–we are gearing up for a fun week!
Image|Flickr| Elizabeth Thomsen
This is my first year attending Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference and I am very excited. As a first timer, I wanted to make sure I was prepared, so I turned to Twitter and Dreamforce Chatter to find out the scoop on what to expect. Here are the top 10 tips I’ve compiled to help you (and myself!) get ready for Dreamforce 2012.
1. Wear comfortable shoes, this is the most talked about recommendation on social media right now! You spend almost all day on your feet, so take care of them. High heels may look great on Day 1, but your body will regret it on Day 2 if you can barely stand…
2. Bring an extra battery! From session hopping to coordinating meet ups with your iPhone you are bound to lose battery power. Make sure to bring your charger (there will be charging stations) or buy an extra long battery to ensure you aren’t without power halfway through the conference.
3. Flag that full session! Didn’t get to register in time for a session you are dying to attend? Don’t fret, Salesforce is now allowing you to go to the Agenda Builder and “flag” each full session. If you flag the session in the Agenda Builder, Dreamforce will notify you when they add an additional session. For example, to find out more information on how to flag the hot GE Capital “360° of Excellence” ROI session, do so here.
Another option—just show up! Most likely there will be some “no-shows”. Go early! It’s first come, first serve.
4. Stay out late and meet people! There will be a lot of cool, interesting people at the restaurants and bars around the Moscone Center ready to chit chat. It’s a great way to network and learn about new products.
5. Don’t overload on sessions! There are tons of great sessions you are dying to see (like FirstRain’s, of course!) but scheduling back-to-back sessions will leave you with very little time to explore the expo. Limit yourself and be mindful that sessions are at different buildings.
6. Party time! Interested in checking out the social scene after the Moscone Center closes? Check out this App for up-to-date events happening at Dreamforce.
7. Bring Layers! Never been to San Francisco before? SF is a layering city. September may be one of our warmest months, but depending on the micro-climate on that particular day—or of that exact block—you may experience a whole range of temperatures. Bring a sweater (or two).
8. Take advantage of San Francisco’s coffee and donuts! Blue Bottle Coffee is just a couple blocks away and Philz isn’t too far. SF has a Starbucks on every block, but these coffee houses brew each cup individually. Caffeine is a necessity to keep yourself energized throughout the conference. And If you are planning on staying out late, make sure to visit Bob’s Donuts on Polk street. They are open 24 hours but make donuts fresh at around 10pm. You won’t be disappointed, they are fantastic. I’m a regular!
9. Be organized! Map out all the sessions you are attending and the booths you want to visit. This year, a lot of the sessions are held outside of the Moscone Center at nearby hotels. Familiarize yourself with the area prior to the conference.
10. Make sure to check your social media and talk to DF alumni! Stay active with #DF12 and Dreamforce chatter for new recommendations while the conference is happening. As well as reach out and talk to DF alumni! Many of the FirstRain team are Dreamforce veterans and are helping me get #DF12ready.
And for those of you attending Dreamforce12, you can check out the full thread where I compiled all these great ideas, if you want even more great tips (and special thanks to Jeff Grosse for so many terriffic suggestions).
Dreamforce season is upon us! Attendees and Salesforce.com employees are talking about what they are wearing and not wearing (I really hope not!) to the event, the Dreamforce party app is hopping, SaaSy videos are going viral, animated gifs are turning up everywhere, sessions are filling up fast and rumors are flying around.
So what are we doing in preparation? Well, some hard work of course as we coordinate our booth (#1626), our customer session [360° of Excellence: How GE Capital Drives ROI Through Customer Intelligence], our team schedules and our client appointments—but also some fun, because that is how we roll here @FirstRain …
If you’ve been following @FirstRain or Penny, Ryan or myself on Twitter, you may have noticed we’ve been tweeting out about our new customer intelligence Tumblr: “You Had Me At Hello, Letters to Marc Benioff“, with a couple new posts a day.
So what exactly is it? You Had Me At Hello are letters directly from Penny to Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com’s CEO. They are ‘penned’ in Penny’s own voice—no marketing content editor behind the scenes—and are what our COO, YY Lee, recently called “like passing hallway notes between two CEOs”.
We have had a lot of positive feedback from our customers (including many who are mutual customers with Salesforce.com), along with many ”thanks for making me smile.” This ticks off our #1 objective as we all continue to be manically busy trying to prep for Dreamforce, deliver our updated AppExchange offering, work on a couple of new client SFDC implementations and continue to drive value to our customers rolling out tools like Sales Cloud.
Here are some highlighted posts from the Tumblr in the last week that might also make you smile:
To read the rest of the posts go to #UHadMeAtHello! Read it, Tweet it, and Submit Your own Letter to Marc if you are so inclined.
View the full archive here.
FirstRain India had another great team-building event this week! These events allow people from different departments to come together and team up to excel in an entirely different setting, and this was our first event since forming teams in June (you can read more about our team building events here). It was fun to see them in action!
For this event, each team nominated four members to work together and come up with a unique costume, made completely out of newspaper. They had 30 minutes to complete the project. One member of each team then modeled the costume for the entire FirstRain India Team. It was great to see the teams work closely together and come up with some fantastic ideas
By the end of the 30 minutes we had some great costumes, ranging from a tribal prince, to a queen, to an Indian mother (rooting for their Olympic athletes!). We voted on the best costume and it came down to Preeti (representing “Team Avengers” dressed as a modern Indian Woman) and Priyanker (representing “Team The Y-Nots” dressed as Eklavya). Priyankar received the most votes and the win went to “Team The Y-Nots”!
The event demonstrated our team’s creativity and efficiency, and was a lot of fun!
If you’ve been following our @FirstRain Twitter feed, you’ve heard how excited we are to be sponsors of Dreamforce 2012! Dreamforce is Salesforce.com’s annual cloud computing conference held at San Francisco’s famous Moscone Center. Last year the event brought in more than 270 exhibitors and attracted over 45,000 people (plus an additional 35,000 who tuned in virtually). This year’s event will be September 18-21st and is expected to be the biggest Dreamforce yet. It’s centered around the theme: “Touch the social enterprise” and aims to focus on how more and more businesses are now going social.
Key headlining speakers include Jim Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, Former Secretary of State General Colin Powell, Angela Ahrendts the CEO of Burberry, Sir Richard Branson the founder of the Virgin Group, and a musical performance by the Red Hot Chili Peppers!
Natutally, FirstRain is in the midst of planning some awesome events for Dreamforce—however—we’re (almost, but) not quite ready to share them yet! In the meantime, make sure to follow us on Twitter and subscribe to our blog Market Mine for more information and updates on `FirstRain at Dreamforce‘.
If you plan on attending Dreamforce 2012, reach out to me on Twitter @justineleviand let me know!
For more information on Dreamforce please visit: http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF12/
And if you would like to attend Dreamforce, you can register here.
“Only the strongest professions have the strongest associations“ - 2012 SLA Hall of Fame inductee Susan Fifer Canby
Chicago in July is hot, even with the lake breeze you can’t escape the concrete jungle heat. So I learned that the key to my personal success in attending the annual SLA (Special Library Asociation) conference was:
Two weeks ago, I attended the SLA 2012 (Special Library Association) conference as an attendee, not as a vendor staff person as I have for many many years (although, I always made sure I was able to sneak away and go to some sessions that I really wanted to go to— often negotiating booth time slots with my coworkers). This year, my focus was on attending as many interesting sessions as I could and to meet as many information professionals as possible that had similar interests.
Here are some high level themes I came back to California with:
- Throughout 2011 I kept an eye on the SLA Future Ready Project, a project that Cindy Romaine, SLA President 2011 had led with the goal of finding and sharing information about how information professionals had to get ‘Future Ready’. Many of the sessions and conversations this year were focused on what and where the professions of ‘Special Librarians’ were going. I had numerous conversations on value (perceived and measurable), extension of roles (where else in the organization to embed oneself) and identity (what is a special librarian, what is the role of information in the enterprise, etc.). The general consensus I heard was that as a profession, information professionals feel that they are or are on the way to being ‘Future Ready’.
- I attended a session on collaborative insights that highlighted some new information professional roles. I thought these roles were great role descriptions for the skills and experience that come with being an information professional in an enterprise including:
- In more than one session and conversation, the topic of ‘delivering information to users where they are’ came up. Mary Ellen Bates in one panel, made the association that it is not only about giving users the ability to ‘search’ but being able to proactively ‘alert’ within context of what they are doing, regardless of what device they are using.
- The rise of internal enterprise app stores and the opportunity for Information Resource Centers/corporate libraries to become front and center to that new enterprise ecosystem. Being first in line to delivering valuable enterprise applications within these new platforms would raise awareness of the services provided and direct value to the enterprise.
- Types of collaboration skills to develop as an information professional includes ‘Horizontal Collaboration’ within organization— IT, HR, and very importantly rainmaking with C level executives.
- In regards to collaboration, I really liked this reminder from Mary Talley : “collaboration requires intimacy“. - The shift to self service and self curation and the changes in how end-users use and consume information was another popular topic heard in many sessions— unlike the ‘clients’ of the past, the skills AND the tools available to end-users enable self access (and success with it). Information professionals MUST understand and become champions of these tools.
- Very popular sessions: 60 Apps in 60 minutes conducted by Scott Brown of the Social Information Group and Joe Murphy who highlighted the need for information professionals to have a good grasp of tools readily available so they can make recommendations, compete effectively and become part of the app culture that the corporate enterprise is now embracing.
- Guy Kawasaki— gave the keynote, focused on Enchantment (that is the name of his newest book). Although I wish Guy had focused a bit more on addressing the actual audience of information professionals (something he talks about being a requirement to enchant!)— his core message can be applied to pretty much any profession that is responsible for providing services and products: Enchant people and build something DICEE - Deep, Intelligent, Complete, Empowering & Elegant.
- Last but not least on my list, Lee Ann Benkert (@LRBenkert, pictured above) spontaneously organized an ‘un-conference’ session during lunch. She asked people to join in the social media lounge and self-organize into small groups to talk about topics that were top of mind to them. It was a new thing for many of the attendees, and it was great to see their excitement. I have been to many un-conference events, and honestly, the group session I was in was just OK (it was about one’s identity as a special librarian, e.g., what should the title really be, etc.). But the classy part was that Lee Ann managed to include the expo vendors who might have complained that this was taking people away from the expo floor booths during the time when attendees had free time to visit by coordinating a ‘flash-mob’ visit to the vendor that best included themselves in the process of the un-conference organization—well done!
There were many other sessions which you can view here, many have slide-decks as well (click through the session title) and there is also an eventifier conference overview that has aggregated images, tweets, slides etc.
Thank you SLA for another excellent conference and thank you to all my old and new friends that I got to spend time with— see you next year in San Diego!
Note: This post was originally posted on my personal blog, chitchating about information delivery.
Next week SLA (Special Library Association) is hosting their annual conference in Chicago and FirstRain will be in attendance. Daniela, our Director of Business Development, MLIS, a long time member of SLA and champion of information professionals in the Enterprise will be attending and is looking forward to catching up with many of you there!
In addition to learning more about new trends and how information professionals are ensuring that they are “’future ready’ by exchanging ideas and connecting with thousands of fellow information professionals“, Daniela will be looking to meet up with information professionals who are currently working or are trying to get involved in Enterprise Social Business projects incorporating social enterprise software like Salesforce.com/Chatter, Yammer, SharePoint, Jive, IBM Connections, Tibco, Cisco Webex Social and others.
The role of the information professional is often an important one in these enterprise projects, and Daniela (who works directly with these vendors as FirstRain partners, and with the enterprise customers deploying these solutions) would like to see more information professionals involved and driving these projects.
SLA2012 is located at the McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois from July 15th-July 18, 2012. For more information on SLA2012 please visit their website.
If you are interested in touching base with Daniela please send her an email dbarbosa@ignite.firstrain.com or via twitter @danielabarbosa.
I love release days. Not only is there the excitement of announcing great, new product features, but there’s a real thrill each time I see yet another amazing, customer-focused accomplishment for FirstRain. However, release days are exciting for our customers too, since it’s a reassurance that we are working hard for you and your business needs.
When I started at FirstRain (almost one year ago!), we had just announced the integration of our mobile platform for iPhone and Android devices. Since then I’ve seen the introduction of several new products, such as: the development of the iPad app, the introduction of the FirstRain ECI system, and more recently, the FirstTweets and visualization analytics integration. We’ve really come a long way in just under a year!
Today, we at FirstRain have put out our July 2012 Product Release, and with it we are adding some great new updates and additions to many of the great new features we’ve developed in the past year. This month’s release is all personalization. We’ve updated our iPad app, improving the in-app monitor experience, taking an already great app and making it even more powerful and useful. So if you’re a FirstRain user who hasn’t yet downloaded FirstRain for iPad, now’s a great time to do so!
We’ve also updated our iPhone and Android apps and added in some nice, new features throughout the product to better personalize and share your customer intelligence experience. This release focuses on taking what we already have that works well and making it even more personal.
For all of you who are FirstRain customers, I encourage you to check out these new updates and, as always, please let us know what you think!
The hottest summer months in Delhi are May and June, with temperatures going as high as 45 ⁰C (~113 ⁰F)! It only begins to cool down when the ‘First Rain’ of the monsoon season decides to descend and make the days cooler, greener and less dusty.
Besides the hot weather, June has been a busy month. The highpoint was a Kids@Work day that brought in about 20 Rainmaker’s kids, ranging from an age of six months to twelve years. The kids spent a good part of the day at FirstRain India. It was great fun to watch FirstRain parents and non-parents taking care of the little ones. I am very impressed (and proud) by how hands on all the Rainmaker parents are!
Below are some snapshots from the day:
Current and future Rainmakers work in perfect harmony
Who is the better programmer- father or son?
Going home a winner!
At FirstRain India we like to host numerous events that every Rainmaker can particiate in. We divide everyone into event teams (a lottery system) comprising folks from different departments, getting together to participate in fun, as well as competitive events, throughout the year. This allows people from different departments to come together and team up to excel in an entirely different setting. The events range from quiz competitions to ramp walks to decorate your bay and the events culminate with a prize trophy to the winning team at the annual offsite event. The new teams were created this summer and the first task assigned to them was to create a name, logo and punch line for their team.
Finally, June ended with a small party in our cafeteria for all the employees who had June birthdays. All the June birthdays gathered around the cake (including myself) and so a case for me of have your cake and eat it too!
