The contextual interviewing process continues! Last week, Scott (aka Skippy) discussed some of the simple rules we are following as we learn more about what our customers face on a daily basis, and ultimately, how ReadyTalk can help.  In the past few weeks, several folks across ReadyTalk have been preparing and conducting interviews with some of our most important customers.

As you may recall, we originally identified two types of use cases within our customer base: The Marketing User and the Collaboration User.  After some additional discussion, using the Value Innovations process, we discovered that our most important customers are the Marketing User and the IT Specs/Contracts User.  The Marketing User is primarily responsible for driving new customer leads and/or continuing engagement with existing customers, while keeping a strong focus on their company’s products and services. And consequently, they are heavy users of ReadyTalk webinars!  The IT Specs/Contracts User is responsible for administering several technical and operational solutions across their company, including web and audio conferencing solutions. Each of these users has unique needs within their roles, but both often greatly depend on a reliable solution.

So what have our teams been up to exactly?  The team focused on the IT Specs/Contracts User is in the process of identifying the elements of value for this type of customer, and getting the first round of interviews on the schedule.  The Marketing User team has held some interviews and is starting to identify some of the common themes of what keeps our customers up at night.

Looking for a sneak preview on what’s important to the Marketing User?  Here are some of the major themes:

1)  My customers are exposed to so much information in our industry, how do I become more effective at getting our message across?

2)  What are the best methods of following up with customers and prospects after a webinar?

3)  How do we create a community within our customer base?

4)  I use several tools and platforms in my role, how do I integrate these to make me more efficient?

Stay tuned for a preview on what we are learning from our IT Specs/Contracts User and what we can expect from the 2^nd round of contextual interviews!

Beth is a Product Marketing Manager and works with our customers to understand their needs as they relate to event services and our conference center, which is used to setup the details of our clients’ upcoming meetings. Outside of the office, Beth loves to spend time with family and friends, cook, and hit the slopes.

ReadyTalk attends several industry trade shows every year. There is one in particular that we attend time after time and that is the International Franchise Association (IFA). The IFA is the oldest and largest organization representing franchising worldwide. The mission for IFA is to protect, enhance and promote franchising through government relations, public relations and educational programs.

Cultivating the relationships with the franchises is a priority at ReadyTalk and in the past nine years ReadyTalk has exhibited at the Annual conference. This year the conference is in Las Vegas and Josh White and Mike Ligon will manage the ReadyTalk booth. This event is a great opportunity for Josh and Mike to reconnect with customers and build relationships with new prospects. The show is a smaller scaled event with approximately 2000 attendees and 200 vendors.

It would be great to see old and new faces. Please stop by booth #149 at the IFA Annual Conference. Mike and Josh would be thrilled to show you some new features in the pipeline for ReadyTalk services.

Melanie is rounding her third year at ReadyTalk. She works closesly with the sales department to coordinate and excute ReadyTalk’s tradeshow presence. She’s also the goddess of ReadyTalk schwag and party planning. In her free time, you’ll find her spending time with finacee and dog.

Last week’s Dreamforce conference had people talking. From Steve Wonder to Bill Clinton, it was an action-packed show chalked full of useful Salesforce tricks, tips and apps.

ReadyTalk used the show as a platform to solicit feedback for the upcoming launch of ReadyTalk for Salesforce.com, an integration that will save ReadyTalk customers time and make web conferences and webinars even easier.

For marketing managers who run webinars and use Salesforce.com, ReadyTalk’s integration will be able to:

• Automatically capture registration & attendance data—no more manual imports
• Get instant visibility into key metrics right in Salesforce and speed follow-up on webinar leads
• Send up to 10,000 polished email invites through ReadyTalk or use a third-party provider

Salespeople who schedule and run audio/web conferences and use Salesforce.com will be able to:

• Schedule and start virtual meetings directly from a SFDC Lead or Contact record
• Automatically document and measure key sales activities in SFDC
• Invite prospects to marketing webinars through their Lead record as you speak with them
• Get instant visibility into webinar attendance data for your prospects and clients

Want to learn more about ReadyTalk for Salesforce.com? Sign up for a free demo and give us your feedback on the soon-to-be-released feature.

1) Buy ads. You can target your cause very specifically on Facebook. Then add pay per click, just like you would do on Google. BlitzLocal recommends a small ad budget, but using Google Grants as a primary vehicle to drive people to your website is a great idea. Then have a ‘like’ box there.

2) Get a ‘like’ box on your site. If you hit “edit page” and go to the bottom right, you will see an option for “promote with a like box.” Grab the code there and paste it into your site.

3) Create a contest. As a condition of winning the prize, whatever it may be, require that fans write a comment of at least 30 words on why they deserve to win or whatever. For them to comment, they have to like the page.

4) Incentivized like tab. This is advanced stuff for programmers only. So if you know someone who understands FBML (or ask kindly and perhaps we will do it for you), you create a landing page that reveals the content behind it only if they click like. Think of it like a scratch off ticket. So have something attractive enough to stimulate action. See example here for Grameen Foundation.

5) Let your users participate. Most fan pages allow post by page only,which is the default option. Change that setting to “posts by pages and fans.” When people know they are allowed to participate, they will; their participation, in turn, notifies their friends’ notifications, which, in turn, bring those friends in.

6) Send a Facebook message. Little known option, but when you click ”edit page”, you can send a message to fans. This generates a real email, not a Facebook message. Whatever you do with your regular email program, so it will with Facebook.

7) Interact with users. Not just because it’s the polite thing to do, but because it increases your Post Quality Score, which then increases your prominence on the walls of your page’s fans. When you or a fan makes a comment or hits “like”, only a portion of friends will see it. That percentage is governed by how much interaction Facebook sees.

Choose a custom url. Go to Facebook.com/username to choose a url for your page. The option is available once you get to 25 fans. A short url is better than a numerical monstrosity, making it easier for fans to remember you and find you.

9) Mention your Facebook page in your other marketing efforts. The custom url helps. Place the url in your email signature line, business cards, brochures- even paint it on the side of your minivan! Print sticker with your logo and Facebook url below.

10) Cross-promote with sister organizations and those who endorse you. Did you know that pages can become fans of each other? Don’t go crazy here doing link farms and chains, but you might as well get every advantage you can get.

11) Update your Facebook page with your twitter and rss feeds (blog posts). We believe that if you post content once, it should be available everywhere. We are too lazy to have to manaually copy content to 15 other sites, so we use easy plugins and apps to do that. Likewise, meet users where they are, by making it convenient for them.

12) Get popular people to mention you on their wall. Did you know that if you post the full url of your page (which includes the http part), then it creates not only a blue clickable link, but also shows how many fans the page has? More fans means you look more popular, which means more people will check out what’s there.

13) Automatically invite all your friends: you aren’t actually clicking on every single friend you have when you hit “suggest to friends are you? Check out this article for a clever trick.

14) Say things that are controversial. Don’t be inflammatory or rude, but do pose charged issues that will bait people into expressing their opinion, thereby drawing people in. You might even seed the discussion or wall post by arranging in advance what side each of your team members will say, just to get things started.

Even more more important than the difference between Drupal and WordPress, is which of the two is the better choice for your nonprofit.

Both Drupal and WordPress are open source content management systems, meaning that technically both are free to use.

Drupal is a wonderful, customizable content management system that 1000s of organizations use effectively and successfully. However, for organizations without IT-experts, specifically coding experts, Drupal tends to be more challenging to use. The learning curve is a bit steeper, and it can be more frustrating for a non-IT expert to use.

So, if like a lot of nonprofits, you have neither the IT-expert nor the financial resources to hire one, we recommend WordPress. It is an easy program to use, easy to modify, easy to make your own.

You can upload your own logo, change colors, add e-commerce, keep track of your donors. In short, there’s not much you can’t do with WordPress.

In addition, WordPress links easily to Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, ensuring that your nonprofit gets the exposure it needs. And deserves.

Please, do check out our nonprofit link for additional information on how to get the most from your Internet presence.