ClickDimensions is a Marketing Automation solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.  We’ve partnered with ExactTarget because we know that Marketing Automation is nothing without great email service.  ExactTarget is so excited about our partnership that they are hosting a series of webcasts promoting the partnership and the ClickDimensions solution.  A public webcast will be held on September 28.  To register for the webcast click here.

Last week we launched our new venture at ExactTarget’s annual Connections user Conference.  We had a great time and were very excited to meet a number of ExactTarget sales people who will be promoting our solution.  We were also excited to see people’s positive reactions to our solution as we did demonstration after demonstration in our booth.  By all measures, the launch was a success and now the real work starts.

Please visit our web site and take the product tour at http://www.clickdimensions.com/tour/

• Re-Brand/messaging simplification
• Re-Build Web Presence
• Marketing Automation
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Online Advertising/Search Engine Marketing
• Sales and Marketing Tools
• CRM Data Cleanup
• Social Media
• List Purchase and Direct Mail
• Partner/Customer Outreach

As I put together the content it has occurred to me that the material, while relevant for any high-tech marketer, will be especially relevant for Integrators, VAR’s and ISV’s in the Microsoft Dynamics channel.

I’m hoping that by doing the webcast we’ll add some value to our partners as well as begin a dialogue among marketing professionals in the Dynamics channel.  I hope you can make it.

Click here to register for the webcast

Click here to see what the webcast will cover

Join Scribe Software Vice President of Marketing and Product Marketing John Gravely on March 24 at 11 AM EST as he discusses the multi-channel strategies and tactics used by his marketing team at Scribe, and how you can take these same strategies and incorporate them into actionable items for your company. Topics will include Scribe’s use of:

• Social Media
• Blogging
• Search Engine Optimization
• Paid Search
• Event Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Web Capture
• Marketing Automation
• Branding
• And more…

Click here to register for the webcast

One of the minor challenges in moderating this group had to do with having an email list exclusively for MVP’s to communicate on common issues.  We started with an Exchange alias but this required me to work with our IT guy every time we needed a change; people would join the group or change their email address and it was a hassle.

Enter  tgethr, ‘an easy collaboration tool for your group; perfect for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and families’ as positioned on their web site.  With this I can easily administer my email list and all members of the list can see past conversations.  The site also allows file sharing, code collaboration and has integration to other services like Dropbox and Unfuddle.  For now we just use the email list capability but that works well and solved our problem for a nominal $6/month fee.

John Gravely and Carlye Adler

“Behind the Cloud” by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler is the story of the founding and growth of Salesforce.com, the world’s leading CRM and Software-as-a-Service/cloud computing company.  On the cover the book is described as “the Salesforce.com playbook” because it is divided into 111 plays on a wide variety of topics including play 18 “Differentiate, Differentiate, Differentiate”, play 47 “Land and Expand” and play 78 “Box above your weight”.  Each play tells and story and/or teaches a lesson that Marc and company learned as they built their impressive company.  Although the book is broken into the 111 plays it flows very well and entertains as it educates.

Marketers will be especially interested in stories of audacious stunts pulled by Salesforce in the early days.  For example, Salesforce personnel rented all the taxis at a Siebel convention so they could ride with Siebel customers and tell them why they should switch to Salesforce.  In addition, the book includes great insights into the success of Salesforce’s City Tours and other event-based marketing which has proven very successful over the years.

Behind the Cloud is a great book and I highly recommend it.  Visit Behind the Cloud on Facebook

Side Note: Back in 2007 I had the pleasure of working with Behind the Cloud co-author Carlye Adler when she did a story on the sale of my company for Fortune Small Business magazine.  Carlye is an excellent writer who we’ll no doubt see authoring many more best sellers in the future.

• Performance is good and so far there have been no service outages (~1 month in production)
• BPOS is inexpensive ($5/user/month for Exchange online)
• No more VPN for corporate email
• You can use Outlook on your home, office or Windows mobile devices with no differences in data or functionality
• There is a lightweight Microsoft Online Services sign-in application that must be installed on computers running BPOS. However, this is quick and easy to install
• Microsoft Outlook Web Access is available when using Exchange Online so you can get to your email from any browser

So far, so good for BPOS. For anyone managing an on-premise Exchange server BPOS is worth a look.

-          Listen to conversations about their products, brand and market

-          Engage those talking in meaningful dialogue

-          Develop intelligence about those people (very cool – it builds a contact database with intelligence about preferences, social media participation, etc.)

-          Promote to those people in a targeted, tailored and permission based fashion

-          Measure the effectiveness of those promotions

If I were running a consumer brand I would want this functionality to put structure, intelligence and action around how the community is interacting with my brand.

Is there a play for this in the B2B world whereby a B2B software company could use the tool to understand who its external advocates (and detractors) are and engage in dialogue with them?  I think so but startups need focus and JitterJam is focused in the right place with a great idea.  This is one to watch for sure.

http://www.jitterjam.com/

http://twitter.com/JitterGram

Who is visiting?	What pages are they visiting?	Notification Emails

At Scribe we are heavy users of Marketing Automation. Our Marketing Automation package handles our email marketing, web forms, nurture programs, landing pages, visitor tracking, lead scoring, data de-de-duplication and more. This is fully integrated to our CRM package so we can keep our sales team spending time on the most promising leads that have displayed buying behavior based on their web activity. We have rules in place to notify sales when a silent prospect suddenly comes back to life on our site.

You can try out the free Visitor ID service at http://visitorid.pardot.com/.