May the force be with you

Rules for the 95%

2012-05-04T22:17:00.001-07:00

2012 is here and so are its predictions, doomsday prophecy and some old calender written on stone. Year 2011 was the year of the social media where the entire world came online. 700 million people on Facebook is just an indication of the world coming out of the hidden illusions.

However, as I have been repeatedly telling social media is not letting people talk about stuff online, people were always talking about stuff, Social Media is enabling the topic that people talk about take advantage of the conversation by changing the course and being part of it.

The year 2012 will see a new wave of Social Software and more rise in the terms of Enterprise 2.0 and collaborative software. There is a known factor that not all companies are open to become collaborative.

There are multiple mindset for that, humanity has evolved from being a individualistic society to being a collaborative one. When earlier everyone had the schematics for building a spear (stone age), now together we build Laptops, computers and other complicated devices. The inventor of the computer system does not know the minutes of the assembly line on which the computer is being manufactured. The skilled worker who handles the assembly line for various chip-set for the computer, may not know the end design of the machine he is building. In turn, he doesn't know (and doesn't care) about the maintenance of the assembly, for there is a separate guy for that.

As a CRM consultant, we may not know the end business of the client 100% but we know how to do develop the things for the end users. The Business users in turn know how to optimize their workforce and help the Customer on the product. So in a way we are collaborative organization in itself, however we still miss one part in collaboration.

Trust.

Organizations still believe in building on policies. The policies are crafted looking at 5% of the employees who are not aligned to the organization. HR department is specially paid to craft the iron hide policies in which any personal, external use of the organization resources is blocked. The 95% of the organization who are aligned to the company bear this with a smile for a while. Obviously there is a tolerance to this limit and productivity decreases. People do work only minimum, what they are expected to and do not put in their 150% in their job.

There are arguments on both ends, if Social Networks decreases productivity or increases. I believe in the later, for the simple trend in human being is, if there is some thing in access, we detest. If social networks are not blocked, very few people will actually use it regularly. (This is just theory, need to verify this.). But then what increases and decreases productivity argument has been going on since the industrial age. Earlier they had same arguments for water cooler, the telephone, minesweeper and solitaire and so on.

There needs to be a change management implemented in the way things work, just like we all work collaboratively to build things that no individual can building. Having a little faith in each other can help us generate ideas that no individual human can think of. The exponential rise of social network was not something very new or unexpected, it was the next logical step from the decreasing trust in each other.

The world is re-calibrating itself in the new-found wave of communication by going social. What the organizations need now is not some iron hide policies but a little trust and alignment in the employees. Employees are the the living workforce of the organization. Using social collaboration and a little faith, corporations can reach beyond what can be perceived.

Either that or wait for a social whiplash on the company.

Newton third law of social media

2012-05-04T22:17:00.000-07:00

Move aside social metrics and the fancy infographics that make you go wow over social media. Lets get to the harsh reality, in a class of 40 people when Vishnu earned the award for the best student in class, 20 of the students got jealous, 5 of them felt their ego hurt, remaining were indifferent to the obvious. Soon the rumors started floating around about him being teachers pet, him washing teachers clothes and what not.

Although these stats are made up, the point is there will always be dislikes for whatever you do. No program can go without reaction. It is human nature to criticize, criticism is one of the basic emotion of human mind, there is no need for coaching in criticism. Every brand will have their set of 'critics' who will feed off negative emotions and criticize, complain and try to stop everything that is being done.

Isaac Newton was way ahead of his time when he proclaimed, 'Every action has equal answer opposite reaction', (Newton third law of motion). These law can be adjusted for social media in a slightly different way, 'Every social media promotion will have a equal and opposite comment.' There will be likes and dislikes for everything we do on social media. If you are looking forward to form a social media utopia, where everyone likes you and your social media program, here is what you can do... Forget it.

There are three possible things that are done:
1. Try to change their mind
Good idea if you are planning to get the saint of the year award. I won't say it is a bad thing, but it is a fruitless effort wasting time. Plus argument on your brand facebook page won't look nice.

2. Banning the trouble makers
It is a good policy to keep trouble makers at bay but banning just because they cause trouble is not always a good idea. Chetan Bhagat made the mistake making, #ChetanBlocks a bigger trend that him. Trouble makers can be classified into two parts, abusers and critics. If critics are making no sense, they can be put into category of abusers. Abusers can be safely blocked, not critics. Critics have a bigger fan base and a better fan following, blocking them is equivalent to spoiling the reputation in front of all of them.

3. Let them be
This strategy will mostly work if they are busy in attention seeking tactics. Once it is realized no one is paying them any attention, they soon die out. Obviously, if people are genuinely criticizing the brand or product, listen to what they are saying and work on it. Some of the biggest critics could be your biggest fans only hurt.

There will be backlash for all your grand effort, some sour grapes will give your agents a tough time. Instead of arguing with them with all your mind, move on. If the ratio of likes vs dislikes is fine (more likes and less dislikes) you need not worry. If the dislikes are more, be a bit wary. If it has all dislikes, rethink.
Social media is transparent, honest and dangerous. This is a one way street, think hard before entering it or there will be disastrous effect, some no PR could fix.

A Handbook to help you with DEV 401

2012-03-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

Every-time I am in a training room, there is a single most query asked by almost everyone, is there a book on Salesforce. The answer is very difficult to answer for multiple reasons. One, Salesforce is always on steroids, meaning it changes a lot in too shorter time, the changes are good and excellent, however it poses a trouble for book publishers. Any book project takes at-least 8 to 9 months to complete and going by that standard, Salesforce would be already changed thrice in that period.

Yet, still books are there and some very good books are available on Salesforce. One small effort in the books was Force.com Developer Certification Handbook (DEV401) written by me along with the great team of Packt Publishers and even greater reviewers Ankit Arora, Matthew Botos and John Rotenstein

The book is primarily aimed at certification and will be helpful in easing out the biggest trouble, where to start. Its a simple marker which says, start here. With the help of the book you can begin preparing for Force.com Developer certification. Its helps you understand the concepts in simple, clear manner with examples and screen shots. This book was written based on the notes I collected during the DEV 401 certification.

Simple and to-the-point examples that can be tried out in your developer org
A practical book for professionals who want to take the DEV 401 Certification exam
Sample questions for every topic in an exam pattern to help you prepare better, and tips to get things started
Full of screen-shots, diagrams, and clear step-by-step instructions that cover the entire syllabus for the exam

You can read the Sample Chapter, Table of Contents on the page of the book. The book also answers some of the FAQs about the DEV exam which arise while preparing for it.

If there are DEV 401 related queries you can post a comment below, ill try to answer them as best as I can.

All the best for the exam. May the Force be with you.

Forcing Opportunity Creating During the Lead Conversion Trigger

2012-01-18T06:21:00.000-08:00

Lead Conversion is a process in Sales Cloud that helps users convert leads into related accounts and open new opportunities. This is useful in preventing rework of transferring data from lead fields to Account fields. The entire process of Copy Paste is done with a single touch of button and the data is transferred.
However, on business end, the customer has just closed the deal and now the company has earned an Account Salesforce allows you to streamline the business processes by field mapping.

We can map custom fields on Lead object to Custom Fields on Contact, Opportunity or Account object using field mapping on Lead setup.

However, there are times when we need to extend the standard the Convert functionality for a more complex purposes for e.g.,
1. Transferring some related object from lead to Account, Opportunity or Contact.
2. Throwing an Error if the Opportunity is not created on Conversation

In this example I am going to create a trigger that throws an error if the Create Opportunity check-box is not checked.

Example: Throw an error is opportunity is not created
Code:

trigger CheckOpportunityOnLeadConvert on Lead (after update) {
 //Check if the trigger is run from UI only.
  if (Trigger.new.size() == 1) {
 
     if (Trigger.old[0].isConverted == false && Trigger.new[0].isConverted == true) {
 
      // Check if if a new opportunity was created
      if (Trigger.new[0].ConvertedOpportunityId == null) {
          //Throw an error
           Trigger.new[0].addError('Please create an opportunity');
      }         
    }
  }     
}

Output:

The error is thrown on the Conversation, preventing it from moving on. The trigger is not that complicated but is a good start to recreate.

Further Reading

Spring 12 Salesforce Contains a Bug... a lady bug.

2012-01-10T11:29:00.000-08:00

Its freezing cold out here. When I say its cold, I mean its cold, the cruel hellish humid city of Mumbai is also wrapped in the basket of coldness and finally after a decade, Mumbaikars (people from mumbai) have a topic of conversation with Delhites (people from Delhi) over cold. But while the entire world is still coping with the cold of winter, the clouds have already moved on to spring.

Salesforce has come out with the Spring 12 release and it contains a bug, no not software bug but a lady bug on the leaf. Obviously on the glorious traditions, new updates to not mean patches to cover up your mistakes, it means glorious new features and new things. As with the tradition with this blog, this is a feature to discuss top ten features that I find interesting in the update.

Chatter Now

Instant messenger inside chatter is now Generally Available. This is a good move towards turning into the one tool for Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform. This can be the next Office Communicator Killer if used efficiently.

Social Contacts and Accounts
Salesforce kicked off last Dreamforce with a bold, 'Welcome to the social enterprise' it was obvious that Social Contacts and Accounts would be generally available sometime or the other. However, one beautiful addition to this is support for Klout and YouTube is added to it. This is a good step to move beyond the main stream social network and also a indication that this will expand beyond. If nothing else, you can see the picture of your contact, instead of a name.

Cross Object Workflow on Standard Object
With this release many standard objects are included in Cross Object workflow. Did I hear a sigh of relief from developers? Yes, this feature is bound to save a lot of coding time and create some beautiful processes quickly. However, currently only few Standard to Standard objects are included with limitation. But this gives a hope that in future we can expect some more features in it.

Workflow Field Updates Can Retrigger Workflow Rules
This looks amazing and was also one of the most critical interview questions. Can one workflow rule fire another workflow? Now the answer is yes. There can be 5 workflow in all which can be triggered one after another on field update. When there is a field update on a workflow, all the workflow rules are reevaluated, which did not previously meet the criteria. This is a very good update in terms of creating domino effect and will also reduce a lot of code while writing trigger.

Cloud Flow Designer is GA
With every passing update, coding is getting reduced less and less. Not sure if I like this or no. True, this saves a lot of time and we can utilize the time in designing killer system and leave the mundane task like making screens to the Flow Designer. But still, I miss coding. Fret not, I am sure most users will rejoice, now no need to tolerate the attitude of the developer, anyone can design screens on their own. Non-profits can benefit from this feature a lot as it is easy to use.

Chatter Answers

Chatter Answers integrates Cases, Answers, Force.com Sites, Customer Portal, and Salesforce Knowledge to provide you with a Web community for customers. This is also a bold move towards the Social Enterprise. We also are provided with Visualforce components to create these custom answers.

Live Chat Agent
An improvement to service cloud. Using the Live agent we can directly add live chat facility to the the public facing site. In additiaon to this feature, we get separate 8 components in visualforce to prepare the Chat Agent.

Apex Rest Api
Aah, finally, Apex REST automatically provides the REST request and response in your the REST methods via a static RestContext object. We can expose the Apex classes directly via Rest API.

Dynamic Visualforce Components are finally GA
This is my personal favorite update, dynamic components are very necessary for so many things. Wait till I dump those JavaScript and rework on the visualforce component using dynamic components. Similarly we also have dynamic bindings which can bind a variable to the controller.

Tab Bar Organizer
That annoying horizontal scroll which was not irritating for so many Salesforce edition finally is resigning. Now the overflowing tabs are neatly folded on the screen, also indicating that many developers are lazy organizing tabs in apps. This is a funny update but trust me in all the above, this is the most important update.

That ends my top ten list of Spring 12 update. Some parts in Spring 12 are very beautiful and I will try to cover as many as I can in upcoming blog. What is your favorite spring 12 feature?

The Basics of writing a Apex Trigger

2012-01-06T09:22:00.000-08:00

One of the most important and common asked question on Forums and everywhere is how do I write a trigger. Coding in Apex Trigger is like going to a dentist for a root canal, you keep dreading the moment until you realize it is actually not going to hurt you. If you plan to write an Apex Trigger this quick guide will help you doing so.

The first and foremost rule in writing a trigger is to remember the oldest suggestion given to the most comprehensive Hitchhikers Guide to Galaxy, 'Don't Panic.' Writing a trigger is not a rocket science, in-fact we should thank the team at Salesforce and ForceDotCom for making everything so simple, that anyone can do it.

Enough of talk, lets code.

So you want to write a trigger. Let us have a glimpse of what we are going to build. The problem statement is as follows

Problem: When the User is entering the Opportunity, check for the Opportunity Amount. If the Opportunity Amount is greater than 50,000. Mark the Parent Account as 'Featured'.
Solution: We will be modifying the parent Account Type field to 'Featured' and select value from Opportunity Amount.
Trigger:

trigger SampleTrigger on Opportunity (after insert) {
Opportunity TheOpportunity = trigger.new[0];
if(TheOpportunity.amount>50000){
Account theAccount= [Select Type, Amount, name from Account where id:=theOpportunity.Accountid];
theAccount.type='Featured';
update theAccount;
}
}

Explanation:
Let us look at the trigger one by one.

Step 1:

trigger SampleTrigger on Opportunity (after insert) {

Trigger Keyword suggest this is a trigger, the SampleTrigger is the name of the trigger. The trigger is written on the Opportunity Object. The Event that the code runs is written inside the bracket.
The following operations are possible in a trigger.

insert
update
delete
merge
upsert
undelete

There are two types of Triggers:
Before triggers are used to update or validate record values before they are saved to the database. A before insert trigger can change the value in the field. We won't get before undelete trigger.

After triggers can be used for a much more complex purposes, like updating a value of some other object when this is updated. Or it can also be used to trigger some other event (like workflow and approval process). The events that run behind the scenes are as follows:

So choose the object, choose the event and finally choose the type of trigger.
When we write a trigger, the Force.com server automatically sends us the value that was operated on in a variable called Trigger, this is called Context Variable.

Suppose I am updating the Opportunity named 'Opportunity1' on the opportunity edit page. In the before update opportunity trigger, Force.com will send all the values that were existing before the record was updated in the list called Trigger.Old and the new values that the user added in the list called Trigger.New.
If there is a bulk updation using data loader, all the values will be in the above two list. It is logical to understand that we won't get Old values in a Insert event and we won't get new values in the Delete event (Cos they don't exist)

If the record is updated from the web browser, Salesforce application we will find always find the value in Trigger.new[0], if the record is updated using a data loader, we need to loop through Trigger.new one record at a time as shown in the figure below.

Now lets look at the line number 2 in the trigger above.
Step 2:

Opportunity TheOpportunity = trigger.new[0];

We just brought the first record updated from the Trigger.Old[0] to TheOpportunity variable (We can directly operate on Trigger.old[0] however code looks messy, developer is an endangered species, spare the messiness)

The next loop is straight forward.

The rest is easy:

if(TheOpportunity.amount>50000){
Account theAccount= [Select Type, Amount, name from Account where id:=theOpportunity.Accountid];
theAccount.type='Featured';
update theAccount;
}

We select the Amount field and check if it is greater than 50,000. If it is, we can fetch the parent Account on the Opportunity using the AccountId field. This post is not about the queries, but if you need help on understanding queries there is a beautiful article written on the Force.com blog.

Thats it then, remember the first rule in writing a trigger, 'Don't panic' rest all is easy.

Toodles.

Starting a career as ForceDotCom Developer

2012-01-03T11:15:00.000-08:00

I have been receiving queries about the future on Force.com technologies and the opportunities. So here is a little post that covers most of the doubts. This post is relevant to most of the Indian companies and opportunities they present, although some general questions on Force.com apply globally.

There are two types of people who usually get into Force.com technologies.

a). Freshers who are out from college who have one thing up their collar, we won't do support work. They brush up a few terms like L1 support, L2 support etc and do it. Again they are further distributed depending on their branch of Engineering. The computer and the IT guys have a little brush up with Java and .Net in their final year and think they know everything there is no know about computers. The ExTC and Mechanical branch students who constantly crib that they copied programs in their data structure subject and the only thing they know is C.

b). The second type of people who start their career with Force.com are usually from the traditional programming background, like Java, .Net and other languages. They usually are either forced to shift or are bored to go on bench for a long time and need the change. These people you will always find talking about technologies they have worked in, specially the Java guys. Java is this, java is that and so on.

Now both are on same platform and are confused what is Salesforce? What is Force.com? Is there a relevant career in the cloud? Do I have to press buttons on the website, no I am an engineer I can't do that? Is there testing involved and so on.

So lets address some of the questions:

What is a Force.com Developer?
Honestly, there is no such thing as a Force.com Developer, not in the traditional sense of way. There won't be a job of the 13th century development method, where you code the whole day are proud of the number of lines of code and go home. No, a Force.com Developer is a techno-functional consultant who has to act smart and deduce what goes into code and what can be achieved using the out of box features (which are many btw). There are many ways of doing the same thing, although none are wrong, only one is optimized.

What is Force.com, I thought this was about Salesforce.com? (This question is most popular, also because we used SFDC everywhere and never FDC)
Salesforce.com is a CRM tool which is hosted on the Cloud platform of Force.com. However, since the company started with the brand name of Salesforce.com, it is customary for many people to call it Salesforce.com practice itself. Salesforce.com is made up of three separate tools, called Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud and so on. There are many other products provided by them, the complete list of products can be accessed on the Salesforce.com site.

What type of projects are done on Force.com?
There are two types of application that can be build on Force.com.
a. Data Centric Application
These applications are build around a data base. There is a central database system which stores the data and multiple users store, access, modify this database. Some examples include Human Resource Management System, Contact Management System.

b. Process Centric Application
These application revolve around a business process and perform a certain task. For example, a payroll management system. It has a lot of formulas and human approval needed for the final payroll.

These type of applications can be built on Force.com. Usually you will find some custom applications as required by customers revolving around their business processes.

There are some projects on Salesforce.com where you will have to modify the existing Sales Cloud, Service Cloud tailoring the need and processes of the business. Any project built on any technology revolving around the database and/or projects can be built.

I have Java background, will it be helpful
Yes and No. Yes, with Java background coding on Apex will be a easy enhancement to your skills but at the same time, you will have to unlearn many many things about coding. The best option is prepare your mind you are leaving JAVA and open a book with fresh perspective.

Is there a relevant career in Force.com technology?
I am no tarot card reader or a guy with magic crystal ball, but for now its the hottest thing on the market and the current market reader. Don't believe me, check Google. Having said that, if anyone can predict what future holds for the developer, its not me. So ill say, pass.

Is this like doing manual testing, because you know, I am an engineer and I don't do manual testing. (Yes these words are not my own)
Testing is needed in any project and there are some automation tools, but Salesforce is not only about manual testing or button press. Again, this question is irrelevant to the discussion as this can be answered only by the project manager who assigns you to the project.

Is Salesforce only about administration, I don't like administration. (These are also not my words)
The role of a Salesforce/ForceDotCom Developer is to develop, deploy and deliver projects/applications to the end clients. For this we use Apex, Visualforce and customization. There are separate Administrators who are very good at their job hired by the project team or the client company. So administration won't be the developers role (at-least no company can risk it). Although not that impossible, it is recommended not to put your eggs in both basket and try to be a good developer or a good administrator. Both the roles are highly challenging and reap good rewards.

Are there any certifications involved?
This question is usually followed by a number of certification the candidate did before he/she realized the skills she had were void. So, yes, there are some good certifications involved in the process. The most common ones are Salesforce Certified Developer and Advance Developer for the Developer track. Similarly for the Administrator track we have Salesforce Certified Administrator and Advance Administrator. For more information on Certification, you can visit the Certification help center. They are also on Facebook.

What are the languages used for Development on Force.com?
For development purposes there are two major proprietary languages by Force.com.
Apex is used for back-end processing and building the business logic. It is similar to JAVA, C# and other Object Oriented Language. We use SOQL, i.e., Salesforce Object Query Language which is similar to PL/SQL (not that much but still) and finally, for building UI we use Visualforce, which is similar to JSP, ASP or ASP.Net.
Apart from these normal client technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript do come in handy for building that user friendly rich UI on the page.

Is this thing the cloud thing?
We sure believe it is. This is the most confusing question asked when someone new joins in. Cloud is a very basic word and has multiple layers on it. There is SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, there are so many things said on cloud already ask Google and be enlightened. Force.com is a Platform as a Service, where they provide development platform. Salesforce.com provides CRM software/tool as Software as a service.

So like you do everything on the internet? Like we have this XYZ IDE and this and those tools.
We are the smartest people on planet and use only notepad to code. Ok not, we use Eclipse IDE to develop and deploy things. There is no official repository as such but your project team can have a separate best practice for that. One thing (and this for people coming from .Net background) don't expect things to pop up after a DOT, if they do, enjoy your luck, if they don't, move on. Force.com does provide an online IDEs but it is not recommended to use the online IDE as eclipse stores the previous version before edits. There are other tools use for data manipulation and browsing.

There some of the questions I could think of now, this is a never ending list. If there are any more question, feel free to add in the comments below.

P.s. I have finally remodeled the blog and added a new doodle. Do you like it?

Image Courtesy: http://developer.force.com/

Relationships as a Service

2011-12-23T13:59:00.000-08:00

In today's world using the world Social has become the latest trend. Every company around the world has started putting social term in their advertisement. Some Indian companies have also started putting Twitter and Facebook logo in their roadside hoardings, what is to be done with it is not yet sure, do they expect people to park their vehicle on the roadside climb up 20 feet and click on them, is not yet confirm?

The Governments have woken up to the power of social media with Indian Government acting to censor the internet in name of anti-religious sentiments and American Government attempting to pass SOPA bill 2012 in name of piracy, they have clearly shown that the time is up for the government. People are self censoring themselves and they are relying on the government lesser and lesser. Obviously Government must be there but in this post social work, Governments will loose control over the information which they so dearly protect. But lets not get into politics of things, lets keep it simple.

Six to seven years ago if anyone would want to take his girlfriend out to a decent night dinner, he would have to rely on some traditional suggestions given by his friends to choose one. Today, Yelp is helping Americans find the restaurant for the evening and Zomato is doing the same job in India, and pretty cool job they are doing.

Two days ago, I bumped into a friend in a local watering hole, the place was a big one and in earlier days it would not be possible for us to meet, but that day we both had checked into Foursquare. We all are turning social, social is becoming part of who we are.

But this is not the first time humans have shared anything with each other, we did it all along. We already discussed the latest topic of discussion over a cup of coffee at the office local cooler. We used to discuss what happened during the day with our family over dinner. Those things changed as the relationships turned weak and electronic gadgets became the companions. Those were the days of texting, mobile phone and television.

The same social objects that were with us before social media now returned back. This time they were shared not with a bunch of people, but with everyone, everyone who subscribed to it. What had changed? This is a subscription based world, this time the social objects reached to anyone who was listening. Anyone who is listening.

We do not invest into a lot for social media, we invest in relationship. Facebook is leading the way in redefining relationships like never before. With the constant birthday reminders and life events reminders, now with Facebook Timeline and Friendship features. Still at this time, Facebook remains nascent with the complexity of relationships. No its not as easy as forming separate circles as designed by Google.

Understanding relationships is not as easy for a computer system as understood by our brain, yet Social Networks are reforging the relationships like never before. Tapping into them poses a great opportunity to corporation, no not up-selling opportunities to friends but understanding in detail about the customer.

In the end, the trick is not to trick the customer into buying things, it is to manufacture things, the customer actually will benefit from.

Can any corporation offer relationship as a service?

Happy Holidays.

Picture courtesy: Wikipedia.
Depiction: Pied Paper of Hamilton.

See you next year ForceDotCom

2011-12-20T08:02:00.000-08:00

Hello there long time no see? I have been very very lazy and sloppy in updating this blog for quite some time. This have been pacing around, as usual Force.com is changing before The Flash could run half way across the world and return. I missed a post about Winter 12 release and by the time I could muster courage to write one, lo Spring 12 is here.

Oh well so is holiday season and a complete new year is standing outside. So where have I been? Aah, for one, published a book to help all those ForceDotCom Geeks out there. The book would come out in the month of Jan and a big should out goes to the community and Salesforce for being so cool.

You can preorder the book out here for now, it is also available as RAW e-book.

http://www.packtpub.com/salesforce-certified-with-force-com-developer-handbook/book

So what next now? I have already prepared quite some surprises for the people who want to get into serious coding but let this year pass on. Plus some great deeds coming on SCRM front with Salesforce and Radian 6.

I am revamping this blog, might as well move it to my wordpress server. As you can see a new design is underway and yes for once, I am going to stop these stupid post where I do nothing but give updates. Lets wait for some more days and come back fresh!!!!

Happy holidays,

See you next year

May the force be with you.

Zoho Creator Vs Force.com: Round one

2011-11-08T10:11:00.000-08:00

Zoho creator is an online database system which allows users to create application by dragging and dropping things into place. It also supports importing databases like Ms. Access, Excel etc. It also supports variety of export types as XLS, CSV, TSV, HTML, PDF, JSON, RSS. All this is Googled, yes it is, but I am really looking for here is can Zoho be used to replace Force.com application? Why?

A person is always lookout for a cheaper alternative for a custom solution, a penny saved is a penny earned. The two systems were tested for the Model- View- Controller pattern and score accordingly.

Model
The things tested in the two system with respect to data model where,

Does it support real-world relationships?
Can we set up validation rules

Like Force.com Zoho Creator can create fields and forms using drag and drop functionality. One of the good thing about this is we can add validation rules using drag and drop. Lookup functionality also exists for relationship between two objects. We can quickly add a many-to-many bidirectional relationship. Creation of Database is really sophisticated and powerful in Zoho creator.

Zoho Scores full 10/10 in Model
Force.com is still 8/10

Controller
The things tested where

1. How easy it is to write a code
2. How is If- Else block implemented.

Zoho supports more like scripting code and not object oriented. It took a while to figure out the code that was to be implemented. Zoho creators offers template like IF ELSE block, but for a native user it is very difficult to use the scripting language.

In Force.com we have multiple options like the very basic formulas of validation rules and the powerful object oriented Apex triggers. While Zoho does provide database level triggers, the script statement makes it very hard to understand.

Zoho Scores 6/10

Force.com: 8/10

View

View is the most important part of any enterprise level system. Right from corporate branding to creating colorful visual and attractive pages this is one place where Zoho has a lot of room for improvement.

Zoho Creator does not allow the user to change the interface vastly, in fact Zoho Creator is probably the worst application for changing the interface so it meets a certain persons/company’s needs. It offers very less option to customize its interface, like with Visualforce and Sites we can completely change the interface but with Zoho Creator this seriously lacks.

Zoho Scores: 3/10

Force.com: 8/10

Conclusion:

Zoho creator has its own strength as far as creating small, excel based application. I created and deployed a survey tool for a group of friends. Zoho Creator is not comparable to the level of customization Force.com provides in terms of visual changes and controller. It is good to create small Excel and Access based applications that can be used internally. Not good to create an enterprise level software yet.

But team Zoho has not disappointed me, so far, and I hope they will come up with a challenging tool soon.

Disclaimer: This post is done by an individual developer and is for your information only, before taking an executive decision please review the system thoroughly before jumping to conclusion.

Being Cloud, Social and Mobile is the next step in being humans?

2011-10-18T07:23:00.000-07:00

In the past few days the computer science world lost two of the most valuable gems, Steve Jobs and Denise Ritchie. While Steve jobs was the people hero, Denise Ritchie was a computer science hero. While the two did the things they did decades apart, there was one common trait shared by both of them, they both worked hard to make things simpler and build a platform for others to take charge.

Looking at C programming language no one will say its simpler but if you compare with the assembly language before C you will know the simplicity of it. Looking at Steve Jobs inventions right from the Mac to the iPad, they also tell similar story, the inventions were made for simplicity.

An ad for iPhone simply states, what do you want to do with this phone? No jargons, no complexities. The c language had similar concept, what do you want to do? Printf? Scanf? getCh? Computer engineers will know these keywords, for others they are part of c programming language. Only the ones who have worked or taken a class in assembly language (I took two one for microprocessors and other for microcontrollers, how glad am I to work with force.com) will know the power c have to them.

If we have to learn one thing from both these visionaries, it is, make things simple. They both strived hard to make complex things very simple. Simple so that everyone could use them. In CRM this is the simple problem we try to solve, how do I connect to my customers easily? How do easily understand what they are saying?

Most importantly where are they complaining?

Most of these customers now are social, they are using the social channels to communicate. It makes sense to meet them halfway there, by quickly migrating to SCRM, the company can bridge the gap between complains and customer service. The employees of the company who will be constantly in touch with the costumers, will be using the smart phones. It makes sense to give them the flexibility of mobile access, so that they can work freely with the customer.

Finally using cloud systems also makes sense. We live in subscription based economy, business users need not understand the complexity or the concept of server software. There is a concern about data privacy but that can be addressed by a trustworthy vendor. Simply code in your username and password and start using it.

We are in this world for a limited time, instead of increasing complexity of the things we do, let's make things simple. Many suits won't agree to this but business should be as simple as using an iPhone.

Simple. Easy. Enhancing.

Running around in Social Circles

2011-09-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

Humanity has moved social, hands down. Yup, the war is won people are comfortable sharing their relationships on cloud. But the current social networks are simply relationships on cloud, what we need right now, is something more.

Facebook was the game changer, it brought relationships on the cloud. It got better viewing of photos, it now includes video chatting etc. Google Plus started relatively (or rather exponentially) slower, while most of the world was slowly opening of on Facebook, google joined the race and tried to change the arena.
Nothing happened, because Google Plus, even though came in fancy packet, it offered nothing different that what facebook offered or could offer. It was same old mumbo jumbo crap of relationships, chatting etc.

Twitter always was a home-ground of misfits, the geeks, the marketing guys, celebrities and the journalists. The people in short who enjoy creating things and the 140 char space of twitter status was enough for them to move on. People who joined twitter because it was the cool thing to do and could follow celebrities, did move on to Google Plus but it was momentarily. Twitter was the game changer, a democratic broadcasting platform for the people where the past or the future did not matter and the entire focus remained at the moment. It was a game changer.

So the battle is won, dictators are falling down, corruption is being fought. People are using social channels to buy, sell, recommend products. What now?

Now, we have millions of us on the social network, it is time someone puts it into sense into it. Can social Media be used there as a web 2.0 thingy to be one of the medium of communication or can we take it further as the next set of evolution?

Like the Toyota Friend, is a game changer, social media for cars, the possibilities are enormous, for example, your car could send you an alert when its battery needs recharging, and you would be able to connect to your dealership to get maintenance tips and service information. Taking it further, Toyota friend can also be incorporated with the foursquare network to checkin into places, announce parties. (No idea if this works, it just occurred to me)

Facebook Social Plugins is a good step forward for developers to incorporate the social network in their own products, however just sharing data one way from facebook does not make sense, there should be a two way channel towards facebook. The open network of Salesforce Chatter can be used to build things that actually makes sense.

Like A wonderful example would be Tata Sky Satellite TV network. People can actually see what friend is watching and can tune in to those things. Take it a notch further and there can be discussion groups using smart phones on the television shows right there while the show is on. What is more, the production company can join in and share their ideas about the show. Imagine the difference it will make in the TRP market. Or a Social Shopping center, people buying things on recommendation of friends.

Facebook and Google are two big companies the entire humanity is looking for to change the course of history. They should not sit down and make big announcements of UI changes but bring forget their petty differences and make things that can change and make sense. Lets not let this social wealth go waste and build things that last.

The things mentioned in this post are only general ideas to prove a point. If you are taking them further do it at your own risk.

The Promised Land of E20

2011-09-18T00:17:00.000-07:00

Ancient Egypt was the worlds most flourishing culture. They build structure which have dazzled the world at large for millions of years. But when we look at those giant towering structures called pyramids, we fail to overlook few things.

1. All of them are tombs of pharaohs of Egypt.
2. All of them follow same dimensions and stand similar way.
3. The people who build these structures are nowhere acknowledged.

Any historian studying Egyptian would tell you that in ancient Egypt, the citizens used to devout their time farming. When the land was ready to harvest, the system would assign them to build the kings pyramid. There was no room for individual innovation and hence, despite being engineering marvels of the time, the pyramids era died down with the rise of prophets and modern religion.

During the era, Moses stepped forward and offered freedom to the peasants. Moses came up to these people who never knew the taste of freedom and offered them, what is described in the bible as 'The promised land.' As described, the promised land was the land filled with milk and honey. There was no map or direction to the promised land. There was no GPS system. Moses offered them a unfamiliar freedom away from the rigid slavery of the pharaoh, all he asked in return was a little faith.

Faith is very important when if you look at the Social Media and the E20 model. Faith is a two sided sword, that needs 2 people to trust each other and, if not, both of them fails. When Moses asked people to have faith and risk their lives to the journey of the promised land, it also required him to trust them to accompany him without question in the unmarked territory. He also had to trust them, that they won't rat him out to the system or the Pharaoh.

If there is a road map of E20 in the organization, the first step is that is that the organization have faith in the employees. That is of foremost important. When we recognize every individual with his own aspirations and struggle towards a single goal, we get much closer in getting that goal.

Every individual should be given a vision of the promised land, not only the organization is benefiting from it, also the individual aspirations and ambitions are considered along the journey. There is a clearly marked road-map that we are on the journey to the promised land and everyone is important, respected and irrespective of their designation, is part of the entire journey.

The shallow feeling of job satisfaction slowly will reduce in the employees and more and more policies and ideas give them the bigger picture of the entire system. Now, they should not work with the organization for money but because it is the right thing to do.

As the organization, the new vision statement is the promised land and they should create the promised land for the clients, for the employees all in one statement. The big vision statement or the promised land of the organization should also be explained to the junior most member in the organization his promised land, that can include specific perks, popularity or even promotion.

By taking in consideration of everyone promised land, the new Moses sets up the imagination of the entire organization working for the final goal to the organizations promised land. Now, the organization can build engineering marvels like the pyramids, not because people have to, but because they want to. Thus making the organization much more stronger and to stand the test of time.

This new organization will be SocialBiz or E20.

May the force be with you

2011-09-09T13:34:00.000-07:00

There was a time when I used to flash my light saber in a cool Jedi style writing code, customizing things. I used to attend every release and even predict things that would come. I used to proudly tell people, 'Aah that can be done, oh no this is a workaround,' and other flashy things.

But, all good things come to an end. With so many features coming in with Winter 12, I have no idea which way I should begin with. Now, I am looking for Sensei.

I have to learn Chatter, Ruby, Heroku, Mobile Apps, Rest API. Sigh, this is a general cribbing as I open the long length of document to plumb through the Winter 12 release note.

Chatter will be over in a jiffy, Ruby book is purchased, I love Android and REST all is fine. So let me fold my sleeves and get into the release notes and as the tradition older than S-controls, will come up with the geeky my favorite winter 12 feature blog post next.

Hopefully will do it before the next release.

Vallah.
Thanks for listening.

Reaching 500 million friends

2011-09-06T12:09:00.000-07:00

You may despise it, you may hate it, you may say its a fad or a fashion trend. But whatever you may do, you cannot ignore it. For the first time in the history of human civilization has the top few, who believed in controlling the system through devious means of information control, are running for cover.

If you scan the daily news papers, there are paragraphs written over a single 140 characters line by some celebrity. The bottom line, we are changing the way we look at things due to these hammering of social media. Social media is no different that word of mouth, there were countless email forwards back in the old Yahoo days. However, email was a private affair the spread of information was linear, however in social media, the spread of information is cumulative making it more effective and blown up exponentially.

This pattern can be shown in a graph as below

Ideally both email and social media reached the same number of users but unlike in email, in social media you can track the number of responses or you can track the number of users reached. This trend is seen in open social networks.

In email there was a leap of faith, that the email would somehow learn ninja skills, bypass the spam filters, enter the inbox and if the subject was not attractive the user would get distracted. Also remember back in those days 1 Mb of email service was something like a pot of Gold. So there was a guaranteed shot that the email would go deleted as it was seen as marketing ploy.

Also in email marketing, the marketing was a private affair, so we could make a giant leaps with the messages. Some people would simply choose to ignore the loudness of email or some would be attracted to it. In Social media, both these people are together. You have to be very smart avoiding the first one and reaching the next.

Remove the jazziness from the email, remove the 'media' from it and get to the message and you have social media. Keep it short and smart and users will support you.

Social Media gives us the channels to check exactly how many users have we reached. Trends prove if the marketing strategy is working. A great quote I read today on twitter by @neha707, Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip. I say, with social media, you have to market in such a way only.

Of-course, these are my views, what are yours?

Salesforce.com social and mobile offerings from Dreamforce

2011-09-02T22:24:00.000-07:00

Did you see the tweets of #DF11 in your timeline? Did you happen to see large posters of Microsoft, balloons of Oracle floating around in Sfo? If you still didn't know what was going on, it was Salesforce.com annual Dreamforce conference, which this year saw nearly 45,000 people registering for the event from over 60 countries, according to a Salesforce media statement. This turned to be the largest conference in the software industry. Obviously, if you have anything to do with Salesforce, you would know all this. If you are not, you have definitely heard of it.

It was a futuristic step to deploy a enterprise based CRM on Cloud and yet even after a decade, Salesforce keeps itself way way ahead of the competitors (are there any left now?) in again releasing a futuristic enterprise application.

The key take away from the entire Dreamforce 2011 conference was social and mobile. Salesforce opening the gates for a full fledged enterprise SCRM, where conversation and your leads rest in the same cloud. This Dreamforce, as with all the Dreamforce some more amazing new products where launched.

Social Apps:

1. Chatter Now: Chatter now is a real time chat feature for customers using Chatter. A good idea and many clients were asking for this feature.

2. Chatter Customer Groups: This is a unique concept, users can invite customers and clients in a secure and private chatter.

3. Chatter Approvals: Approval process now have context, where you can upload document and comments at all steps. What is more, users can approve records directly from chatter without leaving it. This is good because chatter feeds is easily available and I can just think of all the possibilities of manipulating the feed into the array of devices. Oh wait, there are already chatter apps on all the platform.

4. Chatter Connect: Chatter connect is a REST Api that can be easily used to integrate into third party applications. It can be used to make any custom mobile app and enterprise app social. Now, that is something very interesting. They also introduced, Chatter for sharepoint, finally lets hope sharepoint is a less boring and interesting.

5. Heroku for Java: The only drawback of Apex and Visualforce was that, it never received a good response from the developer community at large. It is understandable because normally developers look for big, big programming codes and apex achieves a lot in very less code. So with Heroku for Java developers, Salesforce is trying to get approval from the developer community. Heroku is amazing.

Mobile:
1. Touch.salesforce.com: The world is going touch, Salesforce is no different and they also launched a touch version of CRM. One very good feature of touch system is, it works online as well as offline. Also, existing mobile applications will automatically mobile ported plus developers can create robust mobile application.

2. Seesmic CRM for Android: This is not exactly a Salesforce product announcement but a announcement by Salesforce partner, Seesmic. Seesmic has always provided amazing social apps (they were also the one to provide a mobile app for Ning network) and now they have come with complete Salesforce CRM for android. I have used it and it looks amazing for now. Will come with a detailed report soon.

Data:
1. Data.com: I really want to know where they get these domains or how much they pay for it. But Salesforce has launched Data as a Service, Data.com which provides customer data from Jigsaw and D&B. Its just jigsaw with a fancy new domain name.

2. Database.com: Database.com is now generally available, anyone can use it and create a database on cloud, which is also mobile and social.

3. Database.com Data Residency Option: Salesforce.com has taken a step down with this announcement. Database.com does not fully run on public cloud but users now have option to take the data with them on their private servers. Giving a sense of hybrid cloud for their use.

These are pretty interesting product announcement by Salesforce. The company has again proved its way ahead of its competitors. There were other announcement also, like Siteforce now generally available soon etc.

The Missing Link in Social media

2011-09-01T04:38:00.000-07:00

In India there is a famous saying, 'Not all fingers on your hands are of the same size.' It simply suggests that no two human beings are same. We all think differently, we all have different aspirations. When it comes to social media sites, the world is roughly classified as the battle between Facebook, twitter and Google plus.

I have repeated this since beginning, Social media is not new, people were social like this before. If human being is nothing but only social. We used to gather around bonfire, gather near water cooler, people used to bond together in the rock concerts, they bonded in favorite bars. They did talk about brands and advertise there too. With the advent of computers, people have started channeling their energy on the computer. They do things online, why? For one, you can bond with freakishly high number of people that you can physically meet.

Every day some start-up does a special feature in some online tech magazine about what these social network are missing. Everyday someone writes what the current social network lacks and how it can be fixed. But I believe we all are making one big mistake, we are putting twitter, facebook on the same page, which infact is misleading.

A rough analysis of social activities indicates the following traits in social users.

1. People who use twitter are creators, active agents who like to broadcast things irrespective if someone reads them or no. They are not so keen on knowing what their friends are up-to and prefer living in the moment. The twitter crowd accepts everyone. At the same time, it does not stop for anyone.

2. People on Facebook are closed, they tend to form small comfort zone and prefer to stay in them.

There are different types of social users and they haunt different places in different social network. Bringing them all together can be fatal and disastrous. The point is not to hunt for flaws in the social network and go on and build one for yourself. Google tried that, I wonder how many people actually like it?

The creator won't like it because its too heavy to understand, to channel creativity there should be freedom from expression, this can be evident for the fact that many twitter users still are fine with old twitter with no fancy animated graphics and stuff.

The normal facebook users have already build their comfort zone and won't be comfortable for moving out until and unless their comfort zone moves out.

Instead of creating more and more social networks we should try understand each other. There is no point in creating a separate social networks for communities. You cannot make people from twitter join facebook unless of course you threaten to kill a puppy if they don't. You cannot make people from facebook use twitter, their twitter account will lie dormant even if they create.

The strategy you design for both these networks should not be same, while on twitter, updating a status once in a day may not be as effective on facebook regular updates can amount as spamming. Again, customers on facebook would want freebies and stuff but people on twitter would like to engage in conversations. You cannot stereotype people on twitter as your customers and use it as a advertising medium. You have to fold up your sleeve and get in the mud if you really wish to connect.

It is very impolite to intrude in the personal space of a person, before doing it, always and I repeat, always LISTEN to them first. Then you may make your move.

What do you think?

Toon Courtesy: www.theholycow.co.in

My resume Infographic created using Salesforce Dashboard

2011-08-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when a crazy person mixes Red bull in coffee. I wanted to create an Infographic resume and what better way of showing my Salesforce skills that using the Salesforce features to create one. The graphs are done using live data in Developer org. The about me block is the Visualforce dashboard component created using Wordle.net. Data is subjective.

The social aggregation of clunk and junk

2011-08-11T08:03:00.000-07:00

Hello, and thank you for reading this letter. There is a starving little boy in XYZ who has no arms, no legs, no parents. This little boy's life could be saved, because for every time you pass this on, a dollar will be donated to the Little Starving Legless Armless Boy from XYZ Fund. Forward this to atleast 10 people so that we get enough money blah blah blah.

How many of us have received this email in the past? I believe it is safely to say all, it was prominent in the olden days of Yahoo when email was a private affair not the thing you would discuss with your friend over the wall. I do not know how effective the campaign was but people did hit forward to the mail. I mean how easy it is to just forward it? Who knows maybe there is a boy in it. We have forwarded many such emails in the past, some people still do.

Sometimes they contain blessing from some God who will curse you if you don't do things etc. But nowadays this forwards have stopped being funny and have turned into serious news forwards. Today morning, as I walked into office I received a email from friend about a very sensitive letter written to the prime minister of India by the editor of the times of India, Mumbai. The contents of the letter were sensitive and maybe true to the fact, they contained the sentiment of many people.

However the main concern was? Why choose the name of the tabloid and the editor? To give it credit. Any campaign needs credit and the name was a credit. So I simply Googled the name of the editor to see if the name held any credit.

This is a snap of what were the top results in the name of the editor. If we observe carefully most of them are personal blogs and discussion forums carrying the same email forwards text. The news that was in the email is simply and mindlessly published on the forums as quickly as it spread.

The letter is sensitive and the people will have a tendency to forward it, which is only fair. But this creates a aggregation of the fake news and a cloud of junk which may hide one single authentic link for the source.

What can be done for it? Obviously there are moral obligations of checking what you post on the blog and forward emails but obviously if it was really to be done, we won't be where we are right now won't we?

What are your views.

P.s. The email circulated was with respect to corruption and India, are they any other email circulated in other regions?

Override a standard button with Visualforce and Running round and round in circles

2011-07-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

Are you that person who overrode the standard button with an awesome Visualforce page. Your page is beautifully working and then at the end want to send the user to the original page which you just override.

Hey you think to yourself, all I got to do to is, copy the original URL in address bar paste it in notepad and add it to the page. As simple as riding a bike.

If you did think this way, you are in for a surprise. Life is not exactly as easy as it seems, for when you override a standard Salesforce button or the link, you automatically override the original page too.

So your little plan goes down the drain and all we see in a infinite loop like this.

It was many many many years ago when I wasted an entire night in this vicious circle and decided to tell you a magic spell to help you out to break out of the circle.

When you pass on the URL of the original page in the Visualforce controller, simply add a URL parameter

noOverride=1

for e.g., suppose you want to pass it to a page, you might possibly want to pass it on to.

http://naX.salesforce.com/somePage

simply add

http://naX.salesforce.com/somePage&nooverride=1 to the page.

With this magic spell, your Visualforce page will magically transfer the control to the original page without redirecting it to itself.

Its been a while I am updating on this blog, but don't worry I have something special getting cooked for the developer community. I will be around. Thought many users are busy with #DF11 one small recipe will not harm anyone.

Toodles,

Sid

P.s. Talking about spells, Harry Potter 7 part II was released today. Sigh.

The first report card of Google+ : B+

2011-06-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

I remember reading the Google story were Larry promised his teacher, 'I am going to download the entire internet on my computer...' so many years down the line, he is still doing it. The company obsessed on indexing the entire world had their fair share on stardom with Google being a synonym for search. In the past few days

* Review scale below

Google is repeating its mistake by not learning a basic thing, no one remembers the second person who landed on moon. After Facebook beating Orkut at their home turf, it was but obvious Google won't go down without a fight. So Orkut pops up with a fancier new UI and even fancier new concept, its plus.

Move over the past and lets move on, as skeptic as I was on the concept of new social network. When I moved from Orkut to Facebook, I had 292 something pics in my Orkut album, which I did not move to facebook. Starting again would be a trouble but then its new. One thing to note, the ideology on which facebook took over orkut was the Apps, funny, stupid, crazy games in facebook pulled most crowd away from orkut. Now the mood is different and Google has chosen a perfect timing to hit back, they will make a bang yes, but will they survive it? Read further.

The first look of Plus is WOW. Its simplicity and style, thanks to Andy Hertzfeld, an original member of the Macintosh team. The UI is intuitive and similar to Facebook but with steroids marking it different. Google has never ceased to amaze us with their ease of use systems and this comes as no different. The UI looks like Apple UI with fancier graphics specially on circles page.

This post I am not going to tell you how uump the UI is and what you can do. I am simply seeing the usability and the availability of plus.

1. Plus is a hybrid version between twitter and Facebook. It is private and public network all rolled into one. You can add people without their approval (kinda like twitter follow) This might be a problem for plus in future, as they are trying to step on two stones at the same time. There is a reason why twitter is popular than Facebook and its because of its simplicity. People who use twitter for business connection and a means of sharing their thoughts and work to the world do not really care about fancy graphics (no wonder many hated the new twitter UI) its the data that counts and the usability. But then maybe, putting them together can create a beautiful firework, only time will tell.

2. You can create your circles of friends where you can share post between them (this was a feature of Orkut in recent times when people stopped using it.) This feature actually makes sense, many friends did complain my blog updates about cloud computing were bothering them.

3. The people, Facebook runs on circles (no pun intended) many people are there because many of their friends are there. Plus keeping a invite only feature for now can run into trouble if they delay it for a long like Google Wave. Its not fun if you are alone there.

4. Google has one shot at it at making it the best, once people get acquainted with Plus, the animation is not going to help keep visitors in but the content and data is going to help them.

5. Data privacy, yes a good way of making your data private, also you can download the data from Plus and take it away with you. A thing can is worrying people on Facebook.

6. Plus also merges Google Hotpot, Google Latitude and I saw the distinctive hint of wave like thing in plus. If Plus works out, they have actually made a lot of things from junk.

7. Group Huddle is nice, but people who have a webcam can use this feature, others sadly cannot yet. Wonder how many use the huddle, I'll try to use the huddle with my bikers group and inform more.

As we know Google, they won't go down. Google is always known for engineering the best thing, Chrome, Android, Search Engine but they were never social. Google could never get the nerve of a social space, as I always keep saying socially a human brain ticks differently than it does in engineered space. When Wave was released, I did hoped it succeed and I will hope Plus works better for Google. Just one last point, Google and Facebook are like Harry Potter and Voldemort, neither can live while the other survives. For one to succeed other has to go down or we will have two different sites, with different set of friends.

Sharing will be a mess.

Lets hope for Google. Only time will tell.

My verdict for Plus is B+: It has a room for improvement, this is just my first look, will explore more and share.

Review Scale:

This review scale I used a lot on Sidoscope for reviewing of books, thought I will use it for reviewing Plus.

Internet Vandalism and Twitter Stupidity

2011-06-18T03:19:00.000-07:00

There are some speculations growing on in the market about the advent of social media, Social CRM and the increase usage of social sites like Facebook and Twitter. There are quite some articles about controversies around twitter, the most recent one being about TheRednerGroup and Game publisher 2k.

A single tweet can spell disaster for a corporate if done wrongly. While this is going on, closer to home India, we have claims of cyber bullying and internet vandalism on celebrities like Barkha Dutt, IIPM.

In these events one fails to take in account the social, astrological changes in the millennium that gone by and the change in the way society progressed. We first began long time ago with colonies, a group of people living together. The western civilization progressed with the rise of rumors and threats into the free world while the eastern civilization flourished the kingdoms of those who control the information. This ideology was carried on my the colonies to control the information widely distributed and thus we entered the rise of nations.

We have come a long way from bargain days and the farther we are from the apes, the more control we had on the distribution of information. A few centuries back, India was a land of fantasies to the west, while the west was a land of white good people for the Indians. Today, India and the west are just one flight apart from each other, we have interculturist on both end of the pacific who teach others cultures to us. The information has taken a flight through the satellites and airwaves.

However, the procedure of transmitting the information was costly and those who did it had to bend in front of those who wished to control the information. Its not bad actually, main stream media cannot be blamed, its not that you spend 20 billions for social work, its a job, they have to do it. Many people do not know astrologically the gone millennium was the age of pieces, an age where we need Shepard to guide the sheep.

Then we changed a millenia and we entered the age of Aquarius, the age where information was free flowing like water. No wonder, in just 10 years of new millennium we saw the rise of wikileaks, blogging and social networks where information was flowing freely without any control. Obviously the law of mutation simply states with the new species takes control the old one starts to become extinct. Those who earlier controlled the information will not go out in extinction without a fight. They will resist the change, giving to the rise of Internet vandalism. We will see more such cases coming up, specially governments (formed merely by controlling information), news rooms and educational institutes resisting change like all.

Then we come to twitter stupidity, people tend to look at a tweet with the perspective a tweet, however we should observe it as a thought. It is a medium that spreads thoughts easily, its a medium to have your say, that can be right or wrong the platform won't judge. If however you are using twitter as a medium for promotion, SCRM or for a institution keep in mind that there should also be a complete approval of everything you say before you say it. Also, in this new information age, honestly is always the best policy for in coming years we will see the rise in scandals and worries everywhere. There won't be conspiracy theories, there will be conspiracy allegations. We need to prepare for that.

Twitter doesn't make people stupid, it simply amplifies and exposes our personality. I should add, the inner personalty which we are trying to control and change for so many days.

The social media expert

2011-05-24T05:13:00.000-07:00

"I am a social media expert" hea announced to no one in particular.

I tried hard to avoid him but as we were the only two people in the room it was hard to do so still I pretended to avoid him.

"I am going to start looking for clients now..." he said, "and teach them social Media."
It was hard to avoid him as he bobbled in front of me with too much agility, 'Social Media?' I looked at him, 'you know social Media?'
'Correction dude,' I am an expert on social Media. I today created two fan pages for my friends,' he beamed.

'Social Media is in dude, where are you?'
Clearly I was in an ancient Chinese torture chamber at the moment but he didn't know it... Yet.

'So what do you do in social Media?' I asked making a brave face.

'Its as simple as making bread butter toast...' he explained, I resisted reminding him that last time he burnt the toast and ate it pretending it to be brown bread, 'Open a twitter account and a Facebook page then keep following people and follow them back...Do you know there are 500 million active users...' he smiled wide.

'The 500 user count is as reassuring as well as discouraging dude... There are 140 crore billion people on the planet, no one actually bothered to listen to you except me...just because you see them does not mean they actually care about you. In fact a half of them actually are worried about you invading their privacy.' I corrected, 'Can you assure 500 million people that you are a good guy and make them trust you?' I asked simply.

'Err dude, even God has not managed to do that' he answered, 'What you say seems Impossible.'
'So making money from internet was impossible but Google became worlds largest company by selling keywords over the internet.'

'You mean...'
'Disturbing my peace can be hazardous to your mental health...' I replied coldly.

Can you think of how to turn likes into cash flow? Well I am no social media expert but considering the fact that minimum age for joining Facebook is 13, creating a Facebook page clearly is not a qualification to be one.

So what it? Do tell me before returns.

The human social connection

2011-05-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

When it comes to social media, people immediately jumped into conclusion about ROI, likes, facebook, metrices, IP address, sentiment analysis and many other 'keywords'. Ideally speaking, I believe all this is.... crap.

How can you measure a human thought? How can you stimulate the human thought? Social Media is all about passing a message through the human thought. Twitter, facebook or any other social network are just an extension to this thought.

Lets take two examples of the social connection,

My mother is a traditional house wife, who also has a facebook account. When it came to getting a bride for her son (sadly me) it took her exactly 24 hours to get in touch with 2 girls from distant Karnataka (my hometown)

In a social world this is fantastic, the social channels she used where simple telephone (that also a landline) and total 3 phone calls. The message spread like a wildfire. Here we need to note, getting a wife for her son is about her control over his destiny, which in term triggers a passion. The passion made her open the social channels. This passion is important. Another important example of Passion was the train robbery at Kakori. Ram Prasad Bismill and Ashfaqullah Khan planned to rob the train on Northern Railway lines near kakori. The message was passed to the revolutionaries and in the era where telephone was a privileged of only the white empire, this message was passed far and wide. Because, there was passion involved in it.

When it comes to business, we talk about system. A systematic approach of turning facebook 'Likes' into money. This systematic approach does not work on the social world. The social world is open, not hidden, where there are millions of judges, you cannot just enter the world blindly, because every 140 characters you speak are being judged by millions of people. The 140 characters are going to be modified, sarcastically commented and re-broadcasted.

We can take a great tip from the brilliant orator, Aristotle and his great teaching of 'The Art of Rhetoric', we can use the same principle in Social Media.

'The art of rhetoric' lies in 3 principles, called Ethos, pathos and logos.
1. Ethos is ethics, the reputation. Is your product or your message ethical? Do not mis-representing a fact? Ethos talks about you, the brand, the product. E.g., Google, Don't Be evil. They have great ethos.
2. Pathos is passion, appeal based on emotion. Does your message has passion in it? E.g., Apple, iPod made a big dent in the universe.
3. Logos is representation, the logical and systematic driven message. E.g., Microsoft Office, Software for people ready business.

The social channel exists even beyond facebook or twitter, it exist in office coffee machine, it exist on telephone, on SMS. Social Media is a way for the customer to contact you, not for you to contact the customer. Your message is the first way of contacting the customer, rest comes later.

Completely my view, what do you have to say?

Image source:
Img 1: http://elledecouture.com/2010/07/20/drinks-for-everyone/
Img 2: http://mssilveira.edublogs.org/2010/09/30/109/

Social Media empowering human life.

2011-04-22T00:28:00.000-07:00

Well they say India is a developing nation, but is it? Kudos to this brave taxi man.