Dreamforce 2012: The Week in Pictures
By Michelle Swan @michelleswan

To me Dreamforce is kind of like a wedding. You spend months of hard work planning for it, you get to hang out with people you haven't seen in years, and there's lots of drinking and dancing. So much goes into both these events, yet they go by way too fast.  So, one of my favorite things is to look back on the pictures. You can't possibly capture every moment of the event but it's a great way to remember some of the things that made the day (or the week in this case) special. Here are 10 of my favorite memories of Dreamforce 2012. 

1. Getting ready for our day of training with 100+ employees who came from around the world
to represent Appirio at the show. So much work goes into getting everyone ready for the big event, and watching the excitement and camaraderie between all these Appirians is one of my favorite parts of the week.





















2. Watching the booth come together and fill up with people who want to talk about Appirio, Salesforce and cloud computing. After dozens of brainstorms and meetings on how to make the most of our presence on the show floor, experiencing the energy of the booth in action is pretty #awesome.













3. Hearing Appirio get recognized by Salesforce for a partner innovation award for our platform work with Facebook.  It was refreshing to hear co-founder Glenn Weinstein's accept the award and talk about how we make our customers successful amidst a lot of other company pitches. 
















4. Getting to know our Cloud Pioneers, an award that we give out to customers who are driving and championing cloud within their organizations. One of our newest winners was the Steven Peltzman, the CIO of Forrester. Here is a picture of the Forrester team after our Cloud Pioneer happy hour at the Appirio Club.

















5 and 6.  Experiencing the opening keynote address with thousands of Salesforce enthusiasts. There's already been a ton of coverage of the actual announcements from this, but two of my favorite parts of the 3 hour extravaganza were checking out Benoiff's Louboutin circuit board shoes and seeing fellow Appirian @alliecefalo profiled on the big screen.

















7. Volunteering in the various Salesforce Foundation events, representing Appirio's Silver Lining program alongside dozens of other Appirians. Salesforce has inspired so many corporate giving programs with their 1/1/1 model, and their $10M+ donation this week to the city of San Francisco and the transformation of Howard Street into a volunteer center for the 90K people attending Dreamforce raised the bar yet again.















8. Partying with hundreds of customers, prospects, partners and press at the Appirio After Dark Party at the SF MoMA, which our partner Workday co-sponsored this year.  With acrobats pouring whisky shots, a marching band, a glowing absinthe bar and even a few celebrities like Jermaine Dupri, this party gets better year after year.

















9. Watching Justin Foster and other Appirians hand $1000 cash to people at Dreamforce wearing our t-shirts, or participating in one of our other Dreamforce contests (like the winner of our Server Ninja game at the Appirio booth also shown here). Their eyes just light up - almost as much as Justin's did in his sparkly suit photobombing Marc Benioff on the show floor.















10. Going home at the end of a long week and reconnecting with my favorite people in the world - my family. They are a close second to my colleagues at Appirio (such as the marketing folks pictured below minus the talented Kirk Crenshaw), but few things compare to movie night on the couch with your kids after a week of meetings, sessions, networking and booth duty. 































I can't wait to see what next year brings!

 By Mark Crafts and Brandy Colmer

Great discussion at the Media Industry Kick-off event titled “Media Currency: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg”.  Overall there was a level of candor about media business challenges that you don't get in some of the typical buyer-seller / advertiser - publisher forums.  Definitely worth a listen for media professionals wrestling with where to place their company’s bets in the arena of owned, earned and paid media. 

Salesforce’s Steve Mannel opened with a 10-minute trailer for the new documentary “The Naked Brand” from Questus which details how companies today MUST address the issue of ‘transparency’ and honesty in their product and brand messaging.   We’ll be surprised if this movie is not a smash hit with the media industry movers and shakers.

Author and expert Jeff Jarvis, then led the diverse panel through a wonky 40 minute discussion about the forks in road media companies face today in determining, protecting and advancing their own ‘media currency’.   

Notable quotes
Old media companies thrived on scarcity of their Content, but they lost the power to control it. …
We need to be rethinking our relationship with the people we call an audience.  We now have to go where they are and not expect them to come to us.
- Jarvis

I have to disagree with you Jeff because my business is built on that. (Referring to content scarcity).  
- Eric Danetz, SVP The Newsweek Daily Beast Company

We've measured the wrong things.  Page views motivated publishers to go for volume. The myth is tht every reader saw every reader every ad.  (recent ComScore study show approx 30% of all premium internet ads go unseen)
- Linda Abraham Co-founder of comScore

There’s been a big shift in trust because of social media … I trust my friends more than I trust institutions … we’re in now in the midst of transitioning from interruption marketing to invitation marketing. 
- Marcel Lebrun, co-founder Radian 6

It’s clear the ‘advertising revolution’ described in The Naked Brand is undeniable and well underway.  Many tough business choices are at hand and ahead for both brands and media companies alike.   One clear takeaway for us at Appirio:  both buyers and sellers of media are going to need an increasingly deep set of tools like those in the Salesforce Sales, Service and Marketing Clouds to help manage the courses they are charting for success.  

At Dreamforce, all the talk is about social and how it can transform your business. Most of what we read about social or see in research about social reflects the view point of either vendors, executives or IT decision-makers. This is great if you want to understand if people will buy social software but not so much if you want to understand if people will actually use it.

To find out what people actually think about social, we recently completed a survey with 300+ international respondents where we focused on end-users of social and what they think of it. We learned lots of interesting things including:

• People's bosses uses social tools twice as much as they do
• Brits are more social at work than people in the US
• Everyone generally recognizes the potential of social and wants their company to invest more in it
• People think culture and having an owner for social are more important for success than budget

For more, check out our infographic summarizing the findings!

Work.com is making waves not ripples and helping the US military to kick enemy butt; as Dreamforce kicked off yesterday a few attendees were given a sneak peak into the future of Work.com courtesy of Salesforce. Daniel Debow captivated his audience with a story of extraordinary change which occurred when the U.S. Military’s  Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) — the elite unit responsible for locating and killing Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan -  broke down traditional reporting barriers to become collaborative, social and mobile and achieve tremendous results.

The way in which General Stanley McChrystal re-wired the JSOC’s organizational structure to adapt to a new kind of enemy offers key insights for companies looking to adapt to the social era. He understood that traditional reporting roles no longer worked when soldiers were in the field - they needed to be able to apply competency over rank so that field operations could respond in real time and create multiple cycles of action/reaction within one night so that operational teams could drop in, conduct reconnaissance and pull out many times rather than once as done previously.

Today at Dreamforce’s Keynote Facebook revealed how they use Work.com to allow employees to connect and engage and become accountable to each other using the same tool as the JSOC; the toolset formerly known as Rypple is now Work.com. This new HR Shared Services tool is a social performance management platform that has been rebuilt from the ground up to be social; employees are social and mobile in their personal lives and they expect their worktools to be the same. At Salesforce they rolled out Work.com and 7,000 of 8,000 employees logged in and activated their account without a single email or instruction to do so. This tremendous instant adoption rate led to a transformation in the organization by changing how people work, get recognized and define their work goals (through crowdsourcing).

Work.com provides companies with a tool to align their sales and service teams around business objectives with real-time coaching and 1:1 feedback. It gives them the social tools needed to set goals around driving deals and customer satisfaction. And it provides a platform for teams to rally around organizational goals and driving results.

by Geraldine Gray

In the Salesforce.com ecosphere, the only time you will see Appirio, Bluewolf and Clear Task listed on the same page (let alone a blog post!)  is when a potential customer is evaluating each of them as a services provider. Each company has their own unique brand, personality, delivery methodology and culture, but the one thing they have in common is their ability to put aside their competitive feelings and work together for the benefit of others.  Consultants, after all, are in the business of helping people, right? Liz Kao, Director of Knowledge Operations at Bluewolf, had the slightly crazy idea that Bluewolf, Clear Task and Appirio could put aside their competitive differences for one day to work together at Dreamforce ‘12 for the benefit of national non-profit, Playworks. After a few phone calls and emails with Andrew O’Driscoll and team at Clear Task, and Geraldine Gray and Kim Arden at Appirio, an idea started to take shape.

Dreamforce is one of the biggest events in the cloud computing industry and this year Bluewolf, Clear Task and Appirio are delighted to announce they are working together in the Salesforce Foundation Zone in support of Playworks and the principles supported by this national non-profit organization. The Salesforce Foundation is based on a simple idea: leverage Salesforce.com's people, technology and resources to build collective knowledge and enable action to improve communities throughout the world. Salesforce.com calls this integrated philanthropic approach the 1/1/1 model and it provides 1% of its people, technology and resources to organizations. This results in a sustainable business model, driven by a social change mission, with community engagement for social good at its core vision.

The Salesforce Foundation and Marc Benioff’s 1/1/1 philosophy has inspired many other tech companies, like Google, to adopt an integrated philanthropy model. It has also inspired cloud consultancies like Appirio, Bluewolf and Clear Task to emphasize the importance of giving back into their corporate cultures. Each has created a system that mobilizes their employees to make a measurable impact on the communities where they work and live. For example, at Clear Task, employees volunteer 1% of their time to non-profit organizations, employees additionally provide Salesforce consulting specifically to local education institutions using Salesforce, (see www.cleartask.com/ndv), and Clear Task donates some of its profit to charitable causes both through employee matching and direct donations. Last year Clear Task donated money to build a well in Africa through charity: water. Meanwhile Appirio’s Silver Lining program organizes a  single community day of service each year where client work stops and employees gather together to work towards a common goal and are also given a further day each year to work with their favorite local non-profit. In addition to an employee matching program, Bluewolf educates, empowers and inspires youth nationwide through year-round volunteering, fundraising, mentoring, and charity events that include hands-on technology support, scholarships and grants.

The motley crew of service providers stand by the overarching mission of Playworks to improve the health and well-being of children by increasing opportunities for physical activity and positive, safe, and meaningful play. Playworks places coaches in schools to teach children the benefits of teamwork and collaboration, conflict resolution, and sportsmanship, through improved physical activity during recess and throughout the school day. These efforts result in improved concentration and learning, and lowered disciplinary incidents for children once they’re back in the classroom. They currently operate their direct service program in more than 300 schools in 23 US cities, and serve more than 130,000 elementary school students every day.

This Thursday, September 20th, between 12pm-4pm in the Foundation Zone, Bluewolf, Clear Task and Appirio will be combining their philanthropic superpowers to support Playworks. Working on Howard Street, outside in the (hopefully) sunny San Francisco weather, Clear Task, Appirio and Bluewolf senior management will be in the Foundation Zone. They will be writing responses to kids’ essays on leadership, signing Playworks’ anti-bullying poster, and (most importantly) taking part in playground games that reinforce the principles of teamwork, sportsmanship, positive play, collaboration, and most importantly, fun. After all, aren’t those values that any consulting firm seeks and should reinforce in its employees? We certainly think so! It’ll be a fun event where everyone will have the chance to act like the kids they are at heart, while working collaboratively to reinforce the common values that each of our consulting companies strive to uphold within our cultures. See you there!

Salesforce and Playworks:

by Geradline Gray & Brandy Colmer

Brandy Colmer and Rhonda Ross are two Dreamforce Girly Geeks who work for Appirio and have the whole “commuting to session” system sussed!

Check out how they rode around town in their carriage courtesy of Eloqua and saved their feet for more important things - like the Red Hot Chili Peppers gala tonight.

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