Last week we released the latest version of 5Buckets. This last release was centered around one major feature - integrating with Vontoo.

Vontoo is a permission based voice messaging product. Their tagline is “Say It. Send It. Track It.” Essentially you can create audio clips and have Vontoo make phone calls to your list of opt-in subscribers. Sounds a little intrusive? Initially I thought so too. Phone calls after all have a little urgency to them. So receiving marketing messages on your phone is definitely annoying.

However, there are many situations where I want to get a phone call - school delays, weather alerts come to mind first. But beyond those reminder of a webinar I signed up for or a company wide communication by the CEO also lend themselves to phone calls. Vontoo has a customer in the music industry. The band has recorded messages and phone calls go out to fans about upcoming concerts, ticket sales & CD releases. Hmm, I certainly won’t mind a recorded message from Bono or Paul McCartney. :)

5Buckets is now integrated with Vontoo. It is another “output device” much like ExactTarget is an output device for email communications. The “input device” - the placeholder for phone numbers & email addresses - can be Salesforce.com or your own SQL Server database. For example, you can create a report in Salesforce.com that lists customers that completed their one year anniversary with you. Every day, 5Buckets will pull from Salesforce.com the list of customers with anniversary today and send them a pre-recorded voice message from Vontoo thanking them for their business.

This simple scenario can be extended to include email communications. For example, 30 days before the anniversary date an email could be sent by 5Buckets reminding the same customers that their renewal is due. An email as a renewal reminder, and a personal phone call on their anniversary thanking the customer when they renew.

A project we are wrapping up here at Right On Interactive is an integration between Salesforce.com and a chat tool called “Boldchat”. You may have been to web sites where they let you chat with the sales person or a customer service representative. So, instead of emailing or calling the company, you can chat with a live person right on the company’s website. Boldchat is one such product that enables companies to provide the chat feature on their website.

We have a customer that uses Boldchat on their website; the chat is used by prospects looking for product information. We recently implemented Salesforce.com for this customer and customized their online quote request form to create an Opportunity in Salesforce.com when someone submits the form. Customer was really happy with the way the Opportunities were coming in from the online quote form (slight digression – the quote form checks if the person submitting the form is already in SFDC and creates or updates the record; additional data is captured in a custom object) that he decided that he wants the chat sessions in Boldchat to create Opportunities in SFDC too.

Boldchat is a mature product. They have a well documented API. So, the initial question of “how can we get the data out of Boldchat” was answered quickly – use the API! The next question on my mind was – “but chat sessions are quite unstructured”. Unlike an online quote form, an IM session is very loose and “all over the place”. There is no telling when or how chat visitor indicated their name, their contact information or what product they were looking for. I even looked at the some of the chat sessions and the sessions were literally all over the place. They ranged from simple questions to detailed technical discussions.

We solved the problem by using what’s called a “pre-chat survey”. The chat visitor is required to fill-out some initial information like their name & phone number and some other optional information. That gives us the basic information we need to create/update Contacts in SFDC; and the entire text of the chat session is then dropped in as an Opportunity with the LeadSource set to Boldchat.

Boldchat’s website is: www.boldchat.com and more info about Boldchat’s API is here: http://wiki.boldchat.com/api/

If you are like most ExactTarget API users, your first introduction to the ExactTarget API must have been a PDF document. A large 100+ page PDF document. A little daunting, not so much because of the complexity, but because who the heck has the time to go through a 100+ PDF document. Then someone at ExactTarget probabaly mentioned the ExactTarget Developer Community to you. The community has many useful resources - the documentation, code samples (yes!), forums, a call wizard, ET API experts that respond to your questions!

Let me point out one more piece of the Developer Community that I find very useful - an online help file. It is listed on the “Resources” page, towards the very end of the page. This is the entire REST based API in a search-able, indexed Help format!!!! You can search for a specific API call and get to it directly, no need to thumb through a 100+ PDF. :)

Full disclosure - this Help file currently has only the REST based API and the Batch API guides. The Web services API and the ET for AppExchange API are not in there (ExactTarget - please add them in asap!!).

Here’s a quick little tip about the new ExactTarget Webservices API, particularly the one that does the integration between Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. When you trigger an email send using the ETforAppEx API, make sure you specify -

a) IndividualResults = true;

b) IndividualResultsSpecified = true;

This will ensure that the send, open(s), click(s) are dumped in to Salesforce.com by ExactTarget. The manual says there is no need to explicity specify IndividualResults, and that the tracking will be dumped in to SFDC by default. But as a good practice I would strongly recommend you specify it explicitly. You really don’t want to be left guessing if that tracking information will really be sent to SFDC or not.

Send me an email (adalvi -at- rightoninteractive.com) if you want a more detailed code sample.

The second day has flown by and was just as wonderful as the first day. The day was full of sessions on different tracks ranging from beginner level (Email 101) to advanced tracks (Email 201, Integration and Deliverability). Many attendees stopped by the Right On Interactive booth (in fact we had more stop by in the morning than the whole day Monday). I asked several of them what they thought of the conference and the sessions. Every one of them reported that they were very happy and were learning things. A handful did mention that the challenge to them is to take all this back and incorporate in their daily work life. Yep, that is definitely a hallmark of a successful conference.

The evening was a formal sit-down dinner and awards ceremony. The food, company and setting was wonderful. ExactTarget pulled a surprise on everyone when they had the “The evolution of dance” guy perform live on stage! He was just awesome!

Closer to home, 5Buckets has been very successful. We had several people walk up to the booth unsure of what we do; but I see their eyes light up just as soon as we walk them through 5Buckets. Check it out here if you are interested :)

The first day of ExactTarget’s Connections ‘07 conference has been absolutely wonderful! Scott Dorsey kicked off the conference at 1pm with his keynote followed by Scott McCorkle showcasing upcoming Fall release. Beyond email, ExactTarget will now support SMS and voice messaging! The focus seems to be on “one-to-one” marketing and a new feature called “Interactions” is being introduced. ExactTarget’s UI has been one of it’s strenghts and now there are some new features that take the UI to the next level. Thumbnail previews, context menus to edit emails in place! All good stuff.

One astonishing fact I learnt today - ExactTarget has invested $5MM in infrastructure. Wow, I can’t wait for the application to get speedy.

ExactTarget has their annual conference - Connections ‘07 - going on in Indianapolis, IN. ROI is a proud sponsor. We have a booth and several ExactTarget users have already stopped by and shown interest in “5Buckets”.

With over 500 attendees, this is going to be a great event. Come visit at Booth #10. Oct 1st through Oct 2nd, 2007.

A quick update on Yugma. We have been using it for the past month or so now. And I am happy to report that the product has worked out very well. Only “drawback” is that there is no toll-free number for participants to call in.

We have gone ahead & signed up and become a paying customer! Go Yugma! www.yugma.com.

Last week I posted about webconferencing - particularly WebEx and ReadyTalk pricing. I had a couple of people post about GoTo meeting (thanks Doug and Bo). I have been a participant in GoTo meetings before and it works well. I really like their clear flat pricing too.

Interestingly enough I had a sales/marketing post by a webconferencing company called Yugma. I hadn’t heard of them so I went over to their site unsure of what to find. I was pretty impressed by what I saw. Their pricing starts at $9.99 per month for up to 10 participants. They even have a free version, which they said is ad-based. But over the weekend I gave it a try and I did not see any advertisements. I did have to install Java runtime, which frankly is no different than having to install something (ActiveX control?) from WebEx. Overall I have to give Yugma two thumbs up. I have not tried a live, client conference yet. So I will let you know if I run in to any issues there.

See a screenshot here - Using annotations in Yugma

A lot of us  have been in webinars and web conferences. I have attended many and even presented in one. I really loved it and was amazed when they first came out with the concept back in the late 90s. I think it must have been 1998 or 1999. I am not sure if WebEx pioneered it, but they were the first ones.

So recently when a client asked for my help setting up a webinar he could host (it is his first time), I pointed him to WebEx. We went to the webex.com site together and tried to sign him up for a webinar. The web site was really good at giving some information. There were a myraid of options but fortunately it was easy to locate the section that talked about webinars. However, there was no pricing online. So, we decided to pick up the phone and call Webex. The person on the phone was nice and took down all the information - but was nothing more than a secretary. He could not give us pricing and had to setup an appointment for someone to call us back. Alright, I walked over to the client’s office again at the appointed time - but no one called. Finally, almost an hour later we got a hold of our appointed inside sales rep. He said it was a “consultative” approach to tell us what the pricing is. After answering some of the same questions as before here is pricing we got -

33 cents a minute for the web conference

20 cents a minute for the audio portion (which, btw, he shared only after we specifically asked about the audio portion)

Adding up to 53 cents a minute. I about fell out of my chair. Client is expecting around twenty attendes, for about 60minutes. That would be $636.00 for a one time webinar!

Ok, so it was time to shop around. We, Right On Interactive, use ReadyTalk from time to time. And have had good very experience with it. I wasn’t sure how much we paid, but I knew it wasn’t 53 cents a minute. So, next place to shop was ReadyTalk. A quick call to the ReadyTalk sales number told us that the rates were 13 and 8 cents for web & audio portion. Much better! That adds up to 21cents per minute per attendee, or about $252.00. Still expensive but cheaper than client driving out-of-town to present in person.