Last week we released a new feature in 5Buckets. It integrates four different applications - RegOnline, RingLead, Salesforce.com and ExactTarget. RegOnline is a event registration application. You can use RegOnline to let your customers and prospects register for your conferences or road-shows etc. Salesforce.com is of course a premier CRM application; RingLead is a product that goes along with Salesforce.com to de-duplicate Contacts or Leads before they are stored in Salesforce.com. ExactTarget is an email marketing tool.

Our customer approached us with the problem that the registrant data captured in RegOnline was silo-ed off in RegOnline. Instead they wanted to move that data to their CRM database - Salesforce.com. Additionally they wanted to use ExactTarget to send out confirmation and reminder emails. And to complicate things further, they wanted to use RingLead to de-dup information going in to Salesforce.com.

The solution is new functionality in 5Buckets under the “Triggers” feature. As soon as a registrant signs-up in RegOnline, RegOnline triggers an event in 5Buckets. 5Buckets then in turn makes an API call to RegOnline and retrieves the registration information. This information is then passed on to RingLead to add or update in Salesforce.com. Once that is complete, 5Buckets then invokes a ExactTarget API call to send a confirmation email to the registrant.

The beauty of this solution is two-fold: data is near-instantly captured in to customer’s CRM database allowing the sales team to know that their customer or prospect just signed up for an event. And secondly, data is now in a central database. Marketing can setup further communications with customer over time such as sending reminder emails or updates about events.

A couple of weeks ago I was at a client site doing ExactTarget API consulting. This client is standardizing on ExactTarget as their single source of all e-mail communications from three of their internal applications. They will use 5Buckets for the automation in certain cases, but also needed to develop their own integration with ExactTarget directly.

One of the developers posed me a question about “filters” in the ExactTarget web service. You can use
simplefilterpart() to specify what data point you want to filter on, and of course the value. For example, to filter on CustomerKey -

SimpleFilterPart sfp = new SimpleFilterPart();
sfp.Property = “CustomerKey”;
sfp.SimpleOperator = SimpleOperators.equals;
sfp.Value = new string[] { “TransactionalSendKey” };

Here you are first creating an instance of SimpleFilterPart. Then indicating that you want to filter using “CustomerKey”, indicating the operator and finally the value of the CustomerKey.

Now, if you have two filter criteria, you create two instances of the SimpleFilterPart and join the two using ComplexFilterPart (see code example in the Webserivces API guide, pg. 36)

Going back to the question that came up at client site - they wanted to know how they would add a third filter criteria. Well, it’s simple enough. Create a third instance of SimpleFilterPart and set the property and values as appropriate. Then create another instance of a ComplexFilterPart and assign you first ComplexFilterPart to the LeftOperand and the third SimpleFilterPart to the RightOperand.

ComplexFilterPart ComplexFilter2 = new ComplexFilterPart();
ComplexFilter2.LeftOperand = ComplexFilter1;
ComplexFilter2.LogicalOperator = LogicalOperators.AND;
ComplexFilter2.RightOperand = ThirdSimpleFilterPart;

Google has launched an API around social networking. In the words of Google:

What is the Social Graph API?

The Social Graph API makes information about the public connections between people on the Web easily available and useful for developers. Developers can query this public information to offer their users dramatically streamlined “add friends” functionality and other useful features.

Now here is what I understand of it - 

We all know that Google crawls the web and figures out which pages link to each other. Google is also crawling the web to find out how sites are related to each other. This is done using -

 a) “XFN”: You can change the links on your page (the <a href=”"> tags) to include a parameter called “rel”. “rel” basically indicates how is the linked site related to the current site - is it a friend’s site, or is it a colleague’s site, or is it another of my sites, etc.

b) “FOAF”: Include a series of tags at the top of your site page(s) to indicate who your friends are.

Google is basically going through the “rel” parameters and the FOAF xml tags and storing how one site is related to another. And they have now made this information available to everyone via their new API.

Take a look at the 3 minutes video here, particularly the scenario at the end.

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.

I am proud to announce that I have an article published in a new book titled “Email marketing by the numbers”. The book is authored by email marketing expert and well known blogger Chris Baggott. It’s really a collection of expert articles and anecdotes by various authors. Chris, an avid blogger, public speaker and email marketing expert hit upon the idea to publish a book that allowed the best email marketing minds to come together and provide insight about email marketing. The book covers various topics ranging from general email marketing concepts, deliverability to database marketing.

I lend my voice around database integration and APIs. With integration you can continue to use your current applications, but use “APIs – Application Programming Interfaces” to extend the application. Given my history around integration and custom software development space, I talk about what is integration and how it can be used within email marketing.

It’s great that Web 2.0 is all around us and is used by millions of consumers on the Internet. (Note - I said consumers and not users since I believe that we are now really consumers in this huge marketing channel called the World Wide Web; more on that in a future post). But how does Web 2.0 impact the business world? How do business take advantage of Web 2.0; or the question even before that is how does Web 2.0 apply to the business world?

I found a very good post about this on WebDiva’s blog. In it she talks about how business can adopt Web 2.0. In particular she uses a term “community-based buisness”.

I believe that is the biggest change that Web 2.0 brings about for businesses. Customers, vendors, suppliers are no longer outside entities for a business. Businesses have to accept the paradigm shift that everyone now expects direct and frequent communication with the responsible person at the business for the specific issue or item they have. For example, customers expect to talk to Product Managers directly without having to deal with an Account Manager as the go-between. Suppliers will want to talk to the engineer for his/her specific technical requirements without dealing with a procurement department. Prospective employees want to hear from current employees directly and not the HR dog-n-pony show.

All of this is happening because Web 2.0 is essentially the democratization of the Internet. To adopt Web 2.0, businesses should consider doing the following:

1. Allow a technical writer to write the first draft of the product manual. But make the manual a wiki. Then allow Customer Support and customers themselves to edit and update the product manual; as users they know the product better than anyone else. The tech writer simply becomes an administrator of the manual at that point, validating the changes made to the manual and making sure the manual is well formatted and accurate.

2. My experience has been that a bad hire is far worse than an open position. Allow employees to blog openly. Yes, some of them may say things that Marketing or Management don’t want said. But put control and compliance in place for that. Prospective employees will read the blogs and have real insight in to their prospective employer and their prospective job.

3. Provide APIs for your product. Your product will be extended in ways you never imagined. Suddenly your product will have “features” it never had before; you will be able to reach new customers and drive revenue.

4. Let the voice of many dictate your product roadmap. Allow for Digg style voting of ideas, product features, or even company picnic locations! You will be able to build what a majority of your customers want, not just what the highest paying customer of the month wants.

As I look at the definition of Web 2.0 on Wikipedia, one thing that stands out most to me is the “social” element. All the technologies - blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, APIs, etc. - at the very essence bring about a “connecting of people”. For example -

• Blogs help people post their thoughts and lives openly to others;
• Social bookmarking helps one share what they found on the Internet with others;
• Wikis let people document collaboratively.

Now, I will go one step further and say that these very Web 2.0 technologies allow a recipient of the information to quickly turn around and comment, reply or influence that original piece of information.

• I can post my comments openly about any blog posts I read; this allows me to either agree, disgaree or present a different perspective than the one presented by the author. My comments are literally physically tied to the original blog post and literally physically very close to the original blog post
• I can approve a social bookmark or bury it; my response is literally physically tied to the original bookmark and close to it
• In a wiki, I am one of the many authors; or I can post comments and influence readers of the original content

To me that is what Web 2.0 is all about - democratization of the Internet. It’s a step beyond what happened when web sites first came about. With web sites, everyone was posting content and was able to say things to a wide audience easily. Now, this next step in the evolution of the web is this: all the world wide users of the web decide which content is good and which content should be buried.