User Group member and Salesforce.com administrator Lisa Hoesel asked me to share this with everyone.  If you remember, she sponsored the first 'formal' meeting of the year at Twisted Pair and gave a great demonstration of her company's product.

Normally I would not repost/pass on webinar invitations, but with the growing popularity of Social Networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, it is a VERY relevant topic.  Everyone is racing to get on the Social Networking bandwagon, make sure you're prepared.

Real Strategies and Tactics for Using Social Media and Networking in Your Customer Relationship and Reference Programs

For questions about the content of this webinar or the presenters, please contact Lisa Hoesel, RO’s Director of Customer Conversation, at lhoesel@references-online.com or (425) 844-3839.   Please save your seat today! Join us for an informative webinar that will explore this topic and answer your questions... Topic: Developing tactics for organizational use of social media and networking in customer relationship and reference conversations.  Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 Time: 9:00-10:00 am Pacific Time Our presenters: Toby Bloomberg, marketing consultant, will review the history of web client/customer relationship building, marketing and messaging.  Umang Shah, customer relationship and social media consultant, will speak to his experience in the digital marketing and customer reference world. Duncan Egan, Taleo, will examine Taleo’s participation in the social media environment to build relationship and reference advocates. Know of someone who would love to join us?  Please send this message to a friend. .

My Account Exec, Lisah Smith, from Salesforce.com and many of our friends will be there enjoying a refreshing adult beverage and talking all things Salesforce.

Hope to see you there!

Barry

My family collects palindromes (word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards).  What do you collect, besides dashboards and reports?

Hello!

Our April meeting will be about using the Excel Connector and DataLoader tools.  We have someone from Centerstance lined up to demo the DataLoader but I am still looking for someone to demo the Excel Connector.  If you know of a resource, please let me know asap!  

Suz smoore@kpcorp.com

We met at Twisted Pair (thanks to Georgie for hosting us!!) on Wednesday Feb. 10th.  Barry reviewed a few of the new features coming in the spring release then did his first (and last) demo for a supplier.  Alas, I arrived late and missed it.  Then he showed us a very cool quoting tool he built for Tableau Software.  He is one smart cookie. If you have questions for him about how he did it; either email him or come to our informal meeting in March and ask him in person. After the quoting tool demo we broke into groups for discussion.

S A V E     T H E     D A T E     M A R C H     1 1  We will be meeting at King's Hardware in Ballard from 4:30 to 6:30 for beer, snacks and salesforce.com discussion.  Georgie from Twisted Pair will be out of the country basking in the warm sun; but Barry and I hope to see the rest of you then.  Well, ok, not all of you - our group has over 200 members and if we all showed up our beer budget would suffer.  I will send a meeting invite beforehand (one word or two???) with directions.

Formal meetings:

4/8/2009   8 to 10 AM  Twisted Pair Solutions

6/10/2009   8 to 10 AM  Twisted Pair Solutions

8/12/2009   8 to 10 AM  Twisted Pair Solutions

10/14/2009  8 to 10 AM  Twisted Pair Solutions

Informal meetings:

3/11/2009  4:30 to 6:30, Kings Hardware in Ballard

5/13/2009  4:30 to 6:30, location to be determined

7/8/2009  4:30 to 6:30, location to be determined

9/9/2009  4:30 to 6:30, location to be determined

Suz smoore@kpcorp.com

Barry bplum@tableausoftware.com

Hello lovely members!

Last night was our first informal meeting.  We met at King's Hardware in Ballard.  The place was very retro logger hip. The bar has a doorway into Rudy's Barbershop which is very handy for those drunken spur of the moment haircuts, heaven knows we have all had a few of those, right? ;-)  

We were able to grab a row of tables with a loooong bench.  We swapped seats a few times so hopefully everyone got a chance to chat. Someone said it was like speed dating - funny!  I think there were over 20 of us in attendance.  Our budget bought the perfect amount of beer and snacks. I got to meet a few new people and chat with a few more that I had only met in passing before. 

A few of my favorite things were Per's Norwegian sweater, the fact that Loren recognized our waiter from other venues, and Joel's vintage cufflinks.  Barry will bring his camera next time so we can share photos.

If you attended please add comments/suggestions to this post so we can improve future events.  We got a rush of new members registered today and I am hoping it is because you all told your co-workers about how much fun you had last night!

I asked several members to recommend other places to meet and mostly heard that they liked where we were, just fine.  I did get recommendations for 2 places to try for breakfast. Barry and I do want to have an informal meeting in south Seattle so we can lure our pals from Green River CC to come, Judy-Dan-Mike we miss you guys!!  If you know of a good spot in the south or on the eastside, let me know.

Barry has a sponsor lined up and is working on the agenda for our Feb. meeting.  Keep the morning open on Feb. 11th.  I will see if I can get "the cream puffs" from Beard Papa's that early in the morning - or would they keep overnight?

Hope to see you all on the 11th!

Suzanne

Do you already know about RSS feeds aka subscriptions?  I am not clear about the technology but I figured out how to use them and I am not afraid to share my limited knowledge. I think one of the s's stands for Subscribe because that is what it does.  They let you view current entries from your home page, like this:

Here is how to subscribe.  Go to http://usergroups.salesforce.com/seattle/

Then click on subscribe and pick your home page provider.  Pretty easy?  I think so.