And without disappointment, it turns out that Salesforce is rolling out what they’re calling their “biggest breakthrough ever”: Salesforce Chatter.

According to their release, Salesforce Chatter is the “first social computing application and platform for real-time enterprise collaboration.” It will apparently revolutionize how social networking models will shape the workplace. Of course with social networking, Salesforce has opened up their platform to allow for developers to create their own custom or third-party application.

Not really surprised that Salesforce would wind up opening up their platform to support third-party applications. This coming on the heels of PayPals’s inaugural conference where they too also unveiled that they were opening up their platform for developers to experiment with and create outstanding products. This could potentially be a good thing for the company that just announced their third quarter results that they said would exceed $1.3 Billion – a 20% increase from last year.

With a customer base of nearly 68,000 people, Salesforce must have been constantly asked about whether they would be integrating social media into the mix and also about whether they’d be opening up their API – and the first enterprise cloud computing company has responded with a resounding “YES”.  As it relates to real-time collaboration, Salesforce will allow companies to share information through the use of profiles, status updates, feeds, groups, social apps & content, integration with Twitter and Facebook and even have it be available on mobile platforms!

The big question is when will this become available and how much will Salesforce Chatter cost customers? It seems that they’re going to release this new program to everyone in 2010 and those who have purchased Salesforce.com applications will need to make purchase decisions from the inital set of features currently available? But it seems that if you’re paying for the CRM and Force.com access, you’ll be able to get Salesforce Chatter included. Or, if you just want to get a new Chatter Edition, just pay $50 a month per user which will also include Salesforce Chatter, Content & Force.com.

More information can be found at Force.com.

It didn’t take long for someone to create it.

Not long after Twitter announced it was opening the doors for everyone to have access to the list system, someone created a directory for lists. And perhaps this is the biggest help people will find to showing what lists are popular and which ones they should follow. Here’s how it works:

If you have a list that you want to share and help people find, then you can add that to the Listorious database. So if you’ve amassed a Twitter list of people you know are masters of the Rubik cube, for example, then you can include that simply by adding it to the website. If you aren’t submitting a list, then perhaps you might be more interested in finding a list of Twitter users who fall in a certain category? Perhaps a list of influencers in a particular industry? Listorious allows you to search in a variety of categories: people’s names, list name or a particular tag.

Listorious will let any business user who might be trying to reach out to influencers and personalities take their search up to the next level. It might be interesting to find the diamond in the rough when it comes to your search -when I’ve been searching for online video influencers, for example, I already had the usual suspects such as Robert Scoble, Veronica Belmont, Cali Lewis, etc., but I did find some other interesting people on a video list that I might not have been able to find otherwise.

This tool is probably pretty good to help do some research on a particular brand or individual to see how many lists they may be on. Yes, you can obviously go to their respective Twitter pages, but having that particular list added to Listorious seems to add a hint more credibility to show how many other folks are following it – perhaps showing some significance? Maybe this service is an Twitter version of AllTop as well? From the get-go, you’re able to see a litany of lists on the website segmented by category, including: news lists, art, sports, food, celebrities, politics, health, humor, charity and finance.

Twitter lists seems to have such far-reaching implications, beyond simply organizing your own followings. In fact, it’s able to allow you to track those whom you think are all talking a similar point or have a common interest. For me, I attend a lot of conferences and I’d love to follow some of those people who are also attending to get their thoughts on the sessions. If someone creates a Twitter list of those going, then perhaps I’ll be more inclined to follow it back once I find it on Listorious and then will be kept abreast on what people are tweeting – then perhaps will get the most out of the event. And it doesn’t have to be conferences either. It could be any major event, such as an election or sporting event or perhaps unfortunately, a disaster.

In all aspects of its functionality, Listorious gives users a directory of pundits, regardless of the event or topic…and you’re going to be able to find it easily through this website.

Organized by event producer extraordinaire, Krystyl Baldwin, and Mashable co-editor Ben Parr, a group of about a dozen technology influencers made their way to the San Francisco Zoo. The event took an interesting twist, however, when the organizers were contacted by the zoo. Not by phone or by email. Instead, it was via Twitter – the microblogging application that has taken the Internet by storm.

Using the Twitter handle @sfzoo, it appeared that the San Francisco Zoo was taking Twitter very seriously and after meeting some of the people behind the Twitter identity, it was apparent that they’re looking to dive further into it having a bigger impact in bringing in more customers to the attraction. Through this connection, the group was able to gain a private viewing of their penguin exhibit and even received a behind-the-scenes tour of their bird/aviary area where the hit of the day was meeting Sequoia, the zoo’s bald eagle who remains in their care after being struck by a bullet.

The San Francisco Zoo seems to be really dedicated to trying to find ways to make Twitter work for their business. With a team of at least three people, the @sfzoo account stands to reach out to help educate people about the latest news happening in the park, whether it’s about the animals or anything else. A fun fact that they told us was that in order to garner more attention towards their Twitter account, they engaged in a contest with the National Zoo in Washington, DC to see who could get to 5,000 followers the fastest. Unfortunately, due to the power of the National Zoo & its relation with the Smithsonian Institution, the SF Zoo failed in its bid to beat the National Zoo to 5,000 followers.

Nevertheless, the SF Zoo is looking to expand its reach using the social site and thanks to Mashable co-editor Ben Parr, here’s a video from one of the animal caretakers, Anthony Brown – who also happens to be one of the people behind @sfzoo:

We are definitely moving into a cash-less society as is apparent by everything being done digitally. PayPal hopes that by making it easier for developers to integrate its system into their applications through the API, then more people will use PayPal for e-commerce processing. And why not? During the first day’s opening keynote (which lasted about three hours), several people talked about the success of PayPal and what this new movement will result in. Surprisingly, they even brought out several companies on stage to showcase their successful integration. The customer testimonials were a pretty powerful example that the API can lead to success stories.

Other noted items at the PayPal X Innovate Conference include updated enhancements to its Adaptive Payments API including: (source eBayInk Blog)

Currency conversion: Fast, easy global payment apps, automatically converting currencies using current exchange rates.

Pay Anyone: For financial and other institutions to let their customers send money when logged in to their bank accounts. Their customers won’t need a PayPal account to use the service.

Pre-approvals: Enables developers to create reusable payments agreements between buyers and sellers. While payment approval happens online, the actual money movement can occur offline at different intervals, and through multiple devices that are not necessarily Internet-connected at the time.

Send Money: Developers can build person-to-person (P2P) solutions or business-to-business (B2B) payment applications on their platform of choice – whether it’s the mobile phone or a social networking site.

Chained Payments: Developers can take a cut or distribute funds from PayPal payments as they happen.

Parallel payments: Developers can enable buyers to send money to several people in one payment, which is ideal for purchasing multiple items from different sellers, or even for payroll applications.

PayPal has even updated its Services Payments platform by making it a bit easier for companies and developers using their API. The new structured pricing is now a flat fee of 50 cents for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, “with a three-day settlement period; or a 0.75 percent fee for service transactions funded by a bank account or PayPal account balance, with instant settlement.”

And not to make it seem as if PayPal was going to leave the developers out in the cold, the company also announced the launch of a new website dedicated to supporting these development efforts. Known as X.com, this social network/resource website will house any and all documentation needed to make integration easier and even has the ability to connect developers to one another to help each other out with questions they may have regarding the platform.

From various sessions influenced by the PayPal platform where the team discussed and showcased how to integrate it in multiple instances to inspiring keynotes from not only technology evangelist, industry thought-leader & founder of O’Reilly Media, Tim O’Reilly, but also a venture capitalist panel moderated by Om Malik, the PayPal X Innovate Conference offered a great deal of information and held some good prospects for great applications to be developed in the future to possibly make our e-commerce lives much easier and better.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at the production of this inaugural event for PayPal. The setup was pretty impressive and greatly executed. Unfortunately the wireless Internet in the building wasn’t as spectacular on the first day, but the organizers realized the issue and had it resolved on the second half of the conference. Perhaps the icing on the cake was that they even announced a PayPal challenge where they’re encouraging developers to create the most innovative application and the winner will receive $150,000 in cash & transaction fees. From great sessions to inspiring talks, PayPal has set the stage for moving forward in the next generation of e-commerce and reducing the size of people’s wallets.

Let’s hope it pays out.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Kenneth Yeung.

Just what is this modern miracle that has some real day-to-day applicability? It’s Presenter Pro and it’s created by Rexi Media, available now on the Apple iTunes Store.

Some of the cool features in this application, according to Rexi Media:

- Advanced presentation skills techniques with eye-catching supporting graphics, audio, and video clips.

- A “tip shaker” for accessing hundreds of quick presentation tips. Shake the device while viewing any of the sections for a quick tip.

- A checklist feature which enables you to store and e-mail any topic paragraph(s) you want to refer to later.

- A Notes feature for writing (and e-mailing) comments and notes. Exercises to practice your skills and knowledge check quizzes to help you remember the information.

I’ve seen a lot of people in the industry give talks either on panel discussions or individually and for the most part, they’re pretty good speakers and provide very useful information. But, there have also been those that are less than impressive that you wish would be better since they’re giving an important talk, perhaps during a conference keynote or a meeting in front of stakeholders. This is probably where Presenter Pro comes into play.

For only 99 cents, users can have their own “Rosetta Stone” type application on their iPhone and/or iTouch that will allow them to substantially improve their presentation skills. Best of all, you can learn about these skills on your own – almost like a “Do It Yourself” program. So as you’re commuting into work or when you have some spare time in your day, you can pull out your iPhone and whiz through some of the interesting tutorials and self-help tips that Presenter Pro offers you.

In the beginning of Presenter Pro, you’re able to choose from several items that addresses different topics that you could improve yourself on, including structure, visuals, words, voice, gestures and practice. Once you’ve chosen one, you’re able to get more granular in your selection – meaning that more choices will be given to you. For example, if you chose “Visuals”, the next screen would give you tutorials on thinking in pictures, facts, processes, data, abstracts, using pictures, text, lines & shapes, and color.

From this point, you’re given a screen with detailed information and graphics on best practices, statistics, and other helpful information that will get you to improve your presentation skills. The beauty of Presenter Pro is that it doesn’t expect you to memorize all the facts. Rather, it has a few helpful tools to get you to recall the information easily.

Once you’ve breezed through each different module in Presenter Pro, you’re going to be able to take a short quiz that will help in your recollection of the information. If you think that you’re going to want to save some bit of data given in a module, you’re able to take a snippet of that and make a note in another part of the app that will let you quickly recall the information without having to go through the entire module again searching for it. There’s also some videos included in the application so if you’re better at visual and animated tutorials, this may help you out.

Presenter Pro is officially out and available for downloading. It’s only available via the iTunes Store and you can get it by clicking here. It should be noted that this app has already been named as one of the top 25 business applications for the iPhone and iTouch.

So don’t worry about people making fun of your presentation skills any longer. Now you have the ultimate tool to help truly and clearly get your message across.

Don’t have any objectives at all.

I would imagine this to be a pretty good objective to keep in mind. The best way to actually understand what’s being said is to just not have any distraction. Don’t set any goals or accomplishments in mind when having conversations with your customers and partners. Just listen to them talk and that’s it.

Tracking of brand mentions.

With social media, the purpose of listening is to understand what others are saying about you and your brand. The objective of listening is to make sure you’re tracking each of those mentions. Through tools such as Radian6, ScoutLabs, Mighty Brands and others, you’re going to be able to do a pretty good job understanding what’s being said – the good AND the bad.

Identifying market risks and opportunities.

If you’re always talking, how are you going to be aware of what the risks are when foraying into a new demographic or market? The same will go for the opportunities as well. Will you be letting all of this pass you by?

Improving campaign efficiency.

Once you’ve launched a campaign, isn’t it important to measure whether you’re on the mark with your marketing efforts or would you rather just spray and pray that you’ve achieved the maximum amount of attention? Listen to your audience and you’ll be able to do practically real-time updates to your performance.

Measuring support efforts.

Like with improving campaign efficiency, by listening to the crowd and the customers, you’re going to want to pay attention to how you’re reacting to them from a customer service standpoint. Just because you’ve reached out and your customers are convinced that they really want to buy your product, don’t make it seem like the service stops there. It doesn’t. Monitor the wave of sentiment towards your product even after the sale.

Responding to customer inquiry.

This probably can go without saying. If your customer has any complaints, feedback or suggestions, make sure that they feel appreciated. Social media has become customer service. It’s about the people. And their voices can be heard much clearer than yours.

Better understand customers.

Social media has become market research 2.0. It’s allowed businesses to better understand their customers in a more targeted way. No longer are people just numbers on a table or chart. The human side of research will appear and give you personalities and traits that can go a longer way to make your company a success.

Being proactive and anticipating customers.

If you think you know your customers, then get out there and anticipate their every move, complaint, suggestion, feedback and even idea. If you know that a customer’s anniversary is coming up, make a proactive choice to reach out via social media to congratulate them. If it’s another special occasion or perhaps just something important in their lives, use it to have a positive connection.

Still think that there isn’t enough reason for you to listen to your customers using social media? The objectives given above by Jeremiah Owyang are pretty powerful individually and combined, all eight can really carry some weight with customers. Show them that you care by not talking…and listen to THEIR needs.

A lot of activity took place during the first day of BlogWorld, but the next couple of days really picked up as there were several more keynotes that took the form of panel discussions and brought out a few well-known celebrities to talk about why they are embracing social media and blogging.

The second day kicked off with the CEO of Technorati, Richard Jalichandra, giving a spirited talk about the state of the blogosphere which typically gives people an idea on where things stand in terms of adoption and the overall industry. After Jalichandra spoke, the keynote continued with an invigorating panel discussion on the future of journalism, moderated by Brian Solis and featured CNN anchor Don Lemon, NYU Journalism Department professor Jay Rosen, the chief operating officer of Current TV, Joanna Drake Earl and radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt. This was a rather spirited discussion with all on the panelists pretty much supporting social media & blogging and basically stating that old school journalism needs to evolve in order to survive.

Breaking news from this keynote came from Don Lemon who announced that throughout the conference, they were going to try and break the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest viral message across any social network and at the same time help to beat cancer. The plan was simple…attendees needed to simply add the hashtag #beatcancer to all their tweets, blog posts, videos, etc and then through monitoring done by Radian6, we would know before the end of the conference whether or not #beatcancer had become a world record. Well…it did…and it raised some money for cancer research as well.

The rest of the day was filled with panel discussions on a variety of topics, including assessing ROI in social media, how to build and market an iPhone application, the good and the bad about social media, the ethics of mommy blogging, etc. What really was inspiring was the fact that BlogWorld had adapted to the growing changes in the industry so that they had tracks specifically for mommy bloggers and for military bloggers as well – which have grown remarkably over the past few years. It all wrapped up with perhaps a rather ecstatic keynote given by podcaster and host of TWiT.tv, Leo Laporte.

The third day began again with Brian Solis moderating yet another panel…this time he had quite a few celebrities with him including, actor Anthony Edwards (”ER”, “Top Gun” and “Revenge of the Nerds”), Robin Antin from the Pussycat Dolls, DJ Matt Goss, and successful record producer and artist Jermaine Dupri. The talk was all about how being a celebrity has changed with the world of social media. For Anthony Edwards, it has helped him make a difference with people in another country as he is trying to build a hospital or a school for children in Africa. Matt Goss has embraced social media in a way that allows him to get fan feedback on his records and also to help be more charitable back in England. This is also the same way with Jermaine Dupri, but he also has a affinity for looking online and potentially scouting out new talent for his record label.

After the keynote panel, attendees were dispersed throughout the convention center looking for yet more sessions to go to and some were really interesting including one about listening by Jeremiah Owyang and even a panel on influence with Tristan Harris and Micah Baldwin. If you were interested as well, a travel-related path was available on the last day talking about the relevancy of social media with tourism and hospitality.

It all wrapped up with the closing keynote given by AllTop founder and author of Reality Check, Guy Kawasaki who brought on stage Chad Vadar and some other people in what could have been one of the funniest things to see at BlogWorld this year.

All in all, I really enjoyed being at BlogWorld. It’s a great place to network and meet old and new friends while getting some insights into how blogging & social media should be done.

Photo Credit: All photos shown here were taken by Kenneth Yeung.

The bloggers have invaded Las Vegas. There was no stopping it. For the third straight year, thousands of bloggers, twitterers, and affecianados converged on sin city to hear from some of the best and brightest in the industry and learn from their experiences.

This was my first year at Blogworld and I must say that it lived up to its hype of one of the largest conferences in the technology and social media scene. It was also the first year of Blogworld ever since it merged with the New Media Expo. You wouldn’t think that the conference was that large since there were only about 10 rooms and a giant exhibition hall, but most of the time it was packed.

To my dismay, I thought there would be more empirical data and facts that I could take away. However, when I’m listening to the panelists and even some of the keynotes, I don’t think that I got anything like that to write about – but there was more valuable information that would be useful from a personal level.

The 2009 conference kicked off with Laura Fitton talking about how to be awesome that had a close tie-in with Gary Vaynerchuk’s upcoming book “Crush It”. Her address helped provide a good impression on what to look forward to during this three day conference and also motivated the audience to be better than they are and to strive to be rockstars. But, of course, she couldn’t get away without mentioning Twitter during her keynote…more than a few times.

Then panel discussions were had until the lunch keynote that featured Wall Street Journal writer Kara Swisher interviewing Scott Monty about the social media work that he does for Ford Motor Company. While a great value, the dismal audio system made it hard to hear and, combined with, the incessant noise of chatter by people interested in networking instead of learning, made the whole affair rather meaningless.

More panels were held until the NEXT keynote – stay with me here…we’re only on the third keynote of the day. This time it was a panel discussion with Altimeter Group’s own Jeremiah Owyang leading the talk on whether sponsored conversations were any good. It was a bit of a lively debate and what helped this panel was the fact a genuine lawyer was on the dais to help explain the recent FTC disclosure guideline to everyone. Still, I had hoped to see more of a combative nature to the topic which would have made it more entertaining to observe.

Day 1 ended with the comedic and marketing stylings of Chris Brogan who left us with the message that bloggers need to get out of our own way and to be more helpful to others. Nothing really mind-blowing but always good to have a reminder of the potential we have to make a change in our community. I found it a great way to end the day especially since it was very much like a reality check.

To me, day 1 seemed very much like a source of inspiration. There was a lot of information passed through and that’s what people were expecting. Panelists shared their experiences and success stories, not necessarily facts and figures that you can take back to work and share it with your boss. This is probably one of the biggest things that I’ve enjoyed about Blogworld…it adds a very different feel to it and lets you just sit there and absorb the knowledge and then you can write your own success.

Photo Credit: All photos shown here were taken by Kenneth Yeung.

One of the panels at BlogWorld this year covered social media success stories and brought together four individuals with extensive knowledge on using social media to create rewarding campaigns. Here are a few of their remarks about how they are using social media.

Brian Weigand from Alice.com said that they’re using social media to tie everything back to purchases and reaching out to mommy bloggers. They have many different blogs that they’re very active3 with, including Facebook and Twitter as part of a campaign geared towards lead generation and customer retention.

Frank Eliason talks about how people get into social media – it’s all about passion. Companies need to teach all their employees how to use social media. Frank is NOT passionate about the product. He’s passionate about the people. Cites that Zappos is a great example – they’ve taught their employees how to get out there with social media. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, is passionate about culture. Don’t try and be something you’re not. Be yourself and you’ll be well known.

Frank has a “one-tweet resolution” at Comcast. There are a few things out there that will help to generate ROI in social media. Frank can learn a lot more about a company in seconds with Twitter. Recalls a story where during a hockey game that went off the air. Frank looked on Twitter and found out that it wasn’t just Comcast, and affected other broadcast companies as well. He put the message out on the 800 number and other areas and this helped save Comcast time and money.

Frank thinks that Twitter is good for reaching out people before anything goes wrong. But he acknowledges that every social application has different uses and purposes. He started using Twitter by simply listening for two months before actually engaging. With forums, they don’t interfere because it could destroy or demotivate the community. With Facebook, Frank thinks that it’s a good tool to check up on friends but it’s not a good place to meet people.

Samantha Gammell says that the Oscar Mayer weinermobile is to better engage the consumers. Having this be online is just a natural extension of the offline promotion. They realized that there was a lot of love and excitement over the weinermobile, but they wanted to set some goals beforehand. They set up a blog, a Twitter account, a Flickr and YouTube account and just recently, a Facebook page.

Justin Levy recently bought into a high-end steakhouse where he realized that his business partner has previously been spending about 80% of his allotted marketing budget on a newspaper advertisement that wasn’t really targeted towards the right audience. Justin felt that the better way was to try and compete against the larger steakhouses like Ruth’s Chris by trying to secure the website placement on the first page of Google. Instead of losing money by 20% a month, Justin indicated that the restaurant reserved its course and now has become more profitable by 20% each month.

What is the value behind getting ranked highly in Technorati? Who cares?

Justin Levy responds that with one of his clients at New Marketing Labs that valued the high ranking on Technorati, they didn’t care about the ROI of having the high rank. What they cherished was the fact that people were paying attention and the awareness. The client was more concerned about establishing themselves as a thought leader.

How can I justify having my team monitor Twitter after-hours?

Frank Eliason says to track what is being said over a period of time to see if there’s a pattern and then also look at the blogs that mention your product or company.

Brian Weingand said that it’s good to get everyone involved and Justin Levy states that it’s now a 24 hour news cycle. Sometimes in brands, you have great passionate people – with Frank, he did everything all on his own without permission just to show that he cared about the customers and that soon spanned to be a team effort.

How have the social tools helped transform the story you tell?

Samantha Gammell talked about how social media has helped contemporize the brand of the weinermobile and has enabled the company to expose more people to it through their connections to digital influencers.

Make sure that your brand has personality before you try and bring it to life. It’s not always going to be a natural fit.

Is being first at something a good thing?

For Frank Eliason, Comcast was not the first in the market. He said that the trick is to learn from those that came before you and learn from what you can to take away. Find out what you and your team will do better. The rules in this space have not been written yet. The reason why Frank has succeeded is that he helped Michael Arrington out and a blog post was written on TechCrunch with people offering their support on Comcast’s customer service. Everything is a learning process…always learn and evolve.

Brian Weingand said that if you’re first, then you’re really an authority figure in the space. Being first allows you to establish a mindshare and can make you a leader in the topic.

Justin Levy says that you can be the leader as well. He thinks that you have this unique opportunity but won’t have any case studies to reference in the industry, but you’ll be able to speak about your thoughts at conferences and events all centered around what you’ve done.

I’m pretty amazed as to the growth of businesses during a time of a recession so it’s probably no surprise that I’m reporting on iStrategyLabs and their recent advancements into the west coast.

Run by its CEO, Peter Corbett, iStrategyLabs has done a phenomenal job within its early existence. Having just celebrated its two year anniversary, this digital agency has focused itself on providing quality products and solutions towards a variety of clientele, including large brand names like GEICO, American Eagle and even to government entities like to Washington, DC and the government of Helsinki, Finland. Just this past summer, the company even began its expansion conquest around the country with its second office in New York City where it will help address the needs of its other clients, including NASDAQ and many more.

But will wonders never cease? Apparently not as just a few days ago, iStrategyLabs announced their entry into the Silicon Valley area where this office will be managed by none other than Internet famous consultant and strategist, Chris Heuer – best known as one of the founders of Social Media Club and AdHocnium. After hearing about the opening of a second office in NYC, I’m really not surprised that Corbett would open a third office nor that it was going to be in San Francisco. What shocked me was how fast he moved! But then again, when I saw him in San Francisco around the time of FOOCamp (for “Friends of [Tim] O’Reilly”), I remember him saying that he was thinking about opening up an office – in the metaphorical sense, at the very least.

Well lo’ and behold, the guy did it…and he picked one heck of a guy to run it.

iStrategyLabs couldn’t have picked a better place to set up shop. They definitely have a great location addressing government and non-profit needs in the nation’s capital, financial and other business markets in New York City, and now in San Francisco, they’re going to be intimately in touch with the actual technology being created in the Valley that will give them an advantage in being the digital agency that truly understands how to use social media and emerging technology. What an impressive team that is being built at iStrategyLabs…it’s practically an all-star who’s who that any company would be fortunate enough to work with.

Congrats guys!