Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Working hard on social networks

The amount of hard work I have to do each time I want to publish a statement on my startup is practically insane. Just see:
1.       First of all, I create the marketing message, with a URL, making sure it has the right length for Twitter
2.       Then, I need to publish it:
a.       Publish content on our WordPress site
                                                               i.      And make sure all SEO related tasks are performed
b.      Company twitter account
                                                               i.      And then retweet by my personal account
1.       Which goes to update my personal Facebook and Linkedin profiles
                                                             ii.      My personal Google+ is not in this game just yet, so I have to update it manually
c.       Post it in:
                                                               i.      Company Facebook page
                                                             ii.      Technical Facebook pages we maintain
                                                            iii.      Linkedin groups we’re connected to
I couldn’t find a tool that automates this in an easy enough way. Turns out I waste about half an hour to an hour each time I want to send a marketing message. Crap – this sucks!

Monday, December 5, 2011

Revisiting ZenDesk

Well, I had a chat with the ZenDesk team about a week ago (and was just too damn busy to blog – sorry about that). And it turns out I was mistaken, partly because a ticket I opened with the ZenDesk team was not clear enough.
It turns out that we can have a better process with ZenDesk than with SalesForce Support – the minute a user registers with ScaleBase, a trigger is activated in SalesForce, which can call ZenDesk API (see more documentation here), create a user for our customer – and send the customer an automatic email.
Since this task is manual in SalesForce – ZenDesk wins by far.
Currently we don’t have the time to switch support environments, but ZenDesk is great, high on our list of tasks – and we’ll probably return to use their environment in a few month.