At Cloudforce Seattle yesterday, Salesforce.com gave the best explanation of why you need to monitor social media for CRM, especially in Support/Services.

Your customers have already moved there.

Do they go to Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn first to find answers? If so, how do you monitor and answer those questions? Are you able to create and reuse content? Being a Salesforce.com event, they demonstrated some impressive ways to monitor Twitter and create self-help content for use by CSRs and customers. If your customers are already there, you need to be there too. As the rapid rise of Twitter shows, you will have to be more nimble and react quicker in the future.

Attended Cloudforce Seattle today. Tons of great information and still processing it all. Usual Microsoft jabs by Marc Benioff, but nothing you likely have not muttered yourself. Lots of love for Starbucks and Amazon AWS from the Salesforce CEO.

Some highlights:

• Visual Force, Model–view–controller (MVC) framework for custom user interfaces
• Mobile Lite, Free (for most) Salesforce.com mobile application
• Force.com Sites and Free Edition
• Integrated Content Library
• Genius, Think iTunes Genius for Salesforce collaboration

I will dive into these and other topics when I catch my breath.

Being ready is the best luck does not only apply to interviewing. Check Closing a Sale: Objections by The Sales Hunter. If you are in a job hunt, I recommend taking 15 minutes to answer one of the “Tell Me About a Time” questions. Write your answers down. Repeat with another question later in the day. Overtime, you will have all the “Tell Me About a Time” questions down with the answers you want to give to get the gig. It is good habit and it can carry into other disciplines when you land your new job.

Happy hunting.

I caught wind of this story last night: Starbucks recalling 530,000 coffee grinders. I cannot imagine cleaning a device with spinning metal blades without unplugging it. There seems to be more to this story on the grinder recall.

I do strongly recommend grinding coffee at home. Freshly ground beans just make better coffee. I did use a blade grinder for years, but I was neophyte and foolish. Burr-grinding is the best and only way to go. The grind is more consistent. The use is simple. The mess is less. I have been using the KitchenAid Pro Line Burr Grinder for about 3 years. It is an excellent device. It requires minimal cleaning and does not make the mess that my old blade grinder did. It is expensive for a single use device; however, I would temper the price with the coffee spend each year. Your coffee spend is likely way more than the $160 price tag of the burr grinder. My spend for coffee at home per year is in the $500 range — easy. If you are effected by this recall, go get a real burr grinder. The replacement may make a nice gift.

KitchenAid Pro Line Burr Grinder KPCG100 @ Amazon

A follow up to an earlier post on interviewing. If you are in the midst of a job search, be prepared to answer the questions below. Behavioral Interviewing is becoming more common and is based on the concept that the most accurate predictor of future performance is past performance in similar situations.

Below are some “Tell me about a time when you…” questions that will come up in your next interview:
1. Used your political savvy to push a program that you really believed in.
2. Had to deal with an irate customer.
3. Delegated a project effectively.
4. Surmounted a major obstacle.
5. Set your sights too high or too low.
6. Prioritized the elements of a complicated project.
7. Got bogged down in the details of a project.
8. Lost or won an important contract.
9. Made a bad decision.
10. Hired or fired the wrong person.

Being ready is the best luck. More to come on interviewing.

First camp trip of the year was literally a wash. The wife and I are avid backpackers. We have tackled adventures in the Yukon, Alaska, Glacier NP and Patagonia. The addition of children has compromised our backcountry adventures a bit, but we still enjoy a car camp and light hikes with the kids. With a bigger crew, we recently bought a bigger tent. Our decision was made on size and price. The ALPS Mountaineering Meramac Tent fit the bill and was purchased from REI-Outlet.

In the Pacific Northwest, if you camp you are going get wet. Especially early in the season. Heading over the Chinook Pass through Mt Rainier NP, we found the Little Naches campground in Wenatchee National Forest. Great campground. Clean and large camp areas. Plenty of space for multiple vehicles at each camp area as well. Basically good for families. The Naches area of Wenatchee National Forest is gorgeous. A different feel from the wet side of the pass. More pine trees than fir. The rivers were full of runoff and the lupine was beginning to flower. The weather, however, was bi-polar: Warm and sunny or heavy rain and thunderstorms. The latter are fairly rare in the PNW. The ALPS Mountaineering tent was incredible in the weather and would highly recommend it. Totally dry through not one, but two thunderstorms. Study too. Not a second thought to throw the kids in the tent and listen to the wind and rain. The count between lightening and thunder with the kids was priceless. ALPS Mountaineering is not a brand name by any means, but then, Mother Nature does not care what logo is on the side of your tent.

Recently found this piece. Lots of memories. Love the green screen.

Recently, I had a problem with my Nikon D70. Over 4 years of use without any issues and then the CF card reset without any warning. Some important pictures were gone. Or so I thought. I was not happy.

I came across this Lifehacker post Five Best Free Data Recovery Tools and gave Recuva a shot. Problem solved. The price was right too (free). It recovered the lost pictures on the card as well as several from years past. It also works with hard drives, memory cards and USB drives. Happy again.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, try Recuva.

True story. Amazon’s cloud service disrupted by lightning storm. So many play on words possible, but this is the Google search engine age. Everything is vanilla. How unfortunate.

Very interesting presentations on cloud computing at Seattle Tech Startups tonight.

Jeff Lawson of Twilio gave an en depth presentation on how his company is levering AWS, Rackspace and other providers to bring telephony into the cloud. I was very impressed with their architecture. Honestly, it is better and more scalable than many enterprise architectures. I say this with 15+ years in the enterprise space. Twilio has figured out how to deliver a very robust enterprise class system on Amazon AWS. If others are able to replicate the Twilio model, the cloud will thrive in the enterprise. He offered some insights on cloud advantages. First, the cloud gives you the opportunity to determine the optimal cost performance trade off. Second, the cloud is great for load testing. Third, the cloud is great for the often overlooked failure testing. Given that services can die in the cloud, the uncertainties force better, more redundant design. Twilio is very sensitive to uptime since they are a consumer and provider of cloud services. Jeff ended his presentation with a very funny send up of the most commonly asked questions on the STS forum. Keep your eye on Twilio.

Steve Marx from the Windows Azure team followed. Personally, I have only thought of Azure as a pure cloud application type offering, but in reality Windows Azure will play in the commodity/utility space of the cloud as well in the higher value services of cloud applications. Windows Azure will run a forked version of Windows 2008 Server that has been optimized for the Microsoft virtualization stack and bootup time. Aside from running Windows Server 2008, Azure will be a fairly open system allowing other databases and programming languages. MySQL will be supported as well as other applications that do not require administrative access to the server according to Steve. Impressively, Windows Azure will offer easy scalability and rollback features baked into the “fabric” of the offering. Ease of use could be a compelling point for customers. Look for the Windows Azure SLA and business pricing in November of this year. Steve demonstrated Windows Azure by setting up a web service that used Twilio. Nice touch.

When I leave an event like this and my mind in spinning with the possibilities, it was worthwhile. Tonight was no exception.