With more and more customers establishing Saleforce.com as their marketing database, Dreamforce 2009 was a great opportunity to get tuned in to what Salesforce.com is planning for the marketing automation community. There was plenty of buzz, tons of vendors, and Colin Powell (a highlight of the conference). Read the Twitter stream at #df09 to get the personality of the show. I am going to focus on what I think were the key marketing automation takeaways.

Chatter – Chatter is the name for the new Salesforce.com Community Cloud, also referred to as the social network for the enterprise. Chatter looks a lot like Facebook, and allows you to watch conversations and post comments, and follow not only people, but other Salesforce.com objects. Marc Benioff’s vision (paraphrased) is to allow you to be as aware of what your co-workers are doing as you are of your friends. What was really interesting to me was that although the build up for Chatter by the Salesforce team was enormous, the reaction by the crowd was, how do I say this, subdued. My informal survey found no one that had identified a compelling business case for rolling it out. So why does it matter to a marketer? Because if Salesforce.com thinks it is important, it would probably be wise to keep your eye on it. Here is a pretty good post (Salesforce Chatter: Social operating systems emerge on the IT stage) that came out the day of the announcement that provides a nice perspective.

Campaign Management Features – There are a couple of useful marketing tools that have been released over the last 6 months that I think have some positive impact for marketers.

Campaign Member Types – Do want to capture different information based on the type of tactic that you are using in your campaign (what do emails, events, and web site traffic have in common – almost nothing)? Putting all those custom fields on your campaigns gives you a sea of empty fields in your user interface. Campaign Types are basically record types that allow you to assign specific page layouts to each type, and control the Campaign Member status pick list as well. Use this to capture more data without creating a usability problem.

Campaign Influence – Which is more important, the first campaign a lead responded to, or the campaign that caused them to convert? I don’t know and neither do you. The better approach is to make sure you can look at all of the influences that your customers and prospects have experienced and do tons of analysis to look for trends. Campaign Influence is all of the Campaign Member history that is associated with your contacts. If you tie weighting and scoring to each of these influences you can slice and dice the relationship between your contacts’ over all engagement with the resulting buying decisions in any  number of ways. By the way, Jason Stewart of Demandbase did a nice job of explaining this, and he also has a great blog (Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation demandblog) that you should add to your regular reading.

Communities – Salesforce has provided a number of tools that can be combined to make a Salesforce based community platform a very attractive option for deploying an on line community. Salesforce showed their own community site, developed on the Salesforce cloud platform using such features as Ideas, Real Time Sites, and Programmable Cloud Logic. If you are anxious to begin communicating with your customers, but don’t have a place on your website to send them, you may not be as far away as you think. Look into the Force.com development platform as an alternative to expensive web development projects and start building your own online community by yourself, quickly and cheaply.

Salesforce is a great platform for using automation to develop more effective marketing to your customers throughout the customer lifecycle. With the momentum on display at Dreamforce 2009, both from Salesforce and its partners, the marketing community that uses Salesforce.com is in a very good place.

Take a look at the online demonstration of the Right On Interactive marketing automation solution: 5Buckets for Appexchange