Imagine running your entire business in the cloud–from your marketing campaigns through to your invoicing, with pretty charts to tell you how it's working all the way through.
Thanks to a growing partnership between Salesforce.com and Google, that's now a reality. My favorite thing this year was Google-Salesforce integration, which makes integrated marketing and reporting easy (and pretty cheap, all things considered).
If all goes well, I anticipate the partnership extending to Google Analytics (it already captures AdWords), and that means dashboard-level reporting for your most important metrics from a single screen. Retire early, and check up on your business every so often from your iPhone (or, more appropriately, your Android).
Interested? You can read more about their integration with Google AdWords and Integration with Google Apps. And Salesforce isn't stopping here. Already planned for 2009 is Facebook integration, Google Apps integration, and a complete cloud computing platform in which you can run your website and custom applications.
That's big.
Imagine, for example, knowing at a glance which customers make the most comments on your website's blog posts, or which customers are connected to other customers through Facebook. Seamless marketing at low cost with no servers to manage? It's coming.
Simon blogs, along with the Commune Media team, over at the Content Optimization Blog. Commune Media was a valued sponsor of One Degree this year and brought us a number of promo posts on SEO, content optimization and copywriting, the most popular of which was Six Simple Tricks to Boost AdWords Clicks. Yukon Cornelius is going to use all of them in the hopes of getting some of the misfit toys new homes.