Over the past six weeks, I've been creating a marketing design that uses this blog, social networks (e.g. Facebook, Plaxo, etc), a CRM platform (salesforce.com) and email service providers (e.g. Vertical Response, SilverPOP, etc.).  The purpose is to create a solution that in an automated fashion acquires new customers for small to mid-size business owners.  Of course the design can work for departments of large companies just as well, but my focus has been on small companies.  In fact, adventure travel and eco-tourism has been in my head as I've created this design?  Why these businesses?  Because they are highly experiential and lend themselves well to the nature of social networking.

Anyway, moving on to saleforce.com.  I decided to use this CRM platform because of their large footprint among small business owners.  Also, because I have some prior experience as a user for Fortune 1000 type clients.  So, in the last six weeks, I signed up for my free trial, upgraded to a free developer version, upgraded again to the Professional version and upgraded again to the Enterprise Edition.  So what's a one man company doing with an Enterprise license of a CRM application?

Building out workflows, email templates, doing database imports, etc.  It turns out that in order to create a long series of automated communications to my customers I needed the Enterprise Edition.  Go figure.  One person, one seat, one license.  So, Enterprise Editions for all you software lovers has more to do with functional needs than it has to do with the size of the company.  Not always, but in this case it did.

So, the design is done and I spent less than a day building out the workflow processes, testing and making sure it works.  Pretty cool if you ask me... my blog, Facebook, my web site and salesforce.com all tied together in a seamless marketing process.  One that kicks out a series of communications for the next 4-12 months.

Now, all I need is somebody that needs this stuff...