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If you spend even a little time on Twitter, and follow more than a couple dozen people, you’re going to run into TrueTwit Validation. According to their website their service will allow you to, “Avoid Twitter spam.” It is so annoying.

I don’t know why I find this so annoying. I think it’s just the perversity of the whole thing. These are my three main issues with it:

Twitter is a social tool. If you post updates, answering the question, “What’s happening?”, you are presumably thinking that others might be at least somewhat interested in what you report. Making it more difficult for others to follow your messages seems perverse. You’re using a social medium to be anti-social.

When someone initiates to follow you back, TrueTwit sends a Direct Message (DM) to the person initiating the follow. This is spam. This Direct Message is certainly of no interest to the recipient, and the recipient did not request it. Therefore it is spam. TrueTwit initiates the very activity it says it’s meant to stop. That’s perverse.

Of course you can avoid getting the spam DM’s from other TrueTwit users by signing up for the service. This then makes you a “carrier”. You won’t be infected yourself, but you’ll be helping to spread it throughout the community. That’s perverse.

Hollis Tibbitts writes a wonderful article here (I wish I would have written it): http://socialmediatoday.com/softwarehollis/385357/truetwit-satan-savior-or-simply-misunderstood

Do you use TrueTwit? Come on, admit it if you’re a TrueTwit.

Do you find it annoying? Do you think it’s idiotic?

CoreMotives is one online service, among several, that allows you to better monitor and execute your marketing activities on the Internet. I started using CoreMotives four months ago.

What initially drew me to the service was their ability to track and identify visitors to our several web assets. We receive thousands of visitors each month to our websites and blogs. I assume that people who visit our sites several times are either doing business with us already, or could be persuaded to do so in a shorter period of time than a typical prospect. My problem was how to measure the level of engagement for each visitor, how to identify them, and how to gauge when they might  most be inclined to enter into a sales process.

CoreMotives provides that functionality right out of the box, with very little configuration. A big bonus for me is that they integrate directly and significantly with Microsoft CRM. In fact, access to most all of the functionality is within Microsoft CRM.

It took me a couple of days to coordinate with various developers to install the required tracking codes on all the pages that I wanted to track. But it’s easy to do. I installed the codes on our blogs myself. Simple. As soon as the tracking codes are installed, CoreMotives starts tracking your web traffic. This is a sample of what the traffic records look like:

CoreMotives Web Traffic

If you look at the file you’ll notice that the visitor is identified as, “Anonymous Web visitor”, and you’ll wonder what possible use that is. I’ll cover that in a later article.

Now you’re interested, right?

Wow, this would be neat: I’d like to be able to track traffic to our YouTube Channel. That would be neat.

I posted my first blog article on our Dynamics GP blog on this date, four years ago: http://gp.rosebizincblogs.com/2007/12/fear-not-it%E2%80%99s-only-great-plains-10-0-2.html

So what?

I along with others at our firm have gotten into the habit of blogging and sharing our expertise and thoughts with our communities. Beyond just the personal expression benefits, blogging has helped us develop a strong Internet presence that supports our marketing objectives.

What we’ve found is that blogging is pretty easy to do, and it’s cheap. We feel that it definitely differentiates us from our competitors, and draws in prospects.

This is the quick summary. If you’re not already blogging, get started. You cannot have an immediate impact on your market, so you need to start as soon as possible and build momentum.

I’ve been using Microsoft CRM, version 4 intensely for about two years.  The integration with Outlook is solid.

I regularly e-mail out of Outlook and promote e-mail messages, outgoing and incoming, to CRM.  This leaves a wonderful trail of activity records at both the Contact level and the Account level.  It is so easy to quickly refer to the history, and get caught up on any opportunity or relationship.

I also use CRM to track phone conversations, a lot.  I schedule phone calls to complete in the future.  They automatically show up in my Outlook task list on the appropriate day.  I can go right into the record, or “snooze” it for awhile.  If I don’t actually talk to the subject of my phone call, I make a note of the date and the attempt, on the task, leave the task open, and reschedule it for some time in the future.  I usually follow up with an e-mail message and make a note of that, and note any response from the subject.

Whether I schedule the task in Outlook or CRM, or I update the task in Outlook or CRM, the two systems synchronize in due course.  This keeps me productive and moving through my day.  Terrific!

Here’s what my Outlook task list looks like with the CRM tasks:

This is a video I created sometime ago, that shows this in action:  http://youtu.be/XeZTa3ksMBI

A new feature in Microsoft CRM 2011 is the ability to export data from CRM 2011 into Excel, make changes to the data and update the changes to CRM 2011 with an Excel import.

The first thing to do is to export the records that contain the data you want to update.  You can easily use the Advanced Find function to add fields to standard views in CRM, and then export the data from the Advanced Find results.  Make sure to select the check box, “Make this data available…”  This will create an XML document that can be read by Excel.  Save the document.

Make the edits you wish to make to the XML document in Excel.

Import the data back into CRM.

This will update the data you changed in the Excel spreadsheet.

You can see the results of the import under “Imports” on the Workplace page.

I created a short video to show this in action: http://youtu.be/e6UAnSvuQHs

Getting started with Microsoft CRM usually requires importing existing data; generally customer and contact information.  This process is relatively easy to do.

As an example I imported new account and contact information into CRM Online.  I imported the Account information first.  I used the Import Data Wizard and the Default System Data Map.  I chose to not map the Primary Contact because the contact information was not yet in the system:

The Imports screen will show your current import and past imports.  There is also a nice feature connected to the Delete selection that allows you to delete the records that were created with a specific import.

You can click on the Import Name and see specific records that were imported successfully, and those that were not.

I created a short video to show this in action:  http://youtu.be/nopJEi1abI4

Most of us are wearing many different “hats” these days.  Doing this, doing that.  I picked up some additional responsibilities for national sales for RoseASP.  I am now working with a whole new and large group of Dynamics resellers.  I found out early that if I was going to survive, I had to keep copious records regarding who, what, when, and where.

Microsoft CRM is perfect for that.  I can easily keep e-mail messages in CRM; incoming and outgoing.  I can schedule follow-up activities that flow directly to my Outlook task list.  I can automate follow-up when appropriate.  I use automation to sendout additional content and schedule future tasks.  I record and track opportunities.  And here’s the key point:  Whenever I want to find out about a person, company, or opportunity, all the information is there, in CRM, in one place!  Beautiful.

If you’re becoming overwhelmed in your business, start using CRM.  It will save you.

This is the slide deck I used at our recent Microsoft CRM 2011 Launch Event.

CRM 2011 is loaded with new functionality.  Plan on attending the launch event:

Have you tried to add attachments to e-mail messages you send out in a mail merge, in CRM 4.0?  You can’t do it without some extra help.

I found two pieces of software that will let you easily do it.

The first one is from MAPIlab.  They have a number of Outlook add-ins.  Interesting stuff.  Check it out.

The second one I came across is Outlook Mail Merge Attachment.  It involves running a VBA script, so it’s not for everyone.  But it’s available for download for free, to try it out.

In CRM 2011 we won’t have to worry about this.