Asking your customers to share new ideas and letting all customers vote is one of the most powerful customer engagement methods. You get the most direct Ranked Feedback and create a sense of ownership for your customer base.

Xeesm/Compete is now starting Beta tests.

You create your own competition, contest or voting initiative and ask your contacts to provide suggestions or vote on already existing suggestions. For instance:

The Agile-500 Contest
This is our first project using Xeesm/Compete!
1) We created the contest and provided some description what the contest is about.
2) We invite people to provide suggestions. In this case companies they feel should be an Agile-500 company list
3) Everybody can make suggestions and vote for their own and for other suggestions.

We will see the number of votes to determine the most agile companies in accordance to the customers voice.

You can do your very own contest, just create one.

1) Click on create a competition and explain what this is about
2) Invite all your contacts to provide suggestions
3) Everybody can vote on suggestions from everybody

Now – This is still in beta. Two things we are still completing:
1) To limit the number of votes a user may have (20)
2) The embed code generator, so you can add the contest page to your own website

Of course a user has to be logged in or register in order to vote.
Multiple votes on the same suggestion is not possible.

Some examples you may consider for your business
* Ask your customers about webinar topics they may be interested in and let them vote
* Ask your customers what kind of service offerings they’d be most interested in and let all customers vote
* Ask your partners what training they are most interested in and let them vote
* Ask your customers about product features and let all vote
* Ask your partners for programs they like to see and let them all vote
* Ask your customers what they think need to be added to your service portfolio and let them all vote
* Ask about product documentation…
* Ask about ease of doing business with you…
* Ask them to share their biggest concerns…

* You can ask pretty much anything and you will get the most direct ranked feedback ever. It’s not only an opinion from an individual – but actually ranked by your ecosystem based on their collective interest. Whether this is your customer base, your partners, vendors, consultants, your media connections or your own team.

Use Xeesm/Compete! for a technology contest, an idea competition, feature requests, event venues, leadership, partnership or many other topics to gain ranked feedback – let your audience compete for what’s important to them.

How do you get onto the Beta?
You either install Compete! from the Xeesm Apps world or contact us and we are helping you to get there.

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Several cool updates on Xeesm!
- New Dashboard for none subscription users
- Report on who is following you in Xeesm
- Updates on XNotes
- Enhancements on Flights with “Space Dominance Report”

1) See your followers / favorites

On the xeesm homepage you see now clickable links to the respective statistics.

One is the people who added you as a contact / favorite.

Click on the number of people you are favorited by and you see a list of people that added you as a contact. You can add them to your “Social Address Book” by simply clicking the add button. If you have an active Flight! open, you can add them to the active Flight

(this feature is currently only available to Business Edition Users)

2) Major Enhancements On XNotes

XNotes have now much more details and clickable references. You see them in the Xeesm Dashboard page. References include the Flight! you contacted a person from or the Opportunity in Edge! you worked on.

If you click on a person from within Edge! or Flights! you see the notes that you did from other Flights! or just in general. That way you now have a full view of all the activities with the respective person and the corresponding reference. For instance if you made a note in a Flight and you visit the person later on in Edge! you can see that note and better track other activities.

The other enhancement we made is that we record a visit to a persons site in XNotes as well. That way you don’t have to type like “left a note on LinkedIn”, instead we capture the visit and you’ll see how long ago and in what context.

3) Major enhancements on Flights!

We also did quite some work on Flights! We talked about the “Template Builder” before.

Flight Goals:

We now added an additional field where you can define a “Goal” of any Flight. This is in particular important when you share flights with others. A goal may be “Win 20 prospects” or “Get feedback from 15 top customers” or “Identify 3 top candidates for a sales search etc.

The Goal of a Flight! is copied over to a new flight and also part of the template maker.

NEW: Space Dominance of a Flight:

We now report the space dominace of a Flight. This is a simple yet very strategic report. You see where most of the flight members are and may direct your engagement towards ‘where your customers are’. It shows you the top ten sites where your flight members are.

You may see a number bigger than the members. That is if several members have multiple presences on the same network.

4) Social Finder Update

We updated SocialFinder so it adds photos to a profile if it can find a photo and no photo exists in Xeesm. In the first version Social Finder “updated” social sites if it found a record and another record already existed. We removed the ‘update’ and always ADD a new record if the site URL doesn’t exist.

Social Finder Success Rate

After some first reviews, we’d like to provide some initial feedback:

If you know the persons personal email address the success rate is typically above 80% in the US and around 60+% outside the US. In some areas however it may be rather low.

If you use SocialFinder with a list of webinar attendees you may find the success rate below 20% because often times users provide an email address they only use for registrations but not for their social presence.

Face lifting

We did some minor changes like a bit larger input fields and replaced the “old” buttons with “xeesm style” buttons.

Several Bug Fixes

And as always we did some bug fixes like:

- When going to your Dashboard the active Flight is no longer reseted
- Recognizing the checkboxes in the contact dispatcher
- Fixed some rules bugs when using a non subscription version
- Fixed an intermittent access issue with Notes 2 Contacts
- Added a message if an image can’t be read by Xeesm

And a few others.

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Finding all the social networking profiles of your customers is tedious work. Some companies even shy away from engaging in the social web as they don’t even know if their customers are present in any of the networks. The new “SocialFinder” changes the way you look for your customers. With a single click we grind through approximately 400 Million records and augment your customer profile with social network profiles from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and over 100 other sites.

Most companies still don’t know whether their clients are engaged in social media or not. A typical sales person with 3,000 contacts may need months to search through all the networks. And only then would they know if an engagement in social media would be meaningful. Many company leaders shy away from social engagement because they simply don’t know. For the first time business managers get an instant report for their customer’s social media engagement. The SocialFinder in conjunction with our ‘Social Address Book” provides that answer in seconds. From now on businesses have a new way to make a decision to engage in social media or not.

Social Address Book

Xeesm not only helps to find clients but provides technology to store all the various sites for each individual person. Unlike in the traditional address book, may it be electronically or in paper form, where people usually store a name, a phone number a physical address and email, the social address book like Xeesm stores all the various social sites each individual is engaging in. Xeesm currently supports over 100 social networks worldwide.

Pay search with Micro Payments

The sheer amount of data and the complexity of aggregation and mass API access requires a separate billing method. The new Xeesm release has now a “credits” model that allows for micropayment by purchasing credits that can be used forSocialFinder. We charge 8 cent per record or $80 for 1,000 contacts to be augmented with whatever we can find.

Xeesm Credits will soon be also usefull for purchasing other social business application addons such as pre defined “Flights! Templates” and other options in the near future.

Available New

Give it a try. The smallest “Credits Package” is $20 which helps you find social networking details and photos of up to 250 contacts. You find the new Social Finder inside your Xeesm on the “Contact Details” page. Just go to “My Contacts” click on any of the names and run Social Finder.

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Hey folks, we have some very exciting update with some major enhancements on Xeesm.

Social Finder

Today we release our new SocialFinder, a product some of you are waiting for a long time. Please  see the other post from our boss about the business impact of SocialFinder.

Here is what it does: It finds you social networks of any of your contacts with a very high precision. We are not looking for a name comparison like many do in registration forms but for email match. Jim Brown may exist hundred times. But JimBrown33@yahoo.com exists only once. This turned out to be a really cool enhancement. Give it a try.

Micropayments & Credits

We understood from some conversations that we need to be able to charge for a single search and not on a monthly service base. So we pulled a concept forward that we had in mind anyway: Micropayments through “credits”. In essence you purchase credits for $20, $50, $100 or $500 and then we charge even tiny amounts as credits against that account. For instance an account augmentation in SocialFinder costs about $0.08. It would be very impractical doing that with Paypal. So here it is: Xeesm Credits. You find it under “MySubscriptions”.

Template Builder for Flights!

We also added the new “Template Builder” to Flights! It lets you create templates from any flight. Templates are stored under “MyTemplates” and you use the template to create new Flights! Obviously you can edit templates any time, including changing and adjusting objectives. The only thing that you can’t do is onboard people to a template – it is a template, not a flight. Please note that the Template Builder is only available to Business Edition users.

Go into a Flight! click on “Edit” you will find a button called “Make Template”. That’s it! You have a template. You find the template under Flight Templates. If you want to create flight from the template go to “Flight Templates” and click on the “Create Flight” icon. That’s it.

The next project is to build a “template store” where pros can upload and sell their templates.

Bug Fixes

Thanks to so may of you we fixed a ton of little bugs. The biggest being the visibility into people you can share a flight with.

Architecture

We made some great progress on the Xeesm Platform development. The API development is on track and you see it in SocialFinder. Credits was another important step for future external tools provider who can piggy back on the system and charge even small amounts.

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Xeesm was recently featured in a book developed by Hollie Clere of Clere Communications; to better equip Telecommunications Professionals in Social Media.  It discusses the different terminology, applications and functionality of the Social Media CRM Tool.

Hollie states, “After creating profiles on multiple mediums, discovering things I like and don’t like, I have found that with Telecom; there are specific social media spaces that were more effective than others.  Through the process of deciding how to promote my company to Telecom Agents and other Telecom related organizations, I felt the strong desire to help those in the Telecom Industry develop their branding, find useful tools and sites where other Telecom businesses are present and utilize tools that will help them market their companies in a new way.

The process can be rewarding and fruitful, but has taken me time to determine which sites my clients or prospects may be visiting, how to best contact them, and which sites would become home to personal contacts vs. business contacts.  Defining such things will be crucial for you as well; in effectively communicating your presence and keeping the “grey” out of your space to focus on your company growth.”

Hollie has been involved in the Telecommunications Industry for over 13 years.  She started her company over 7 years ago supporting Agent Business Partners in back office needs.  She has documented the best trends and resources for Telecom related companies to connect, share in groups and market to prospects via third party tools on the Internet.

She has compiled her thoughts and perspectives in this book.  She is excited to share these ideas with you as you develop your online presence and marketing plan.

Visit this link for more information about the book: http://www.clerecomm.com/Announcements.html

For those of you who have an access key for Xeesm/Edge!, here are a few instructions for an easy start. We will add the training presentation as soon as it is completed.

1) Important:

Keep in mind that this is not a 1:1 version of traditional CRM but a new way to interact with clients. Xeesm/Edge! is an “Open Sales Engagement” System.
You may want to read this white paper to get familiar with the idea of social selling:
http://xeesm.com/_/site/index.php/best-practices/social-selling/

2) Upload your contacts

The first thing you may want to do is upload your contacts.
Beginning of next week we enable an additional service “Site Finder” where we search for all available sites matching a users email address.

3) Setup

Once you are in Xeesm/Edge! you find “Setup” with a very simple function to define your sales processes.
Give each step in the process a name and associate a percentage representing the probability of closing
For instance:
“Socialize with customer” 20%
“Engage in a demo” 40%
“Installing an evaluation product” 60%
“negotiating terms” 80%
The patent pending forecasting system is based on a predictive model and provides much higher forecast accuracy.

4) Opportunity Setup Process

Here is another differences:
1) You create an opportunity
2) Then you “Onboard” people. People are the ones in your contact base
The initial suggestion shows people from your contacts where email address matches the domain name of the opportunity
Click on “more” and you see all your contacts
3) You may want to add people from your team and share the opportunity with them.
Also here is a big new “opening”: you may actually invite partners or other people not necessarily only from your company

5) Happy Engagement

Once the opportunity is setup you will want to engage with your prospective customer. You will want to establish and strengthen your relationship and follow a process that is in alignment with your clients purchasing flow. This is the part where the above mentioned white paper comes very handy.

It may come as a surprise but the Xeesm team doesn’t want you to “live in Xeesm”, instead we want you to live where your customer is. Xeesm is just a rocket launch pad to get you there as fast as possible.

Hopefully you can make it to the best practices training tomorrow Friday May/28 or the next June/9
http://xeesm.com/_/site/index.php/events/xeesmedge-training/

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Xeesm Business Edition – Limited

We added a new plan called Xeesm Business Edition. It includes the new “Corporate Xeesm” and “Flights!™ Business Edition”. This Edition will be available for a limited time period only. In the future “Corporate Xeesm” will be sold separately.

Corporate Xeesm
- Setup your company as an account within Xeesm
- Create Companyname.xeesm.com
- The sub domain “companyname” is your business domain address and can’t be changed
Example: Xeequa.xeesm.com

Flights! Business Edition:
- Unlimited number of Flights!
- Send personalized emails to flight members
- Export Flight members
- Copy a Flight! into a new Flight!
- Share a Flight! with anybody
- Enhanced Onboarding, to onboard people from another Flight!

Register or login here and grab your Limited Business Edition

Register / Login

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Howdy Xeesm’er.
We just pushed out some update with some interesting / important new features.

Contact Category Manager

Under “Manage” you will now find a Contact Category Manager to setup your own contact categories. You can create 2 categories in the free version and unlimited in the Business Edition

Contact Import

We updated our APIs so direct import from Yahhoo Address Book or Google Address Book now works. See a few more details about sources below.

Contact Dispatcher

After import you can review all your imported contacts. A few things are new:
- You see who of your contacts are already in Xeesm
- You can select a contact category that you like the contact to associate with
- You can also import contacts directly into a selected Flight! (Business Edition only)

Auto De-Duplication

You don’t need to check for duplicates. We find any duplicate based on identical email address.
If a person is already in Xeesm, we don’t create a new record
If a person is already connected with you, we won’t make an additional connection
If a person is already in the selected Flight! we won’t add the person again

Just enter your Google Account credentials (we don’t store them) and import your Google Contacts into Xeesm. The imported contacts will land in the Dispatcher.

To import your address book from Yahoo, you only need to select Yahoo and we will enter the dialog with Yahoo where you enter your credentials. Import your contacts and you will see them in the dispatcher.
FACEBOOK: You can actually import your Facebook friends into Yahoo. That means from there you can import them into Xeesm.

To import data from LinkedIn or MS Outlook, you would export the contacts into a CSV file and import them into Xeesm.

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APRIL 21  Update
We updated Xeesm with a variety of minor changes, additions and fixes including:
Navigation
AppsWorld
Flights!
XNotes
Success Tracker
Import System
Adding Contacts
My Contacts

Navigation

Based on inputs we further improved the navigation logic.
We removed the reporting button from the top navigation and added it to the “People Relations” field on the right hand side.

We moved “AppsWorld” to the top navigation. This is the place where you can install applications such as Engage! , Flights! , and soon Edge! as well as other applications.

Reports will be part of each application and its respective navigation.

AppsWorld

With the new navigation AppsWorld is easier to find.
We also fixed a bug where users who installed the free Flights! application actually got the PRO version installed. Sorry – we fixed that.
Edge! can now be installed for selected “pre Beta” user. Access on request.

Xeesm/Flights! Business Edition

The export feature wasn’t enabled even after upgrade to PRO. We fixed that.
Copying a flight remains to be all flight data but no flight members.
Sending personalized messages from the “general Notes To Contacts” will recognize the active Flight.
Last Touch is now again visible in Flights! – we fixed the performance issue.
To upload contacts directly into a Flight, grab the Flight ID on “Edit Flight”

XNotes

You can tweet directly from Xeesm but you need to add user ID and password in your social site setup.
Notes show the source. I.e. if the note was created in a Flight! shows the Flight Name or in Edge! shows the opportunity name.
There is now a bit more real estate for the XNotes on the home page and also in the Contact Details page. There we moved Notes on top.
While notes can have up to 250 character, we show if you exceed the 140 character Twitter limit.

Success Tracker

It is now showing the activities from the last 3 weeks as well. Showing number of visits to contacts per week, Number of notes taken and number of achieved objectives (Flights!)

Contacts Import

In addition to the name and email you can now import social sites if you have them. The table header need to look like this:
Facebook.com
Linkedin.com
Twitter.com
Myspace.com
Flickr.com
Friendster.com
Hi5.com
Slideshare.com

The field content needs to be a ‘fully qualified URL’ like:  http://www.linkedin.com/in/name

If you are uploading your records from Flowtown.com you need to separate firstname and lastname but can upload their output. We will talk more about Flowtown any soon.

Add Contacts

“Add Contacts” now has more fields for business information such as Title, Address, Company, and website. If no website (company URL) is provided the company name is ignored however.

My Contacts Search

You find now an additional search field to search by “State”.

Known Issue

We experience issues with Google and Yahoo Address import. We are working on it and hope to fix it any soon.

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Thanks again for joining our Xeesm Flight Training.

We hope you had a good flight and sorry for the seven minutes delayed landing.

If you were unable to make it or would like to review it – the recorded webinar (67 min) provides the complete content.

For a quick review: The presentation is posted on SlideShare

Please see here all the questions and respective answers.

Yes, the list is long – but you will find your question easily

Thanks to everyone in our Xeesm team, for providing me all the answers.

Q: Will  you translate it into other languages?
A: Yes,  we will have translation later this year. We plan to do the “major 7″ Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese. In the meantime we will add a Google Translator module.

Q: How can I train my network on the use of Xeesm and flights?
A: We will make today’s presentation public. So you could either just point people to it, or offer a training to your eco system if they want to actively use Flights!. If you like to become a Xeesm Business Partner,  we can do even more together.

Q: Is it possible to on-board contacts from other databases (assuming they are not in Xeesm- so they do not have to be in Xeesm yet to become part of my group)?
A: Yes, we provide an upload feature so you can on-board anybody from a standard CSV type spreadsheet. (PRO version is required for that).

Q: Recommend – a simple checkoff on copy flight members should be available to copy
A: We plan to do that. However when you work with Flights! for a while you will notice a few things:
- Typically not all flight members complete the task and you may either have only those or all others in the new flight.
- On-boarding from another flight is so easy that you don’t really need the copy
- We think very “individual” and as such it is good to really select your flight members
But again we will add that feature as an option.

Q: Most of us do not have all of our contacts on Xeesm yet- unless I am in the minority
A: Yes/No The active Xeesm’er simply uploaded their contacts. And if you really want to leverage the system you will want to upload your contacts which is super simple. If you have a database other than outlook, csv or so you can send us the file and we should be able to convert it.

Q: If I am inviting  my contacts to join Xeesm- could I send out some PR material about Xeesm to help them understand? I experienced you through social media academy- but my contacts don’t know you.
A: The best way is probably pointing your contacts to the website. We have some good explanation for each product. Also on http://xeesm.com/Xeesm you find Groups, Fanpage, Slideshare presentations and more about us.

Q: Was Axel saying that it is only available in PRO version to upload people to your Xeesm from your address book , or LinkedIn contacts, etc? I’m asking where the people come from to start with.
A: Upload is available to everybody. So you can always upload all your contacts and then on-board them to a specific flight. Only the upload direct into a Flight is currently only available to the PRO account.

Q: Just wondering about access to Pro… is this part of what you have invited me or not?
A: The “old” PRO was only to people during the initial Beta Phase and it included a lot of special features. Flights!/PRO is the subscription version of Flights! and there are specific new features that are only accessible subscribers.

Q: I might have someone that can help you with deep api integration with many social networks
A: Cool – any help is always appreciated. We are using the standard API calls to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, SlideShare etc. but there are always more things… – please let us know.

“Q: Regarding uploading from csv – does the opposite exist : exporting contacts or attendees from a seminar or event Flight! back to a CRM system?
A: Yes, The PRO version has an export functionality so you can export all members from a flight and use it elsewhere. The only restricted record is the email address. It is only exported if the connection is reciprocal.

Q: When you on-board somebody on a Flight! how dos this work on this person’s side : he has to accept boarding? he gets a notification?
A: No. It is like adding contacts into your Outlook or CRM system. The person does not need to confirm that process or is notified that you have them in a Flight!

Q: Are there plans to link with common CRM systems…Salesforce.com,  Siebel, others?
A: One of our partners is planning to provide a Salesforce.com integration. We are focusing our efforts on building the APIs so that integrator can access Xeesm and provide interfaces to other systems.

Q: What are the requirements to become a Xeesm Partner, other than what’s on website?
A: Be highly motivated, fun to work with and crazy enough to join us – ha ha ha ;-)

Q: A question from France : regarding Facebook -  how do you consider the issue of people not willing to mix pro & private life on Facebook – especially with a population of inside sales being young?
A: This is just a matter of time. Once you are working with social media for a while it is very apparent that there is no borderline between personal or business presence in the social web. If you want to be REALLY social you have no demarcation. However at the end it is up to each individual how to leverage  the tools and the platform.

Q: When you build your db > do you contacts have to accept,  get a notification ?
A: You can notify them but you can also suppress notification. You can do that on a record by record case. Like you may want to add the CEO of a large enterprise  but you don’t want to invite  the person – just check it off in the “Dispatcher” – all others keep for invitations on.

Q: Have you encountered resistance or anticipated resistance due to the integration with existing CRM systems ?
A: Yes/No – This is one of the IT paranoia: First, any system NEEDS to be integrated then – No resource to make the integration ;) Phase II: Security is number one – so no touch-point to the outside world – then “if you are not connected to the market” you will loose it. And the final question we discuss: “What do you really want to integrate?” The answer: “everything – because…..”
With Xeesm’s sCRM Edge! coming out next week we don’t see an integration in traditional CRM – but we do see already needs to integrate our sCRM with ERP systems. The three mayor touch points are account synchronization, predicted revenue, product demand.

Q: Two questions: If we start with $20/month what are the odds you raise the price down the road? Is there any risk you turn the free version off some day?
A: We are committed to have always all basic features available for free. That is part of our business model and the trust you put in the company is guarded by our CEO. We are having a price protection model that states that we will not increase any subscription more than 10% per year. So even if Flights! may cost $40/month later this year, every current customer would not have to pay more than $22 next year (10% increase of $20).

Q: Do you provide any support plans and team training?
A: We are currently developing our partner program with partners around the world. We are in the middle of training partner in the US, Europe, Latin America, Australia and Singapore. Some have already over six month experience with Xeesm and are highly capable to provide training, consulting and any kind of support. The Xeesm team is always there for all customer as a fall back support – no matter where you purchase.

I just had to add those too:

Q: I managed to stay on the whole time.  This was a good one. 7 min over is pretty good for Axel!
A: –unanswered– ;)

Q: we go to great ends for Xeesm
A: Thanks for the Feedback

Q: hi Marita – I  in my car with my laptop and listening in.  Yes, my brother is driving
A: ;-) this is really mobile txs for joining Wendy – have a safe trip

Again THANK SO MUCH
You were an awesome audience.
Hope to ‘xee’ you next week Friday:
Introducing Social CRM and Forecasting 2.0
http://xeesm.com/_/site/index.php/events/social-crm-event/

Also, we’d love to hear what you thought about the webinar. Please post a comment here telling us what you thought liked about it, and tell us how we could make it better next time. Your participation helped make this a great event, and your feedback will help make future events better!

Best

Marita

http://xeesm.com/maritar

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