This year is going to be my first taste of Dreamforce and I am thrilled to be part of it! This event is carefully curated to address enterprise wide concerns around innovation using cloud technologies and best practices on integrating enterprise social platforms. I have had the great opportunity to work closely with a number of salesforce.com session owners as they evaluate, vote and hand-pick client stories that will be showcased during the general sessions and the Executive Summit sessions. 

Why should C-Levels attend?

The goal of Dreamforce this year is to elevate the need for organizations to embrace the social enterprise in order to stay relevant, competitive and part of the conversation. You’ll hear answers to “Why did the CEO choose to innovate using Salesforce?” “How is ROI success measured effectively across the organization?” “How did you roll-out a global CRM initiative across five international markets with cross-cultural challenges?” and “What were the security and compliance implications?” And much, much more!

As an agile consulting company and Titanium sponsor at Dreamforce this year, Bluewolf is focused on helping organizations of any size navigate their transformation using cloud-based and social technologies. We’re dishing out brilliant C-level worthy content at our sponsored sessions. Hear answers to: “We have 30,000 employees and we’re a global organization. How do we get started?” “Our data is currently running on five legacy database systems. How do we transition to one language and one system without jeopardizing the credibility of our data?” and “How can we build our platform and processes around it so it adds to our customer’s value?”

C-Level Buzz

I took the time to catch up with a few enterprise C-levels who I know are super excited to be at Dreamforce. This is what they had to say:

Derald Sue is CIO of InsideTrack, a company that provides 1:1 executive-style coaching for college students to help them be more successful in school and graduate prepared for career success. He had this to share:

“Dreamforce is an excellent opportunity to connect with other executives across all different sectors and understand the challenges and successes they are having with the Salesforce platform and how they are addressing these challenges.”

An organization that I’ve followed since its early stages, Sliderocket is a cloud-presentation company that was recently acquired by VMWARE. I caught up with fellow ‘kiter’ and CEO Chuck Dietrich who is a salesforce.com alumni. He commented:

“Salesforce.com is an extremely innovative company. Keeping a pulse on the direction that salesforce.com is going is an educational experience. C-Levels and their executives will learn a lot by understanding the directions they are taking to either apply or not. Attend to educate yourself, network with peers and participate in the sessions!” 

HID Global, the security systems company, is a big supporter of salesforce.com and will be present at Dreamforce. Will West, it’s most recent CFO, shared:

“Dreamforce is a critical event, in that it will be a catalyst for dialog around social media, commercial enterprise, and the variety of technology paths forward available to evolving businesses.  C-Level executives who attend will likely gain depth in their understanding of these issues, and thus be in a better position to help lead their companies into the future--and possibly ahead of "the curve."

What Does It Mean To Be A Social Enterprise?

Dreamforce this year is focused on the social conversations taking over the board room and how it is shifting strategic thinking at the enterprise level. The social media tracks are impressive with Dan Zarella, Jeremiah Owyang, Charlene Li and a number of other big names who are instrumental in elevating social media as a prime channel for customer engagement. We asked Chuck Dietrich, CEO at Sliderocket, what it means for a company to be social ready. He added:

“Embracing that social media is a part of a modern-day strategy. Recognizing the need to apply resources or the focus to do it right. Carving out the details of the execution is key to a successful implementation. The social strategy has to be pervasive across the organization’s culture for it to be authentic. At Sliderocket, our entire marketing team is on the social networks. The personality of the company cannot be represented by one or two people.”

Take the 8-question social ready survey! Results will be shared prior to Dreamforce 2011!

Don’t take my word for it. Be at Dreamforce 2011! Experience and learn about the organizational transformation that C-levels and executives like yourself are embracing to better serve their customers and meet ROI success. Be sure to join Bluewolf!

About Bluewolf:

From demand generation to sales, channel strategies to customer care, Bluewolf is committed to partnering with clients to attain Agile Business Transformation.