A Social Enterprise takes a different perspective on how to engage with your customers, partners and employees. But what about the developer? How can we leverage the Salesforce Platform to develop applications that are inherently social and engaging? Case in point. How can you take one of the most basic (yet powerful) functions of CRM – the Web-to-Lead function – and make it more social? There is of course a very robust Web-To-Lead feature in Salesforce, but I thought I’d think a little outside the box and develop a custom Web-To-Lead application that leverages the power of the biggest, baddest social network out there – Facebook. This application is built on Heroku (using the native Heroku-Facebook integration) and lets you

• Add a ‘Contact Me’ functionality to a Facebook application or page that would result in a Lead being created in Salesforce.
• Tap into one of the most powerful features of a social network, a user’s social graph, by letting users refer one of their Facebook friends.
• Make ‘social’ actionable by capturing data (i.e. Leads)

Here’s a short recording of the application. Please note that this application is for illustrative purposes only. It has not been tested thoroughly enough (especially on different browsers) to be considered production-ready. It is rather meant to be a catalyst for developers to start thinking about coding a Social Enterprise by taking a social ‘lens’ to every application that they develop. In a follow-up blog I’ll discuss the architecture and technologies (e.g. Bootstrap, Node,js, Socket.io etc.) that I used to develop this application, but for you can download the code from GitHub.

Tip: Make sure to watch the video in full screen and 720p resolution.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIQawAkaEuo