Dreamforce season is upon us! Attendees and Salesforce.com employees are talking about what they are wearing and not wearing (I really hope not!) to the event, the Dreamforce party app is hopping, SaaSy videos are going viral, animated gifs are turning up everywhere,  sessions are filling up fast and rumors are flying around. So what are we doing in preparation? Well, some hard work of course as we coordinate our booth (#1626), our customer session [360° of Excellence: How GE Capital Drives ROI Through Customer Intelligence], our team schedules and our client appointments---but also some fun, because that is how we roll here @FirstRain ... If you've been following @FirstRain or Penny, Ryan or myself on Twitter, you may have noticed we've been tweeting out about our new customer intelligence Tumblr:  "You Had Me At Hello, Letters to Marc Benioff", with a couple new posts a day. So what exactly is it? You Had Me At Hello are letters directly from Penny to Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com's CEO. They are 'penned' in Penny's own voice—no marketing content editor behind the scenes—and are what our COO, YY Lee, recently called "like passing hallway notes between two CEOs". We have had a lot of positive feedback from our customers (including many who are mutual customers with Salesforce.com), along with many "thanks for making me smile." This ticks off our #1 objective as we all continue to be manically busy trying to prep for Dreamforce, deliver our updated AppExchange offering, work on a couple of new client SFDC implementations and continue to drive value to our customers rolling out tools like Sales Cloud. Here are some highlighted posts from the Tumblr in the last week that might also make you smile:

• Why Crash Diets Don't Work: Diets don't work for losing weight, and they don't work for making sales quota.
• Collaboration is the mot du jour and without it, you won't be successful. We like “speed and agility” without the artificial steroids.
• FedEx, flexibility and yoga: this one got a lot of play, I think the sexy photo of the tattoo guy stirred up some interest. I wonder if people thought it was a buff Marc?
• Coach Needs you and we all need new hand bags (yes they have man purses for the savy dressed Salesforce.com male staff)
• Shout Outs to Salesforce.com: we work, we play but we all must give back and Salesforce.com leads the way with its non-profit work, Penny's talking about young girls and STEM
• Awkward, Choke, China and Will.I.Am and how SFDC can help them react, stay on top of the brand and coke drinkers everywhere.

To read the rest of the posts go to  #UHadMeAtHello! Read it, Tweet it, and Submit Your own Letter to Marc if you are so inclined. View the full archive here.

Note: This post was orginally posted on the FirstRain MarketMine Blog. 

Have you ever thought about how, when you are in a specific situation or have something very important on your mind, you begin to see it all around you? For example if you have ever been pregnant—ALL you see around you are other pregnant women, as if it were a global pregnancy epidemic! Last week Steven Feinberg visited our office and I learned about our brain's reticular activating system (RAS), the part of the brain that recognizes patterns and "makes sense" of your experience. Your brain does this by looking for evidence to prove your beliefs—yes, the part of your brain that spots all those other pregnant women, or all the Mini Coopers on the road! 

So maybe it is my reticular activating system acting up because it was another BIG Monday morning for Social Business Big Data in my content streams. Here are some highlights: 

"Why Big Data Will Deliver ROI For Social Business" If you are at all interested or affected by social business, then you have probably heard of Dion Hinchcliffe, whose focus has been social business and next-gen enterprises working with some of the biggest companies out there. In this post in InformationWeek, he talks about driving forward very real business outcomes by harvesting the missing social business intelligence capability within most organizations. You can follow @dhinchcliffe for daily knowledge of social business.

"Business Intelligence (BI) Trends Go Beyond Analytics" on Forbes.com by SiliconANGLE’s Editor Kristen Nicole. This popped up on my radar because it mentioned what we are doing at FirstRain, by adding context to the data FirstRain finds and packaging it up for business use so a sales professional can immediately understand their customers.

"Why Context Matters—Forget Real-Time, Achieve  Right-Time" this one goes back a couple of weeks but I just found it and, although it is B2C focused, had a key point that addresses the B2B Social Business harvesting of Big Data:

"Customers and employees only want engagement aligned with self interest. Relevancy of information is required for customers and employees to respond. Real-time interactions quickly evolve into noise. Signal to noise ratios must be improved as garbage in will lead to massive garbage out. In some cases, customers don’t want engagement. They just want the experience."

"Can Data Science Save the US Economy?" Saroj Kar, takes a slightly different take on the importance of Big Data by focusing in on the data scientists:

"In recent months in the U.S. alone, large organizations, from staffing companies to universities, have seen a growing interest in a new professional class around data. A curious mix of business expertise, analysis and information technology, this new title is underway in various vertical markets such as energy, commerce, healthcare and financial services. And if experts are right, this is just the beginning."

I found this article because it mentioned our CEO Penny Herscher's recent TEDx talk on how "Coding is the New Literacy ". It not only highlights what we see in the marketplace as a real need for business skills but how FirstRain delivers (in doing the  'heavy-lifting' of data analysis for business users) such value to our customers—of course we have a team full of data scientists ourselves! 

Have you seen more articles on the subject that we should highlight? Tweet them to me @danielabarbosa 

Image| Flickr| adopted raebrune