You may have noticed things look a little different around here. That’s because, today, we unveil a whole new direction for the Salesforce Blog, which will now be known as The 360 Blog from here on out. The 360 Blog is about you — the business change agents and the Trailblazers who are navigating a turbulent environment right now. Whether you need to digitize your operations, get better oriented around customer needs, or find new ways to support employees impacted by COVID — the articles here offer you reliable guidance.
Why The 360? Because at Salesforce, we are invested in understanding all 360 degrees of the challenges that keep leaders like you up at night. We do this for a wide range of business types and industries: from sales and marketing and field service to healthcare, government, small business, and more. Whether your day-to-day is running a chain of local coffee shops or an online commerce business, we support the most critical business issues you face from a 360-degree perspective. Importantly, we also help with a 360-degree understanding of your customer so you’re better equipped to meet their needs. That’s what you’ll see in the screen capture of the new homepage below:
Meet the #ContentRevolution
The 360 Blog story began more than a year ago when we came up with the internal mantra: #ContentRevolution — and launched an organizational effort to ensure every marketer was oriented towards a content mindset. This trusty blog was, of course, a central publishing channel for the effort and a bit overdue for a spruce up. Our team’s V2MOM (which is a foundational project alignment tool we use at Salesforce) laid out the vision and values for our needed blog transformation:
Speed and agility enabled by WordPress
We had our work cut out for us. While we were in the early planning stages for our new publication, COVID-19 hit and we put aside our best laid content marketing plans to focus on the massive business disruption in front of us. In true Salesforce style, we responded quickly, rallying more than 1,000 marketers to create a new editorial slate, which we call: “Leading Through Change.” We wanted to offer as much helpful guidance to business leaders as we could.
Unfortunately, our legacy publishing systems were not as flexible as we were, and it took weeks, not days to create the key pages we needed to house our new initiative. We’re optimistic this kind of pivot will go differently in the future. Today, we roll out our new blog on WordPress, which we can readily configure to meet breaking needs as they arise.
With WordPress’s drag-and-drop modules and a full range of options for multimedia embeds, we’ll have greater flexibility to customize the presentation of our stories. We are also now poised to efficiently deliver content to our global community in multiple languages, and soon we’ll scale this infrastructure and design system to nearly 20 markets around the world.
Up-leveling our stories & the user experience
With the choice to move to WordPress behind us, we were able to focus on creating compelling content and a great reading experience on the front end. Early in the project, we aligned the team around a refined editorial voice and tone, partnering with Atlantic 57 to zero in on what makes for the most impactful stories. Our new editor, Carolyn Warsham, worked with teams on story ideation and headline writing, emphasizing the concept of the news hook to ensure stories are both relevant and timely. We also focused on how we could do more co-creation with our Trailblazer community, business partners like Deloitte and Accenture, and our broader ecosystem of thought leaders.
In order to bring The 360 Blog into harmony with the Salesforce design system, we partnered with Portland-based agency Instrument to create a more streamlined reading experience, including bigger, bolder images, more white space, and a lot less clutter.
We created new visual guidelines to steer our content creators away from stock imagery tropes and toward truly resonant photography to accompany each article. And our creative team found inventive ways to bring our brand magic into the blog design with our Salesforce characters.
I hope you like what you see here and continue to visit us to learn how you and your company can be a success. Here are three of my favorite articles to get you started — each one touching on a topic critical for business growth, from understanding possible pandemic outcomes to the ethics of artificial intelligence to leading with empathy:
- 4 Possible Pandemic Outcomes Every Company Needs to Consider
- Ethical AI Can’t Wait: 4 Ways To Drive Greater Equality in Your AI
- Vulnerability Expert Brené Brown Explains How to Be a Braver Leader
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