To me, a corporate blogging strategy isn’t just about what a company publishes on their website, it’s also about how they use other people’s blogs to respond to issues of importance to their company.

A lot has been said about what Dell is doing through their Direct2Dell blog and how they are seeking out bloggers with customer support issues and proactively responding. I got contacted by Dell about a blog post a few months ago and I wasn’t really complaining!

Anyway, here’s what Salesforce did…

I got this email yesterday:

Please be aware that salesforce.com has scheduled maintenance for your instance (NA2):
Friday, January 12th, 2006 from 6:00pm PST – Saturday, January 13th, 2:00am PST
During this time, the salesforce.com service will be unavailable. Users attempting to access the service during this time will receive a scheduled maintenance notification page.
The purpose of this maintenance window is to upgrade your instance (NA2) to the Winter ’07 release.
We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your patience during this maintenance window.
-Salesforce.com Support

This Winter ’07 release is a pretty big change.

Our Salesforce instance is actually on server NA1, so I found it curious that the email said NA2 but I didn’t think that much about it.

This morning, I left a comment on an entry about the release on the Salesforce Collective blog, which isn’t an official Salesforce.com site:

Just got an email that the upgrade is scheduled for the NA4 server on January 12th at 6pm PST. If anyone else got a different date for another server, please let us know. Click here for all of the functionality planned for the new release.

My comment:

NA2 is also January 12, according to the email I got. Would be helpful information if our instance was actually on NA2. I’ve always assumed we were on NA1 since all our URLs are na1.salesforce.com. Maybe not.

I just got a phone call from Salesforce. Should have remember the guy’s name, sorry…if you’re reading this, thanks again. Seems they saw my comment above and found it strange that I got the NA2 email when we’re really on NA1. Turns out they have two installations for us, likely since we switched nonprofit templates way back in the beginning and the old one wasn’t deleted. We should have received the NA1 email (which is launching January 5th, a week ahead of the other servers…woo hoo!) and he’s investigating why I didn’t receive it and they’ll make sure they only have us down for NA1. They’re resending the email anyway…to make sure folks mark their dates in January 2007, not 2006. I hate it when that happens.

So, another company that is using blogs to put out fires before the customer even realizes that the wood is warm. And we don’t even pay for anything!