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Take a step back. What ARE you protecting? The Crown Jewels? Then crank up the CAPTCHA. A random spam comment showing up once a week on your company blog? If you're running a company blog, you're going to want to be vigilant anyway. Cleaning up some spam isn't that onerous of a job. You can also make your blog comments requiring approval before posting. The danger in this approach is the honest blog commenter is robbed of the instant gratification of seeing his/her words posted immediately. If you're trying to nurture engagement, it's a good way to snuff it out.

Sometimes we're conditioned to think companies ignore suggestions. When companies do respond it's both delightful and maybe a little disarming. I've been struggling with the Microsoft Surface. It was a Christmas gift. (Thank you, guilt-ridden divorced dads of the world!) I tilted between returning it and keeping it. I've largely concluded it's about finding new ways to do things I'm comfortable doing in Android. At some point I used the feedback link on an app and the developer got back to me within hours. I didn't expect that. If our suggestions are actually being read, we generally just assume they're kind of collected and synthesized in a kind of zen like way and then, maybe, eventually, we'll see something not entirely resembling our most cherished feature request.

What makes Wikipedia valuable is it's a quick and dirty tool is for many topics it's a great way to quickly get up to speed on certain topics. If used with the proper nuance, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of information.

People belong to different organizations, and older CRMs would never allow you to record those relationships properly. BlueCamroo deals with the real world and gives you tools to manage those relationships properly--but how can you do that without first capturing the relationship?

I cautioned readers of the Roo Blog not to abandon Google Plus. I'm starting to see some green shoots of Google Plus's emergence as a viable social networking platform, all thanks to Google Hangouts. Google Hangouts are a great, free way to conduct a video-based webinar or panel discussion.

In BlueCamroo, Leads are what I like to call "the big slush pile". The Leads section is where you enter your first contacts. Got a business card at a trade show? Saw someone on Twitter? Someone filled out a Send Me Information form on your web site? Got an inquiry to your info@mycompany.com email? These are all leads. And they can all be captured easily and in the later two cases automatically by BlueCamroo.

A question we're often asked is what's the difference between an Internal User and an External User. The simple answer is an Internal User is a member of your company. An External User is a client or customer you want to give access to a special "Intranet" portion of BlueCamroo.

The Opportunities tab allows you to track sales opportunities and create a series of tasks needed to close the deal. For some, it might be a little difficult to understand why you'd use the Opportunity feature instead of just creating some tasks associated with the account.

Your heaviest use of documents will probably involve projects. A project has two ways of uploading and sharing documents. The Attachments button works the same as above. The Documents button, however, gives you powerful source control features. Add a document in a fashion similar to adding an attachment. After uploading the document, BlueCamroo presents you with several new options. You'll note there's no Browse button. You cannot upload a file over top until you click the Checkout button. Clicking that will bring up a standard download box. After downloading, the downloader is presented with two primary options. Click Check In upload the updated file. It's good to leave comments, helping other users understand what changes were made. This dialog also has a Send Notification box, check that to alert users you've modified the file.

One of BlueCamroo's strengths in the cloud marketplace is it brings a lot of business productivity cloud apps together into a unified package: CRM, project management, customer support, social CRM, social networking reputation managements, email marketing. Well, I could go on. But you get the idea. That said, BlueCamroo is an application you need to invest some time learning. We've done a lot to create a real world default setup and create a number of setup wizards that get BlueCamroo customized for your office environment. We've designed BlueCamroo so you can start using it out of the box for your basic CRM needs and then "ramp up". We spend a considerable amount of time "pouring cold blood" on the interface and wondering how to make it intuitive.

BlueCamroo has a Group rights system that allows you to add internal users to your own customized groups. For example, you can create a Sales group and a Support group. Internal users added to these groups then can receive similar access rights. It's a quick and logical way of managing rights. Instead of fiddling with rights for each user, you set them for one group and then add users to the group. We've recently extended the Group concept. The Group has added flexibility, allowing you to assign task while retaining accountability. The gobbly gook out of the way, what does that really mean?

A lot of us plan each work day. We will spend X hours working on Project A. Y hours working on Project B. Z hours on support tasks. How does that plan typically go? Accurate? Or is the hour you devoted to Project A interrupted by Brush Fire Q and Curbside Consultation M? Project plans in some offices are best thought of the "suggested serving" photos that accompany products found in the frozen foods section. They are useful wire frames but the real world can confound the modeling. How do you account for your real day with any accuracy? Or do you just lump it all under your original project plan and mentally write off these intervening tasks as the cost of doing business?

One of the conceptual learning curves inherent in BlueCamroo is understanding the distinction between accounts and contacts. BlueCamroo has an import utility that allows you to import leads, accounts, and contacts from a CSV (comma separated values), Excel, or Access file. A lot of times new users export their list of Outlook contacts into a CSV file and then try to import them directly as BlueCamroo contacts. The results are, shall we say, not pretty.

Many sites are increasingly making use of email as a way to get content into, say, a blog or social networking site. BlueCamroo is no different. Sometimes you need to get something into BlueCamroo quickly and you only have access to your email. BlueCamroo provides several hard-coded email addresses that you can shoot an email to. Upon receipt, BlueCamroo will use the To, Subject and Description fields to file the email appropriately.

Extra Data Objects emerged from a discussion with a user. They liked the Extra Fields concept (where you can add extra fields to details page) but they wanted the ability to collect competitor analysis data and associate it with each lead. They were using a spread sheet to fill in cells with largely text data. And they could have used the attachments option. However, they wanted the ability to search the data and build reports from the data.

LinkedIn Answers provides multiple ways for an entrepreneur to market his/her services. Frequently a LinkedIn question might be an overt call for a product recommendation. Sometimes the user is a bit more vague. The user does not want a direct pitch. But merely showing up in the comments with relevant, on-topic knowledge can help you turn up a sales lead. The problem with LinkedIn Answers is finding topics you can comment on effectively can be time consuming. The system has a search engine but it can require some effort to daily search the section for questions that match various key words. Fortunately LinkedIn Answers now has a Twitter account that shoots out new topics as a tweet. Twitter and the power of BlueCamroo's Social Network Scout come to the rescue!

Our first release for April has introduced two new wizards to help first time users and first time Administrators provide essential information BlueCamroo needs. If you're already a BlueCamroo user and admin, you won't actually see either of these wizards. If you're not currently a user (hey, thanks for stopping by and reading this blog post), you'll see both of these the first time you take BlueCamroo for your free, no-risk 31-day trial! (Boss says I got to bump up the SEO factor on these blog posts…)

Bidding on a project can be a major expenditure of time and money. The conventional wisdom is you have to spend money to make money, but nothing prevents you from being as efficient in the bidding process as possible. BlueCamroo's Opportunity feature helps you organize bids, manage tasks, track deadlines, collate relevant documents, and automatically generate an accurate sales quote.

In our last blog post, we looked at how the Web-to-Lead system could be used to create a wall between the user and a page with "freemium" content. The site visitor gives you some contact information including an email, the site visitor gets entered into BlueCamroo as a lead, and the site visitor then gets forwarded to the download page.

Trade content a site visitor finds highly valuable in exchange for something a company finds of value but the site visitor is happy to give away. In other words: information. Leads. If you're in the leads game, a great way to get leads is to offer "freemium" content ("free premium") walled off until the site visitor provides some form of contact information.