Friday, May 27, 2011

Integrating Eloqua With Slideshare - Making it Easy


It's no secret that Eloqua is a big fan of Slideshare (allows you to upload power points and other docs to the web). It's not just that we create a ton of presentations (which we do) and need some place to store them but we've achieved some great results. This includes Greg Thorne of JMP Securities publishing an article on Revenue Performance Management based on something he downloaded from our Slideshare site. I also recommend checking out "4 Reasons B2B Marketers Should Love SlideShare" to get a better understanding of the benefits of Slideshare.

Example of a form in Slideshare
How can you make Slideshare even better? Integrating it with Eloqua of course! What does this mean? It means easily passing leads that are generated from forms on Slideshare back to Eloqua. This saves you time as a marketer and gets your leads to sales faster.

Now that they're in Eloqua, these leads can be sent a follow up email, entered into a nurturing campaign, scored and/or sent to sales for follow up. This post assumes that you have set up a Pro Slideshare account.

Integrating Eloqua with Slideshare - Step by Step
  1. To get started, you’ll need an Eloqua user account that is API enabled. This is very easy to do, see the post on Cloud Connector Installation instructions and follow the first step only.

  2. The Slideshare Cloud Connector we’ll be looking at here is available on our repository of interesting connectors: cloudconnectors.eloqua.com. They are free to use, just create an account and login. Please note: This account is different from your normal Eloqua login. Under Products > Feeder, select the Slideshare Lead Query option.

  3. Enter in your credentials: In the first step, enter in your Eloqua login credentials and keep going

  4. Configuration: Enter in your Slideshare username and password, the Slideshare CampaignID (it's the number at the end of the URL. For example: http://www.slideshare.net/business/lead_campaigns/12928) and the Eloqua Contact Group / Shared List that you want to add the contacts to (you'll want to pop into Eloqua and create a Contact Group / Shared List).
  5. Field Mappings. Map the fields from your Slideshare form to Eloqua fields. You may want to create some new Eloqua fields that you can pass the Slideshare Campaign ID to. Make sure you click on Save Settings.
  6. Test it. Fill out the form on Slideshare and then in the Run Step tab, click on "Full Run". Run a few tests to see if it's working. When you're happy with the results, just go to the Credentials tab to click "Enable Step" to enable it to run automatically. That's it!
You can also go into Eloqua and see if a contact has been added to the Contact Group / Shared List. To pass these contacts to your CRM, you can add this Contact Group / Shared List as a feeder into your CRM integration program. You can also create a Program or a Campaign and feed in these contacts to a nurturing program - the sky is the limit.

8 comments:

Steve said...

Thanks for the idea. Question for you: Any tips for getting people to fill out the form? I tried Slideshare's lead gen service about a year ago, and had only one person fill out the form. We now have several presentations up, one with 3300 views, so would be nice to link back to Eloqua. Just trying to decide whether it's worth it.

Steven Woods said...

Steve,
good question - really comes down to the usual content marketing things... compelling interesting content that drives interest. No real secret to it, but it's hard to execute on.
Steve

Stacy Taylor said...

I'm so glad to come across this post! We set up the cloud connector to our slideshare lead gen account and it seems to work ok, but we ran across a few drawbacks.

(1) I am able to capture company name on the slideshare lead form, but in the field mapping within the cloudconnector console, there was no option to map 'company' to Eloqua. (2) We pass custom campaign codes in hidden fields typically and map to Eloqua. There doesn't seem to be an option for this as of now.

Any thoughts about why I may not be seeing company name as an available field to map within the cloud connector console?

Steven Woods said...

Stacy,
thanks for the feedback, a good comment. We'll look at making sure company field is there. What field do you pass the hidden campaign codes into?
Steve

Steven Woods said...

Stacy,
quick followup to this, it appears that Slideshare does not pass the company field information back as part of their API, hence we are not able to integrate it. Hopefully they will expose that field soon.
Best,
Steve

Chester said...

Steve, I think Slideshare is sending it as Organisation. Can you check if it's not in the API?

Steven Woods said...

Chester,
unfortunately, we're not seeing that from Slideshare - here's the XML packet for a lead (angle brackets replaced with curly brackets so it shows up):

{Id}44444{/Id}{LeadCampaignId}7556{/LeadCampaignId}
{SlideshowID}5108415{/SlideshowID}
{FirstName}Joe{/FirstName}
{LastName}Chernov{/LastName}
{PhoneNo}{/PhoneNo}
{Address}{/Address}{Email}joe.chernov@eloqua.com{/Email}
{PaidAt}Sun Nov 07 19:42:58 -0600 2010{/PaidAt}
{Rating}{/Rating}
{CreatedAt}Sun Nov 07 19:11:35 -0600 2010{/CreatedAt}
{UpdatedAt}Sun Nov 07 19:42:58 -0600 2010{/UpdatedAt}
{Message}{/Message}
{UserComment}{/UserComment}
{City}{/City}
{Country}CA{/Country}
{Zipcode}{/Zipcode}
{State}{/State}{Mechanism}Download{/Mechanism}
{ReadAt}{/ReadAt}{DeletedAt}{/DeletedAt}
{GeoData}{Region}ON{/Region}{Country}CA{/Country}{City}Toronto{/City}{/GeoData}

{Cost currancy="USD"}1.0{/Cost}

Pratik Patel said...

Steve,

We've added custom fields such as Employee size to lead capture forms. I noticed we can only sync back the standard fields. Is there any option to sync back these custom fields?

Thanks,
Pratik Patel