Building a SXSW Party Hotline on Salesforce with Pervasive and Twilio

Building a SXSW Party Hotline on Salesforce with Pervasive and Twilio

This guest post is by Chad Sakonchick, the Galaxy Marketing Manager for Pervasive.  He’s mildly obsessed with social activities (IRL), any kind of physical challenge, and autonomous drones.  You can keep up with his witty banter at @csakon or virtual hoarding of whosits and whatsits galore on Pinterest. 

One of the advantages of having powerful tools at your disposal is the ability to execute greatness on a last minute idea. To provide context, Twilio and Pervasive worked together over the past few months to scope, develop and launch a cleverly simple product that pumps information gathered by Twilio apps into Salesforce. The goal was to enable call and SMS tracking within marketing campaigns, which has previously been a pipe dream to most.

Due to the simplicity of Twilio’s APIs, Pervasive was able to architect a solution that should have marketers that use Salesforce clamoring for this new product.

We wanted to provide a real world use case to demonstrate the capability of the product and jumpstart the imagination of clever potential users. The idea Twilio and Pervasive agreed upon was this: a simple party hotline that let users call in, listen to a list of upcoming parties and then receive a text message with the address to the venue and a short link to RSVP for the party.

Our friends at Twilio started by whipping up an interactive phone app running on Salesforce that gets its data from a custom object. Next, we compiled a list of popular SXSW parties with date, time and venue information within Google Docs. We then went to our integration marketplace, Pervasive Galaxy, and used the Google Docs Download template with Data Integrator v10 to push our party data from Google Docs to our custom Salesforce object.

Once all the party data was in Salesforce, we turned on our shiny new Twilio-to-Salesforce call tracking solution and began making test calls to the SXSW Party Hotline. In less than 48 hours, we had gone from an idea to a live marketing campaign that tracked hundreds of calls and texts throughout SXSW Interactive.

Check out this video about the Hotline:

If this looks like something you’ll find handy, head over to Pervasive Galaxy and snatch it up.