If you did not catch the Salesforce.com Chatter commercial on the Super Bowl ads last night, you can view the Black Eyed Peas Chatter commercial here. The halftime show was full of energy and artistry as would be expected. Salesforce.com took advantage of the millions of viewers to get their message out to the masses.
Using Chatter To Drive Salesforce.com Collaboration
Chatter is social media built within the Salesforce.com platform. As users work, they will see threaded conversations posted similar to Twitter tweets. User posts are within a private and secure account for your organization. Your users can collaborate quickly around projects, files and ideas.
The extent to which organizations have adopted this social media system varies based on culture and workflow from our Salesforce consulting experience. The idea is that there is less email and phone calls and more social collaboration by pushing status, posts and requests via the social media interface.
The benefit is a team that can keep tabs on what others are doing and join in on relevant conversations where they can find and add value.
Opening Up Salesforce.com Activities
As your team works within Salesforce.com, it is difficult to have transparency into everyone’s work which may have an impact on your own. Chatter logs and publicizes the work of others automatically in addition to users creating their own shared posts. The effect is that you can stay tuned into what the team is focusing on.
Furthermore, you can follow others and contribute to ongoing threads as part of a live conversation. The system captures and logs such information which can be used for reference. This is a different value than the limited one-to-one paradigm of email. Work becomes social and invites collaboration.
Strategies For Using Chatter
Your team may have different applications for this tool based on what you work on and how you work as a team. The top 10 uses for Chatter can be found here. There is typically a goal which needs to be accomplished. A project needs to be completed, an idea needs to be generated or a customer needs a resolution. Opening up the conversation can invite both creative and unexpected responses from the collective conscience of your team. Contributors and observers gain benefit from plugging into the private social media forum.
The driving strategy should be to increase the velocity for getting things done on your team. Knowledge sharing and solving problems are the strategies to focus on for driving your team’s growth and execution.
The publicity and hype for Salesforce.com on a national stage was fun to watch. Getting down to the practicalities of your daily grind is what this feature is all about. Again, it’s about the strategy more than the tool.
