Chatter – Adoption is the Key!

By Ron Goldman – Service Cloud Director

I read an interesting blog recently from Sam Diaz from ZD Net about Salesforce’s Chatter application.

As far as I see, adoption is the key to unlocking the Power of Chatter. It’s a different way of thinking about collaborating in the enterprise; not forgetting that you’re also replacing a deeply ingrained tool, email!

I run Astadia’s line of business focused on implementing cloud computing for the contact centre and as part of that role; I’ve been using Chatter since April of this year. I use Chatter to communicate the availability of new sales tools, industry trends and product updates. I’ve had great success in getting our 20+ person sales team and our management team to follow me on chatter, meaning they’re getting live updates from me throughout the day. I’ve gotten valuable feedback from the team through Chatter to refine and update my materials. They see value, I see value and so adoption is happening naturally. I also follow sales opportunities for my line of the business so I get immediate updates whenever something changes on the opportunity.

I also realized that it would be great to selectively post some of the materials I was sharing internally to Astadia’s external communities on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. I had our development team put together a solution framework called ChatterConnect that is like a TweetDeck for Chatter so you can bi-directionally post between Chatter, Twitter and Facebook. You can also post to LinkedIn (their API is limited to only receiving posts). Bottom line is that we are finding Chatter extremely useful in its out-of-the-box state and even more powerful with the extensions we are building for our clients.

If you’d like to reach out to me directly please do at rgoldman@astadia.com. Thanks for reading, Ron Goldman!