In October 2014 I made my speaking debut at Dreamforce in San Francisco. Dreamforce is the largest tech conference in the world and THE place to be for getting the latest on Salesforce Cloud. It was not my first Dreamforce. I was there in 2010, when it was big. But it just got even bigger!
I got to speak about Chatter, the Salesforce Collaboration Product or “Enterprise Social Network” product. That all sounds good, but what is it?
In any organisation, the basic communication (outside of voice) is via email. Email, however, is a transactional. It is simply the evolution of sitting down and writing a letter to someone. You write the letter, stick it in the post, and wait for a response. Then we start with email groups, and the transactional nature of email starts to show. I email a message to a group. Some people respond. Some people don’t respond to all. Some people read it and file. A lot of people delete. Not a very collaborative approach.
Social Media has been massively successful as a broadcast medium. I can post a message, and others can read, or respond and get involved in the conversation. Others can monitor and get involved when they have something to add. Social Media better addresses our need for community and conversation. So, Chatter is a tool that brings the best elements of social media platforms, and lands it right in the middle of the Salesforce platform.
Users on Chatter can post messages, create and join groups, share files and pictures or other updates about important company information. Like Facebook, they don’t need to monitor it all the time, and unlike email they don’t need to file every important message for future reference.
So, if you want to hear 5 ways to use Chatter to accelerate small business, have a look at my session speaking at Dreamforce 2014.