We be Chatting (or is it Chattering?)

So we may have just turned on what will finally be really useful social media in the workplace.


Thursday evening we turned on SalesForce.com's new "Chatter" collaboration tool. Maybe I should say pre-new, as we were able to convince the nice folks at SFDC to turn on the beta in our production environment. I didn't want to make too big of a production of it, after all, this is supposed to be social media for the enterprise, if the users like it, they'll figure out how to make it go. It is pretty simple, even dinosaurs like myself were chatting in no time.

We did make a simple announcement so folks were not wondering what this new thing at the top of the page was, and we gave them links to the intro videos. Other than that, we just turned it loose. I have been watching closely, and there does seem to be considerable activity considering it is so new. We had a few folks asking for something like this, and there appears to have been some pent up demand. I did figure the youngsters would like it, as it does look an awful lot like facebook.

Of course the real magic here, that makes it light-years ahead of Yammer and the like, is that the SFDC objects (Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, etc.) can participate in the news feeds. Even custom objects can play along. We have a custom project tracking application, and the projects where I am the executive sponsor will not chat to my newsfeed when something important on them changes. Pretty slick.

We did find a certain amount of humor in the email it sends when you follow someone; "Dan Petlon is now following you" is enough to scare anyone. That, plus a link to your SFDC profile is all it sends. We are calling it "Chatter Stalking"

Of course I already have my wish list:

• I want rules-based auto-following. for example, I automatically want to follow any new project that I am the sponsor for. The sales leads want to follow new opportunities in there territories. You get the idea.
• I want to be able to start following from my iPhone.
• I really need to be able to control the colors in the new UI theme. I like the default, but I have had a good number of complaints.
• How about a "Chatter Genius"? Punch a button and see chats similar to mine, or to those of folks I follow. I would think this would be a pretty good way to find folks with stuff to say that matters to me.

Overall, I would say we have a winner. It is early, and time will tell, but we already have a lot of engagement from the sales teams, who figured out following opportunities very quickly. They believe it will save on a lot of email.

I'll post an update as we chat on.