As most us of know, social media has blown up over the last seven years or so and specifically Social Media and CRM. Whether you are checking out posts from Reddit, Twitter, Facebook or following cool blogs on Tumblr, and WordPress, social media has really taken root in our society & culture. Social media even helps people understand the lives we live when most people we know can’t be with that person every day. But what about enterprise level social media? More specifically what about internal social media and how can this benefit a company when collaboration and speed are key to closing deals, satisfying customers or solving everyday operation issues that arise at a large enterprise corporation. Check out this projection of how much ‘social CRM’ is expected to grow over the next several years.
Social CRM Background
I have had the opportunity to work with various forms of social media as it relates to enterprise level installations and will share my view of the mostly good, slightly challenging and new world of social media a lot of us are still discovering. My first experience with social media in the enterprise space was Yammer. This tool was a start-up that had a lot of buzz early and was eventually purchased by Microsoft. My limited experience with this tool will allow me to say, it came on fast at my company, was used, and was replaced just as quickly. Initially the feedback was good, but with lack of training, strategic vision changing with tools, this tool was quickly replaced. Next came Chatter, from Saleseforce.com. Chatter was introduced at Dreamforce in 2010 and quickly took off from there. I will offer some advice on deploying Chatter and then what worked best and what you and your company may want to do differently.
Salesforce Chatter
Chatter tool is a great enterprise social media vehicle that allows you to collaborate with team members or other segments in your company. In addition, Chatter breaks down the barrier between individual contributors various levels of management to foster an environment of collaboration across your organization, A few things to consider when using Salesforce Chatter; ensure you have C-level buy in from the beginning with this tool, as it critical to ensure user adoption. If you cannot get buy from the top and the management is not using the tool to communicate, what’s the incentive for the rest of your organization to adopt? Next, ensure you users know why they should use Chatter before actually rolling it out to the organization. Create a comms and training plan to build buzz and momentum as you get closer to deployment. The worst thing you can do it deploy the tool, get everyone log in and just stand by and watch the tool die slowly.
In the past you were limited with email, cumbersome SharePoint or other antiquated tools to attempt to get critical info to your team. However with Chatter, it’s all in the cloud (no additional hardware cost), secure and documents, opportunities, accounts, people and most object within the Salesforce platform can be “followed” by whomever you wish to have access. With that being said, there are some really good lessons learned on how best to use the tool, drive behavior and have your organization or company collaborate as they never had the opportunity in the past. Stay tuned for my next post as I will share with you some of the best uses for the tool, some lessons learned and how we saw collaboration work across our org with Chatter.
Hector Perez Jr
- Tags: Chatter, CRM, Salesforce
