Develop a Rollout Strategy

• Executive Sponsor: Every company needs at least one executive identified as the sponsor. A sponsor must believe in the power of social collaboration. They must be willing to invest time to make Chatter collaboration a success. When your Executive Sponsor is actively posting in Chatter, others follow suit. Now, this person usually has a full calendar, so a good guideline for your Executive Sponsor is one post a day. That’s manageable and sets the right example for others to follow.
• Evangelist: You can’t be everywhere at once, and with Chatter you don’t have to be. Right now, there are people at your company who have incredible knowledge and already love social collaboration. Engage those users! Formally recognize them as Chatter Evangelists, and engage them in helping drive Chatter success. Your evangelists can help answer questions, encourage other users who are nervous about posting, create and manage groups, and curate content.
• Community Manager: For Chatter to soar, you need great content and a sense of community. You need a Community Manager curating quality content and driving user engagement. Examples of great content include helpful files, links to industry news articles or videos, posts about events, and exciting announcements at your company. Your Community Manager drives overall engagement at a strategic level. They’ll measure your results, work with evangelists, and deploy adoption programs to keep Chatter going long after the initial rollout.

Depending on the size of your company, a single person can fill multiple roles.

Here are some sample use cases.

• An All-Hands Chatter group for company-wide collaboration during quarterly or annual company calls. If your teams are geographically distributed or you have remote employees, an all-hands group is especially important.
• A #CorporateGoals Chatter topic to highlight and share around a key company objective. If your company decides it’s the year for giving back, make giving back a topic (#givingback). Encourage your employees to use Chatter to share how they’re giving back, and advise them to mark those posts with #givingback. Topics can promote company-wide collaboration and the visibility of company objectives (#CorporateGoals).

• A series of quick polls to gauge employee reaction to a company directive, like a charity donation or a planned product enhancement. If you’re looking to get fast feedback while you iterate, consider informal polling in Chatter.

• A Competitive Strategy Chatter group where you can share insights on your competitors, access files and tip sheets, and get quick answers from experts.
• An Event Planning Chatter group where you can collaborate while planning a department event. Collaborate on the slides for the event, schedule speakers, share details on the agenda. Even invite external vendors who could be supplying food, drinks, or equipment to coordinate all the details.

A great Chatter deployment needs a solid communication plan. Develop a plan for advertising Chatter to your users to get them excited about what’s coming.

• Create Marketing Content: You can send emails and videos to advertise that Chatter is coming. Consider allocating budget for fun swag or a launch party. Making the launch of Chatter an event for your company helps to build excitement and momentum.

Tip: You can drive adoption with a sense of play. Consider setting up a “school picture day” for all company employees. Have a photo booth with props, and take fun pictures. Send out the results, and encourage employees to use the pictures in their Chatter profile.

• Create a Schedule: Choose your launch date carefully. Avoid holidays and busy times for your company (for example, avoid the last day of the sales month). It’s a general best practice to turn on Chatter after hours. Once you’ve decided on your launch date, create a schedule for your pre-launch communication. Here’s a sample communication schedule.

• Use mentions thoughtfully. You can make every name you enter a mention, but it counts most when a mention triggers a less-frequent and more meaningful notification.
• Make mentions count. Where your post lives can impact whether the person or group that you mention is notified or has access to the post. Check out the following table for examples.

Where you post	Who you can mention
On a person’s profile	Anyone with access to that person
On a public group	Anyone with access to the public group
On a private or unlisted group	Only members of the group (note that people with special privileges, like “Manage Unlisted Groups” or “Modify Unlisted Groups,” can also see the mentioned post)
On a record detail page	Anyone with access to the record

Broadly, a profile-based deployment of Chatter consists of these steps:

• Ask Salesforce to enable a profile-based deployment of Chatter for your organization.
• Determine which of your users can make best use of Chatter.
• Review and modify existing custom user profiles and permissions sets. For example, verify that the Enable Chatter permission in a custom user profile or permission set has the desired setting.
• Turn on Chatter for your org.
  1. From Setup, enter Chatter Settings in the Quick Find box, and then select Chatter Settings.
  2. Click Edit.
  3. Under the Chatter Settings section, select Enable.
  4. Click Save.

For more information about profile-based deployment of Chatter, read Control Chatter Access Through User Profiles and Control Chatter Access Through Permission Sets.