We're entering week 3 of our Chatter-only (Sales Cloud, Services Cloud and Community Cloud to follow) launch to over 4.500 global employees, and here are some tips I came up with during the initial explosion of activity:

How to Improve Your Chatter Experience! (Please share this post!)

Whew! Chatter has exploded like the Big Bang and there’s a ton of pure energy and noise in the system as people fly around trying to figure out how do I adapt to this new environment? Some of you are feeling overwhelmed, so here are some tips to tailor your Chatter experience to reduce the “noise” and truly realize Chatter benefits like increased productivity, better communication, and better collaboration.

Here’s how …

Limit what you follow – Chatter users can follow People, Groups, Topics and Files. The more you follow of each, the more you’ll see in your Chatter feed. Let’s look at each category to see how you can better manage your Chatter experience:

People

We have over 4,500 employees on Chatter. The more you follow, the more activity you’ll see in your activity feed, and if you follow too many people, you could reduce your general Chatter feed to a meaningless distraction.

Consider:

1. Who are you following?
2. Take a look at the people you follow and if appropriate, delete those that are not really important to your day to day role and responsibilities.
3. If someone follows you and they’re not really part of your day-to-day, don’t feel pressured to follow them back.

Groups

Groups are rapidly proliferating and causing confusion among some users. We are currently assessing all groups to identify where we can consolidate and simplify.

Consider:

1. Before creating a group, do a few searches using key words related to the group you’re considering, and ask those you work with whether they know of such a group. You may find the group already exists.
2. Look at all the groups you are following and if appropriate, delete those that are not really important to your day to day role and responsibilities. If there’s a particular topic you’re interested in within a group, you’re better off following that #topic (see topics below).
3. If after searching for like-groups and considering the use of#topics to label your posts, you still believe you need a group, it should be public in order to foster collaboration across Kronos.
4. Private groups should be limited to the following 2 cases:
   1. The private group consists of staff and a leader - in essence a virtual extension of a staff meeting
   2. The group content contains confidential information

Please remember Chatter's primary function is to increase collaboration, so if you must create a group, make it public unless one of the conditions above is met.

Files

Chatter users can upload, share, download, and comment on pretty much any file type like XLS, PPT, DOC, WAV, PNG, HTML, PDF, etc. Users can “follow” files so that if the file is updated, the user will be notified in their feed. For example, if a user relies on a particular Healthcare presentation, by following it, they’ll always know when a new version is available.

Consider:

1. Only follow files critical to your job.

#Topics

Chatter Topics let you label or categorize your posts with a common topic by using the hashtag sign (#) before the topic - like #YourTopicHere. By using hashtags to add topics to your posts, you make them easy to find by users searching for the topic, and also allow users to follow the topic so in the future they’ll see any post that includes the hashtag topic in their feed.  When users search for or follow a #topic, they’ll see all posts categorized with the topic even if it’s from a public group they don’t follow! Following topics reduces the noise you may get in your feed by following a whole group.

Consider:

1. Click on Topics in the left navigation bar of Chatter and explore them by scrolling or searching. Follow those that are important to your day to day role and responsibilities.
2. Make sure you categorize your posts with Topics! This will allow people to find and receive your post on say, "YourFavoriteProduct" by following the topic #YourFavoriteProduct.

Thank you.

Your friendly Chatter Implementation Team