The Social Enterprise Part 1 ? Improving Collaboration with ...

This is the first in a series of Summa blog posts delivering an overview of Salesforce.com?s foray into the Social Enterprise. In future posts we will go in-depth on Chatter features, provide deployment strategies that drive higher user adoption, and explore the Social Enterprise in a broader sense.

It?s actually been quite a few years now that the term ?social? has taken on a new significance in our lexicon. It still means what it?s always meant, of course: ?pertaining to?relations?community?companionship?. And the underpinning of the social communal relationship has always been sharing ? sharing feelings, ideas and thoughts.

The growth of social media outlets has fostered this sharing like never before. The most widely-recognized social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn) have enabled personal, individual connections and sharing by bringing strangers together and reconnecting lost relationships. Seeing an opportunity to leverage these social networks, businesses also can now reach discreet segments of their customers, receive immediate feedback and target promotions like never before.

But what about within the organization? Should companies be considering ways to use social platforms to increase collaboration, efficiencies ? and revenues?

There is, in fact, a role for social collaboration throughout the enterprise. And there is a solution ? Salesforce.com?s Chatter.

Collaboration?s obstacles

As efficient as we?ve become, collaboration in the workplace is generally much harder today:

• Organizations are larger, with unique structures and roles
• Organizations are more disperse, with multi-site locations
• The virtual workspace has moved employees away from each other
• Business is faster-paced
• We are all exposed to content overload, and sifting through it all takes time
• ?and then there?s NOISE?the irrelevant, insignificant and unneeded information

What is Chatter?

Chatter is Salesforce?s cloud-based enterprise social network. Chatter fosters collaboration within your organization by:

• Enabling relevance ? your staff chooses the information that?s important to them, bringing the conversation to the subject
• No more seeking for important information - Chatter pushes relevant updates directly to users
• Delivering efficiency ? through automated feeds, your employees have quick and seamless access to relevant content
• Shrinking the organization ? bringing remote locations together
• Cutting through the noise

Chatter?s value

In a study done by Nucleus Research in July 2011, Chatter has proven to directly contribute to an organization?s productivity and efficiency:

• Companies adopting Chatter to support business collaboration drove greater productivity ? but also made employees more aware and aligned with company goals
• Chatter users experienced a 12.5% increase in productivity (on average)
• Productivity savings were often seen to have a direct impact on the improved performance of the sales team
• With increased manager visibility through automated feeds, managers are more quickly aware of events, setbacks or actions needed
• Improved responsiveness was seen with topic/customer-specific questions, delivering solutions that are more on target with reduced cycle-time

Features of Chatter

Taking some of the best features of the most popular social platforms, Chatter brings your workforce together, and improves the visibility and dialog throughout the enterprise. Some of Chatter?s key features include:

Groups ? Groups help your teams organize around business processes, topics and customers. By collaborating within specific categories they share relevant information and work more productively. They can even set up private groups to work on sensitive projects.

Feeds ? with Feeds your team can monitor the projects, people and groups that matter most in one spot. The automated content push sends updates on sales pursuits, customer projects, and marketing campaigns.

File Sharing ? Chatter?s file sharing improves access to important files across your team ? right from your browser. You can even receive notifications whenever a document has been updated.

Messenger ? a new feature, Chatter Messenger enables private and group instant messaging to enhance productivity.

Next week: a deeper dive on some of Chatter?s most impactful features.

To learn more about Chatter, the Social Enterprise and how Summa can make your organization more collaborative, contact Orion Wolff at 412.708.5787.

Source: http://www.summa-tech.com/blog/2012/03/29/the-social-enterprise-part-1-%E2%80%93-improving-collaboration-with-salesforcecoms-chatter/

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