5 Ways to Boost Collaboration with Chatter

Chatter provides some great ways to collaborate through discussion, categorization, and automatic updates. Here are a few ways to boost collaboration within an organization with Chatter.

Keep updates relevant – be choosy in whom you follow, which groups you join, and how many email digests you receive. One of the greatest advantages of Chatter over e-mail is that you can predetermine and control what content is sent your feed. With Chatter, you opt-in to what to follow, as opposed to e-mail where anyone who has your e-mail address can send a message to your inbox. If you’re on a project for a finite point of time you can create or join a project group and/or follow the project team members for as long as the project lasts. Any updates in that group or from those team members will be sent right to your Chatter feed. Once your part of the project is done, you can simply “unjoin” and “unfollow” since those updates may no longer be relevant to you.

Tie content from other company systems into Chatter. Often times companies use document sharing repositories, shared drives, or other systems (for compliance reasons or other) to store and share documents and templates. By using the Chatter topics and link features, you can create a post that lets colleagues know the content exists, the location of the content, a link to it, and a hashtag (i.e. #shareddrive) to associate the post with that topic so you and your colleagues can easily find it later.

Include hashtags in your posts to categorize them. By using the “#” symbol with a specific term (i.e. #resource, #help, #FAQ, #healthcare) you can associate posts on the same topic so you and your colleagues can easily find them later. This is immensely helpful when you start to generate a lot of content within Chatter and need to focus in on a specific topic or recall categorized discussions from an earlier point in time.

Use the desktop app to stay up to date easily. The desktop application for Chatter sends automatic notifications in the lower part of your screen when there are updates to your feeds – just like an IM does when someone sends a chat or like Outlook does when a new message is sent to your inbox. This is handy since you don’t need to be logged in to Salesforce via a web browser or refresh the page to check for updates.

Provide frequent status updates of what you’re working on or to where you may be travelling. Often times colleagues will want to know if you’re in the office for the day or the week or what account you may be working on. By updating your status on Chatter, they can get that info automatically and may even have some good information to proactively share with you for the trip or the project.

What are some ways that you use Chatter to collaborate?

Kate Borger (31 Posts)

Kate is the Assistant Marketing Manager based in Cloud Sherpas' Atlanta headquarters and oversees much of the company's strategic partner communications in addition to her duties as Editor of the Cloud Sherpas BaseCamp blog.