This was a great session that practiced what it preached. If learning about Chatter use cases wasn't enough, the presenters utilized the DF Dreamforce Chatter for this Session. Great!
Doing that introduced a nice way to discuss the presentation as it was going on with other audience members. At the end, some questions were read aloud and answered. I'm hoping all of the sessions are like this.
Like a lot of companies that got excited with a pilot of Chatter, we introduced it quickly without proper planning and the attention it deserves. We enabled it for everyone, tracked a bunch of fields on a bunch of objects, effectively creating too much "noise" to do our deployment much good.
An example given during the presentation was to think of Chatter as an old time radio with a tuner dial. You can have all static, some static, or a nice crystal clear signal. It's all about fine tuning for your audience. The record oriented updates didn't mean anything to our users because it was too much of the wrong stuff. For you it might be too many fields, the wrong fields, or the wrong org environment to follow these record "changes."
For my company, I believe Chatter can be an effective communication tool. It will come down to grouping and empowerment. I've disabled the Chatter updates for records within my org and will have a stronger focus on the next attempt. I'll create a basic set of department based groups and elect a leader. The leader will be the employee of the highest position within the company hierarchy. The tip I've heard the most is that adoption of Chatter increases as the higher ups become involved.
With departmental groups, I hope to foster intra-department specialization, increased shared knowledge, and open up communication between the employees in that group.
One challenge will be to establish guidelines of when to use the group and when to pick up the phone.
I'd also like to try an experiment where a group is created for specific projects. I would think that this would help my firm stay on track, be more organized, be more open, and ultimately increase awareness on expectations of those involved.
I'm also thinking that it might be good to have a group to let people teach people. "What do the more experienced users want to share with less experienced employees? HR should be able spread good news like promotions, group managers should be able to post departmental achievements, and more. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
I'll be sure to post more once I have a solidified plan going forward. Open questions after the session were:
1) How do my employees know of groups and hash tags?
2) Compliance related issues: SEC 17a-3 and 4.
3) Future of Chatter in workflow - auto create Chatter; auto-enroll employees into groups
4) Administratively add users to groups - no opt out
