Salesforce Chatter is a great way to collaborate at work, as long as people use common sense when posting. To help you out, here are some things you should try to avoid:
1. Scheduling internal meetings (that’s what Outlook/Google Calendar is for):
This is annoying
2. Having conversations that should be private:
Really? Everyone who follows either of you needs to hear this?
3. Inappropriate content or language:
Dude, this isn't Facebook.
4. TMI:
We don't care.
5. Spamming groups with off-topic posts:
Just say no to feed pollution
6. Abusing popular users’ walls to broadcast self-serving or irrelevant posts:
Can you say "career-limiting"?
Do you have more Chatter Anti-Patterns to share? Reply in the comments and I’ll add them to this article.
This post made me laugh, especially that last one. It reminded me of an acronym our CEO mentioned – “CLM” – “Career Limiting Move.”
Number 6 is my biggest fear with Chatter. See my thoughts at http://www.x2od.com/2010/06/11/chatter-clm.html. In fact, yes, I can say “career-limiting!”
Great post, Rob.
Question: In an office where nobody wants to piss-off anyone else, are there people who step up voluntarily to teach/coach others, or is it better to appoint those people (and risk them being seen as an Internal Affairs-style posse)?
Good article, David. I remember encouraging you to write something along these lines when we talked at the VMforce launch; I’m glad you did. This is an important topic (may be worth another blog post…just need to determine the correct level of snark to employ)
Aaaand, we’ve seen a nice example of #5 in the Dreamforce org. I’ll send the offender this link and see what she thinks!
David – you did indeed send me a link to this post and I greatly appreciate it as being new to Chatter (and not really up on Facebook either) I was unaware of the pollution aspect. I have learned my lesson, and think you (we) should indeed help to enlighten folk.
Don- Thank you. I hope I did not come across too harshly (as I tend to do). Chatter is a new experience for all of us, and we’ve all (including me) made some missteps along the way. Hopefully as we all figure out how to use this new tool, things will evolve into some sort of group/herd shared knowledge. Until then, as Rob points out, there are many possible missteps.
I have broken these rules many times myself; when (not if) you see me doing it, please let me know as well.
See you at Dreamforce!
Oh – please check the date on that comment I made – it’s from Nov 16 and was definitely not angled at you. Someone really made a huge I-don’t-know-what and posted that an exec at his/her company was now in the headshot promotions for Salesforce. It went in four groups, on three people’s profiles, and ended with “Woot! Woot!” (Yes, identical wording every time except for the one that started “Marc.”)
Needless to say, many people posted replies!
You just inspired me to write a spam-blocker app for Chatter complete with a “Blacklisted” dashboard and a Chatter “Penalty Box”. Maybe some Akismet integration could do the trick.
And #5, how about we add a “Fire”button? So much easier and far less dangerous than the “Can I see you in my office” phone call.
K-
What do you think about writing a deduper? It could run periodically and find posts with identical wording. Then it can delete all of them and post that wording on the person’s personal feed.
Hmmm.
I think what would be cool is a small ‘report abuse’ or ‘block spam’ link at the bottom of every post, next to the ‘unfollow’ link, and you could set personal preferences to auto-hide any post that X number of people have marked as spam
This is a great post – I love the humor too. Thanks for sharing it!
Here are a few more “anti-patterns” that I’ve observed:
# Starting a new thread/post rather than replying to the original post (pretty annoying if you’re trying to follow and organize one conversation)
#Posting about a project or document on your own “wall” or status update bar, rather than in a designated group or at a specific person, where it could receive the right attention and response
Kevin – my (thankfully rare) “bad” conversations with my boss begin not with “Can I see you in my office” but “Help me understand . . . ” when I hear those words I think “Ooops.”
I think I will post an idea that as well as Like and Delete we need a button for Report Abuse or Inappropriate; it’s up to the company to set Chatter policy but if people can anonymously mark an item as Inappropriate it is then also the workers/users who are setting the standards, not just the management. And we should be able to include or exclude this feature as small orgs are less likely to need it.
Haha – “Unhire.”
Or as one of my customers said on a training session yesterday – “See the button that says create resume? Yeah go click on that one. Hahahaha!”
Just remembers – #1 – that’s what the Cloud Scheduler is for!
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