Chatter Becomes More Social with Spring 12 Release

When Salesforce Chatter debuted just over a year ago, it was a huge step forward in company communications. It enabled users to make quick and candid notes and updates on their projects. It was no Twitter or Facebook, which have re-sharing features, likes, @-mentions, and photo galleries, but this was a good thing. It allowed businesses who were new to the concept of social networks to start off with just the basics, which was providing updates. As businesses and their employees have become more skilled at building their internal social networks, new Chatter features have been released to allow for more fine-tuned use of the tool. With the new Spring ‘12 release, there are some exciting new features that I’d like to discuss.

Re-posting Chatter Posts
This is a feature that has been a core part of Twitter since its beginnings. If you are following a person whose tweet is one that you want to add to your stream to share with your followers, you can easily do so by “retweeting” that tweet. With the Spring ‘12 release, Chatter users have the same ability. It’s natural for niche groups to form - marketing group, IT group, etc, and occasionally, a post from one group becomes relevant to a larger crowd and should be shared.

Here’s an example: Suppose a bug and work-around has been discovered with some internal software, and it has been logged in your internal Chatter IT Group. If you think that the Marketing team should be aware of this, go ahead and click the “Share” link on the Chatter post to re-post it in Chatter Marketing Group, or on your own profile if your friends are the marketers you want to inform. This is a very exciting feature that I hope to see used. One of the driving forces of any social network is the satisfaction of having an item you post be deemed so excellent as to be re-shared by a peer.

Chatter Bookmarks
There are many times when I lose track of a Chatter post that I wanted to read later. Thankfully, the Spring ‘12 release brings the ability to bookmark chatter posts by clicking the little bookmark icon on a Chatter post. What happens when you bookmark a post? By bookmarking a post, it is added to a list in the “Bookmarks” section of the sidebar. Next time you scan your feed and find a few items to return to later that day or the next week, you can bookmark them to easily find them later.

Other Awesome Updates
- Files in comments - Sometimes its best to defer to the contents of a file.
- Influence score on profiles - See who’s active on Chatter
- Inline YouTube videos - Great for sharing a training video from Salesforce’s huge catalog on YouTube
- Adding a Chatter search as a Favorite - Same as saved searches in Twitter or Google+, which is great for seeing what other people are saying about a topic you’re interested in.

For more information, check out the Spring ‘12 Release video that demos these Chatter enhancements.
Alternatively, check out their photo gallery on Facebook that walks through all the new Chatter features.