You and The Success Community – Jenny’s Admin Tip #19

Want to know if it is possible to clone cases in Salesforce1 or know how to create a formula to stop a picklist value from changing if a particular field is blank on a lead record?

Niche Salesforce questions like this might not be readily available on the web, and often your colleagues might not have the time/resources available to help answer these questions. So instead of racking your brains for the answer, why not let your peers help find it for you? This is where The Success Community is going to come in handy.

But, what is The Success Community and how can you gain the maximum benefit from using it?

For those who are familiar with the Community, you’ll know it to be one of the strongest and most beneficial aspects of Salesforce. For those who are not, briefly the Community has grown from 500 users in 2005 to over 1 and ½ mill users and 209 User Groups (and still expanding) in 2015. And it has proven to be a valuable place to collaborate and discuss by following your peers, joining groups, and sharing links and files. It is basically your go-to-place for all Salesforce information/help.

Gain maximum benefit from the following:

Your Profile

Isn’t it always nice to put a face to a name? As you start to collaborate in your community via Questions, Answers, Chatter etc, your peers may start to recognise your name or may want more information about you. This is why it is best to fill out your Salesforce Community profile or at least add an avatar to provide a more personal touch. This is also a great opportunity for you put links to your company, blog or social media accounts. Don’t be anonymous, your community peers won’t bite. Promise!

The key players – In the Community

Know your Community leaders. When it comes to ANSWERS, you will soon see a number of familiar avatars answering Salesforce User questions on a daily basis. Speedy and reliable responses from Salesforce Gurus and MVPs such as Mike Gill, Chris Edwards, Steve Molis, Jon Tresko, is what has made these guys top community leaders. If you want to join and make it into the top 14, simply answering a few *cough* 1013 questions should get you there. Better get answering!

Answers and Ideas

All the gear, but no idea? Wack it on the Answers feed and watch your Community Leaders (and other community members) respond with their solutions. Or why not filter your feed to find unsolved/unanswered questions and help a fellow user out with your solutions? Oh and if there is a particular feature that you would like to suggest e.g. Merge Contacts across Accounts, simply post your feature request in the Ideas section and let other users vote it up (or down) . And while you are there, why not search for other trending/popular/recent Ideas, after all the more votes an Idea has the more likely it is to reviewed and released.

Join Groups and Follow Users

Our Community, your feed. Want more personalised updates from specific community members? With Chatter capabilities you can simply follow peers that you want to learn from and receive their updates in your feed. Or why not bring structure to your discussion by searching and joining a group in the community? This will be a perfect place for you to share and access files, and view member lists and feeds. There will be a group for everyone and if not, simply create your own.

So what are you waiting for? Start engaging with your fellow peers today and reap the rewards of a closer Salesforce community.

What do you love about the Success Community? Send me a tweet @jenny_bamber or leave a comment below.

See you next week.

Jenny