Are digital communities the future of business? Salesforce thinks so. According to Nasi Jazayeri, executive vice president of Community Cloud, “Communities have become the connective tissue lining customers, partners and employees to companies and each other.”
What is Salesforce doing to change the game with the next-generation of Community Cloud? With the Summer ’15 release, Salesforce has made managing an online community even easier and provides users added flexibility to help brands create an even more engaging member experience with Community Cloud. Here are four exciting, quick and easy Community Cloud features administrators should explore:
Editing a Chatter Post
Have you ever wished you could update a Chatter post after it’s been posted? Well now you can!
With Summer ’15, administrators can allow users to do the following:
- Users can edit their own feed posts
- Record owners can edit any feed posts under the record they own
- Administrators can edit posts and grant editing permissions to specific individuals
The “Edit Posts on Records I Own” profile permission will enable users to edit feed posts and comments on records they own regardless of who created the post. Feed posts that are modified will display an edited time stamp to show that the original post was edited.
Targeted Recommendations
The Community Builder templates just keep getting better and better. The Napili and “Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce” template now allows administrators to create recommendations to boost community engagement. The new Targeted Recommendations tool relies on algorithms to analyze structured and unstructured data to deliver relevant content to users to boost community engagement.
Community managers can also suggest content or post an announcement targeting a specific group, role type or individual, similar to how some of the social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook are using digital advertising to target a specific demographic. A recommendation can display text and an image along with a button directly in the Chatter feed that navigates the user to a helpful URL. For example, you may have a YouTube tutorial or new product release you want customers to view.
Example:
Topic Management Tool
As your community matures and community management becomes increasingly important, the number of topics will likely grow making navigation difficult or the user experience more difficult. This is especially true of member-created topics in a self-serve community. In Winter ’14, topics were automatically merged if the names only differ in capitalization and spacing. Summer ’15 just got even better by allowing topics to be merged, renamed and deleted in one location. As your community matures, it’ll be important to monitor topics and streamline them.
Salesforce Files Connect for Google Drive
This new feature for Google Drive (now available for Chatter and Employee Community licenses) will help companies improve collaboration and increase engagement with community members. Users can collaborate and share any file created or stored in Google Drive. Files can also be attached to records, such as a sales opportunity or case, helping to deliver relevant information to users.
All of these great new features in the next-generation of Community Cloud are included in an existing Community Cloud license and are generally available in the current release with more features to come in the second half of 2015.
Want to learn how to step up your game with Salesforce Community Cloud? Download our free guide, “The ‘Secret Sauce’ to Create an Engaging Online Community”, or learn more Community Cloud by watching our 2-minute video.
