Salesforce chatter

We've been using Salesforce.com chatter for a while now. in fact we were one of the private beta customers. When we rolled it out, it was not really announced and instead sort of grew by word of mouth. We had decent traffic,  probably 100 chats a week, which is good, but we recently had our first chatter class and expect it to jump up a bit.

Chatter is salesforce's version of facebook and twitter but for private use. It also allows you to follow "salesforce objects" like contacts, opportunities, cases etc. Pretty cool if you are in sales or support, marginally interesting for other functions. 

We do a lot of customer demo's and I always like to see if the customer we show our data center and products to actually end up buying so I'll probably start following them to keep up with what they do. It also will allow me to offer suggestions if I see them having a problem (because they open a case with support). 

We also use it a lot just tokeep people connected. It's amazing how much "water cooler"discussions can get started based on a single chat. We recently upgraded a core switch in our data center, during the day, with no network downtime during the change out. Pretty cool stuff. But it's not just cool to us IT geeks, but to the firmware engineers building the product to see it work. It’s good for the service guys to see how long it took us, so they can better price out when they do it. It's also cool for the hardware engineers to see how we do cable management. All of this from one chat.

We actually had our first official class today. I announced we were having it at 8:00PM Wednesday night and had 8 responses in 10 minutes, goes to show how many people are checking their email
after hours. By the end of the next day the class was full with 25 people signed up. We'll be having another one soon since it was in such high demand. Also we had a request for remote training so we'll be doing a webcast as well.