Community – Becoming a Well Rounded Admin: Part 4

Salesforce has an amazing user community! Personally, it is one of the main reasons that I love working with the platform. Never have I participated in or been a part of such a knowledgeable, passionate community of users. But how can you leverage the community to your benefit? Get involved! Choose one or multiple channels below and interact! Interaction is key!

Here are 3 ways to get involved!

1. Salesforce Customer Community
   Salesforce has done a fantastic job of creating a community where users can help one another with questions, problems and issues; share best practices, and glean new ideas from other users. The Customer Community page provides users with the ability to crowd source questions for the best possible answer to a situation, and contribute ideas which include the Salesforce product/platform development. Getting involved is easy! If you have Salesforce credentials, you are already a part of the online community!
2. Twitter
   If you don’t have a Twitter account, what are you waiting for?! There is a wealth of Salesforce knowledge on Twitter. Being able to share with a variety of users in real time has proven to be one of the best channels which I use the most to find answers and interact with the community! Not sure who to follow? That is easy too! There are public lists of users that you can subscribe to for quick and easy access to their Salesforce related tweets! Salesforce by Mike Gerholdt (buttonclickadmin.com) & NoSoftware by Michael Farrington (michaelforce.org) are two great lists of Salesforce users and MVPs! Aside from following Salesforce users, you should also be regularly reviewing the #askforce topic. Using this topic allows you to post questions to the user community for a quick response. I have had wonderful results with super quick answers to my questions. Answering these questions and providing best practices is also a lot of fun!
3. Local User Group
   Compared to Dreamforce, your local user group provides a more intimate setting for networking and sharing of best practices. If you aren’t a part of your local user group, see if one already exists and sign up to receive notifications and register for the next meeting! So get your business cards ready and have fun!

Speaking from personal experience, the Salesforce community has been instrumental in my growth as an Administrator. Becoming a well-rounded admin doesn’t happy by chance. Be intentional in becoming a contributing member of the Salesforce community and see how much your knowledge grows!