How many times a day do you need to show a client a file, concept, video, photo, …? If you’re anything like me, it’s all the time. Many of our files are pretty big or proprietary and confidential, so it’s hard to send them through email or over a social network like facebook (I mean do you really want to be discussing the terms of an upcoming shoot on your fb wall?)
Would it not be great to have one place that is like facebook, just secure? A social network for business that is more personal than LinkedIn? A timeline like Twitter that shows your whole team what is happening in your business? A place were you can work together with your vendors, clients and crew to produce, review, share and comment on the projects that you are working on?
Find out how you can do all this for free after the jump.
If you read my blog, you know that I use SalesForce for my customer relationship management and that it is tied into my website. They introduced a “facebook for business” about a year ago, where you could do just that inside your SalesForce account, which is great for a company that has many people using this CRM, but does not do much good if your by yourself.
All that changed on Sunday though when SalesForce opened Chatter up to everyone. (You may have seen their ads in the Superbowl) – here is a quick video that gives you a Chatter overview.
Let me give you an example of how Chatter works in practice. I shot a video for one of my clients last week and needed to get the rough cut approved. Usually I would upload a small version to YouSendIt or to DropBox, wait for the client to download it and sometime get a call or an email about what they though about the project. However today I uploaded the video to Chatter, invited my client to Chatter and placed the video in a private group that only they and I can access – and SalesForce knows how to do security, believe me. So I can upload proprietary information to the cloud, for them to review and to comment on – directly in Chatter! (Which shows up in my Chatter feed – similar to your facebook wall or twitter timeline.)
Pretty cool stuff. You can check Chatter out for yourself – it’s free and it’s pretty cool.
