Like a true millennial stereotype, I spend about 50% of my day on some type of social platform. Whether it be Twitter for @NOWsupport, or Facebook to see what my best friend from high school is doing, I'm constantly consuming content. I am regularly tuned in to what my team is doing on Connect and where my friends are working thanks to LinkedIn. In a lifetime, an individual will spend about 5 years and 4 months on social media, and social media has only been around for like 10 years. To give you some perspective, that's more than how long a person will sit in traffic for in a lifetime. So if you think you spend a lot of time in traffic, people are spending even more time in their social spheres (sometimes while they sit in traffic).
Communities is only available for customers who are licensed for Customer Service Management.
ServiceNow Communities: Making Corporate life feel like your Personal life
ServiceNow recognizes that social media culture is influencing the way people do work and collaborate. Hence, the CSM team wanted to make your corporate life feel more like your personal life. With Communities, you will notice all of the usability and personalization of social feeds you use every day in social networks.
Build your Community profile
Like our current community, your users can build a profile that tells others what they do at their company. Users can provide the name they prefer other community users to see, a bio of their professional (or personal) life story, where they are located and more.
Be sure to upload a profile photo so other users can put a face to the name. Default profile images, like the infamous Twitter egg or Facebook silhouette, discourage users to engage with your content due to the association with internet trolls. Just upload a picture (it doesn't necessarily have to be of you).
The profile feature allows you to easily distinguish between your posts and the posts you engage with. You can also keep tally of how often you contribute high quality information on the community on the right sidebar. Along with a list of your subscriptions, this gives other users a better idea of the topics you are interested in and participate on.
Personalize the content, categories, and topics you subscribe to
It seems as though the more we say "death to email," the more we ask for email notifications. With so many different types of community content being shared by your ecosystem of influencers, advocates, and consumers, we need to be able to sift between the things we care about. The best way to stay on top of priority discussions, what users are saying about products you care about, and more is to adjust your Notification Settings.
Communities in Jakarta allow you to subscribe to different information areas, but gives you an extra opportunity to only get emails from specific things you care about.
Examples of community notifications you can turn on (or off):
- A blog is posted in a Forum
- An Article is revised (Knowledge Base)
- A question is answered in a Forum
- A content is 'Commented' by a user (Blog)
- A content is marked 'Helpful' by a user (Video)
- The Article is checked out (Knowledge article)
Personally, I suggest to turning on notifications for when a Blog is posted in a Forum at the minimum. Here's how to set your notification settings.
Share valuable content with others in your ecosystem
Want to know the different between social media and a community? The difference is why they come together. Social media is often about you joining people you already know to talk about anything. Community is where you join complete strangers to talk about a shared interest. You can have communities within social media via #hashtags but not to the extent you would see on a community platform. CSM is bridging the gap and helping strengthen your community experience with people you already know.
Empower your users to share their knowledge
First, the Communities feature allows you to share a variety of content types to create a rich user experience beyond the tradition Q&A of a forum. Admins have the ability to adjust who has access to post discussions, blog posts, and videos. This allows the community to have layers of authoritative content on top of the niche use cases discussed in questions.
I remember when lawrence.eng nearly threw his ergonomic mouse at me for saying they were the same. #MyBad.
Encourage personal connections within your community
Like with LinkedIn and Facebook, your activity feed is front and center. Your community experience highlights users you care about just as much as content you care about. You can see what Ralph in Finance has questions on; as well as the wisdom Jasmine from Security is dropping in her blog posts. Rather than seeing the latest content across the whole community, your homepage will show you the latest content on the people, places, and things you subscribe to. Nifty, eh?
The conversations are also threaded so you can easily see what Ralph or Jasmine discuss.
Communities is not enabled by default and is only provided in the Customer Service Management application in ServiceNow. This new application in CSM allows for increased transparency, better communication, as well as reporting benefits for organizations. Explore the possibilities with building your community in-platform and turn on the Communities plugin! Check out the Communities page for more info.
8 Comments
