Building your Community Presence with Daniel Peter

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re speaking with Daniel Peter, Lead Engineer at Kenandy and Salesforce MVP. If you’ve looked at anything Salesforce-related on Twitter, you’ve probably come across something Daniel posted, and we got a chance to talk about how you can build your community presence.

Join us to hear about how Daniel approaches Twitter and uses that to really be a leader in the Salesforce community, as well as how he bridges the Admin and Dev divide.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Daniel Peter.

The Power of Community

Daniel started with Twitter and Salesforce around the same time, in 2009, when he was working for Safari Books Online as both their Salesforce Admin and Dev. In the beginning, it was just about engaging and sharing, “There’s not really any other community that’s as fun as Salesforce,” Daniel says, which makes Twitter especially useful “both to learn and stay on top of new information, and also spread that information to other people.”

For Daniel, using Twitter is about staying actively engaged with new ideas. You keep reading and learning, and a week (or a month, or a year) later you connect some dots and get somewhere new. He carves out an hour every day to stay up on the industry because it moves so fast. “There are some network effects about how doing this over time builds and synergizes and you get a new understanding you can share with other people.”

Approaching Twitter as an Experiment

Daniel cops to having a Twitter strategy, even though he hasn’t put it into words before now. He compares evaluating what he’s going to post to art class, where you look at your work to see if it’s visually balanced: “I take a quick look at everything I post to make sure that it’s not rubbing me the wrong way.”

The default on Twitter is to be repetitive and consistent, but Daniel thinks that “you need to fight that default and always be looking for new ways to do things.” Instead, you should approach Twitter with a spirit of curiosity and experimentation, finding what sticks and continually tweaking your approach.

Admins from a Dev’s Perspective

Daniel started on the platform as both a Dev and an Admin, and he was drawn to Salesforce because of how quickly spending your time with it can translate into impact.  “It’s the really the ability to build cool things very quickly: nobody likes to feel like they’re wasting their time with non-value-added activities, but with Salesforce a very high percentage of every hour you spend building something is value-added.”

As someone who is more on the Developer side of things, a big difference he sees is that even though Devs do a lot of Admin activities, they don’t have to play the role of the Business Analyst or Internal Champion within their companies. When he was playing the role of both Admin at Dev at Safari Books Online he still had to know who within the company was going to get the requirements and champion it. At the end of the day, “You can configure and develop things all day long, but if nobody’s using them what’s the point?”

For more insights, make sure to follow Daniel on Twitter (@danieljpeter)

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