Giving thanks? But Thanksgiving was last week wasn’t it?
Yes – but this isn’t Thanksgiving in the turkey sense; this is Giving Thanks in the Salesforce community sense. So, what are we thankful for?
In the last couple of weeks, the authors of this blog – Mike Gill and Chris Edwards – have passed two huge milestones in our Salesforce careers.
Towards the end of November, we were both truly honoured to be named as Salesforce MVPs. This gives us a shiny new logo to use but most importantly it means that the community – our fellow users, admins, developers and consultants – have to come view us as trusted advisors and knowledge leaders. And that’s very humbling.
A likely factor in the MVP award is our work in answering user questions on the Success Community. And in a happy coincidence, this week also sees our combined tally of Best Answers (responses marked by the question-setter as being helpful in solving their issue) hitting 500.
And although it’s nice to hit a milestone like that, answering the questions of the community isn’t something that we do for the points or even the recognition, but simply because it feels good to help others. The #1 contributor to the answers community, both in terms of number of responses and number of Best Answers, is SteveMo, and he has a really good analogy for why typing a few characters on a screen is a small price to pay for helping someone overcome a problem or question that they have.
Plus in my experience we learn so much from the community – even just reading the questions and answers of others, let alone contributing – that giving that little extra back should really be a duty rather than a sacrifice. Even if you don’t know the answer to someone’s question, another community member will and once the solution is shared that’s another piece of information for your own personal knowledge base. You never know when you might need it, but if someone posts a similar question or even if you come across the same issue yourself, you’ll know just what to do.
So we very much want to celebrate and give thanks to the community itself. Not just the few of you who we may have helped personally, and not just those who may have nominated us for the accolade, but everyone who contributes to the community – whether that’s asking questions, suggesting answers, raising ideas, sharing their thoughts, or even the small army of Salesforce staff who keep the community itself running. It’s one of the things that sets our Salesforce ecosystem apart. Thank you.
And thank you, too, for reading this blog. Since Mike first put the idea (and the excellent URL!) to me around a year ago, it’s come a long way, we’ve covered a number of topics and hopefully we’ve helped a few of you to learn about a feature or given you the inspiration to try something out.
Right, that’s probably just about enough thanks-giving. We better get back to it – there are questions to be answered! And only 2,000 more Best Answers to go until our combined efforts are just about on par with a single SteveMo! Now that guy is the definition of an MVP – compared to him, Mike and I are just turkeys!