Tips and tricks 0: Do NOT use your email address as your community username.

Your username is how you are known in the community. While you may choose in your Profile to keep your email address private, your username is always public. By using your email address as your username, you are making it public and you may have an increase in spam (unsolicited email).

If you have accidentally entered your email address as your username, please use the Contact Us link at the bottom of every Thinkfinity Community page and let Thinkfinity Staff know what you would like it changed to.

Note: Usernames must start with a letter. Allowed characters are A-Z, 0-9, _, @, - (dash), and .(dot). You can NOT use spaces.

Jane Brown

Community Manager

Tips and tricks 2: Take a Peek

You can quickly learn about someone in Thinkfinity Community by hovering your cursor over their name or avatar. In one glance you will see their title, department, contact information, status level, and most recent activity.

Jane Brown

Community Manager

Tips and tricks 4: I love Spell Check

As you venture out into the general community, you will want your discussion posts to look professional. Please remember to Spell Check your response right before you select Add Reply. You may be so glad you did.

Look for your Spell Check icon (the green checkmark next to abc) in the right corner of your Reply to textbox.

Note to some: You can even toggle your Spell check to eight languages from the drop down arrow beside the Spell Check icon.

Jane Brown
Community Manager

Tips and tricks 6: Your Reputation in Thinkfinity Community

All new members start with a status of New User. You can increase your reputation in Thinkfinity Community by contributing in several different ways. One of the best ways to increase your reputation is by answering questions. When the member who asked the question marks your answer as helpful or correct you get a boost in your reputation. Other ways to contribute are creating documents, publishing blog posts, and posting to a discussion. You total number of points will increase by the following:

• Create a document: 4 
• Publish a blog post: 3 
• Posting or replying to a discussion: 1 
• Correctly answering a question: 4 
• Helpfully answering a question: 2

For more information, please read How To: Earn Points in the Verizon Thinkfinity Community, one of our many helpful documents in the Thinkfinity Community Help Center.

Jane Brown
Community Manager

Tips and tricks 8: How can I edit my Profile/Privacy Settings?

Your Verizon Thinkfinity Community Profile is all about you. Your profile can contain a short bio, pictures, and your recent activity. Through Privacy Settings you can decide how much information you share with the community.

Tip 2a: You set up your profile during the registration process, but you can always modify your information. Please read All About: Profiles and using the gold navigation bar to locate your profile (select My Stuff > Profile) and make appropriate edits.

• If you ignored the suggestion to avoid using your email address as your username when you joined, you may want to reconsider this act. Why? While you will be able to change your privacy settings in Tip 2b, you cannot hide your username. Using your email address as your username makes your email address public information and you may start receiving spam (unsolicited emails) to your account. (If you need to have your username changed, please let me know and be sure to tell me what you would like your username to be.  I will fix this for you.)
• Everyone likes to see your picture if you have a digital one to upload. And it is fun to select an avatar that represents your persona in the community.
• Be selective with your profile descriptors as others may search for members with your expertise.

Tip 2b: Once you have your Profile set up the way you want, you want to read Privacy Settings and establish your appropriate Privacy Settings.

Jane Brown
Community Manager

Tips and tricks 10: Let people know what you are doing

Have you moused over a person's avatar and, while reviewing a summary of their profile, seen their latest update, a chunk of information telling what they are doing? You may even click on the avatar and see that person's profile page to locate their personal update history.

Staying connected is as simple as posting short, quick messages (updates) using the Community Activity widget on your home page that you see when you enter the community(or, select Communities > My Community View from the gold navigation bar.) Perhaps you let everyone know you are "Training today" or "Attending a retreat." You can post a chunk of information as frequently as you want.

To delete an update:

1. Select My Stuff > Updates
2. Click on Permalink under the post you want to delete.
3. In the Actions menu, click Delete update.

Jane Brown
Community Manager

Tips and tricks 12: Get Notified

You can have Thinkfinity send you an email when content you care about is added or changed. This is an alternative to feeds, which require a feed aggregator.

To begin receiving email notifications, navigate to the content you care about - a discussion or blog, for example - and select Receive email notifications under the Actions menu. To stop receiving email notifications, select Stop Email Notifications.

Note: You can manage all of your email notifications by going to the Email Notifications tab in your profile.

Jane Brown

Community Manager

Tips and tricks 14: Help! How can I stop receiving so email notifications?

A course participant writes, asking if there is a way to stop the influx of email messages that she is receiving. She changed all default responses to NO from the preferences tab - but she simply cannot manage several dozen email messages a day coming into her work inbox. Do you have this problem? 

Though I responded to her by private mesage, I think I'd like to explore this topic a little more with all of you, hence this post.

I certainly do understand how email notifications can become a problem.  First, I'll point out a document we have in the Help Center called How To: Manage Email Notifications, compiled by our wonderful Community Hosts. This document warrants a careful read if you are wanting some serious control your email notifications.

The course participant went to the email notifications in her Preferences as described in the initial section of the document and set them all to "No." However, the settings there will only apply to content that the member creates or comments on from the time they change the setting forward. Any content previously set to receive notifications will remain unchanged and she will continue to receive notifications on that content.

What to do?

Please read the section in the document on Removing Notifications for Specific Content, using your My Stuff > Overview. I think this should help!

After you have these under control, another thought is to chose in your Preferences to receive an email summary from the community. This step is described under the section in this document on General Email Preferences.

Email notifications is a wonderful feature, but it can get out of hand. I want you to be able to manage your own account and its email notifications to your satisfaction.

Jane Brown

Community Manager

Tips and tricks 16: Watch a Tag widget (now here is a real time saver)

For those of you wondering what a "Watch a Tag" widget is, you may select Communities > My Community View on the gold navigation bar and then click on the edit link next to the words My Community View (located at the top of this page.)

Next, click on Content in the left column of the available Widgets.  Scroll down and select Watch a Tag. The widget shows in the right column. Click and drag (using the green +Drag to Add button) and place the widget where you want it on your page.

Now you want to click on the grey drop-down arrow and type in a Tag (some word) that you want JIVE to watch for and show you any entries made that are tagged with your keyword.  You can select the number of results to show and the type of resources you want reviewed and to show.

Save Properties and you will have saved yourself a lot of time by allowing JIVE to work for you.