We have some exciting new features and enhancements this month, including a new Custom Theme Builder! Theme your Socialcast community to match your corporate branding, showoff your company culture, and drive internal initiatives. Admins can use this interactive tool to create and deploy beautiful themes for end-users to enjoy in a matter of seconds. This feature is only available for Premium communities, so upgrade your Free community today. Check out the features available for September* and let us know what you think:
1. Custom Theme Builder
At Socialcast, we love empowering our customers to customize your communities exactly the way you want. Today, we’re happy to announce that we’re taking this one step further by allowing all premium communities to customize the look and feel through our integrated Theme Builder. We will no longer have to engage Professional Services to deliver this great feature and UI enhancement.
To access the Theme Builder, premium community admins can go to Admin Settings > Setup > Theme to create a custom theme. You will still have the option to select one of our three pre-defined themes, or you can create your own.
To create your own theme, begin by specifying the colors for your link, navigation icon, and background color. You also have the option to upload a background image and control its properties, such as its positioning, tiling, and scrolling. There will be an interactive mini display that mocks up your selections. You can also hit the “Preview” button to view the new theme, which only you will be able to see. Once you are satisfied with how your theme looks and feels, you must hit “Save” to apply the theme for the entire community.
Note: Any theme adjustments will only affect the Socialcast Web interface at this time.
2. Updated Group Broadcast Message Display
We have updated some rules around how we display our broadcast and priority messaging. Going forward, a Broadcast (or Priority Message) made from inside a group by a Group Admin will only show the following title: “[User Name] made a group announcement to [Group Name]”. This will be the title even if other groups are @mentioned in the original message or subsequent comments. These Broadcast messages will still appear in other public groups if they are @mentioned in the body of the message or in comments. We made this subtle change to clearly indicate the owner of the Broadcast message and the original targeted audience for that message.
A Broadcast (or Priority Message) made from a User’s Home Stream will continue to work as it does today. The title will display as follows: “[User Name] made an announcement“
3. Improved Permalink Display
Did you know that clicking on the date/time stamp link for a message takes you to a permanent link for that message? We have decided to improve the display to help users understand that it is a clickable link. Users will now see “View message – [date/time stamp] from [post origination] ”
4. “See Less” to Collapse Messages
Our users want to be able to quickly peek in and out of messages that contain a lot of comments. We’ve now given more control to end users by allowing them to “See more” to expand the content of a post, and “See less” to collapse the content that has been expanded. This is a quick trick to help users manage and fine-tune their viewing experience on the web!
5. Additional Sorting Options for Groups Dashboard
We have added additional sorting options to the Group Dashboard to help users easily filter through their list of Group memberships. To get to the Group Dashboard simply click on the Groups button from the left hand navigation bar. The following new filters have been added to your Groups Dashboard:
- Most Members
- Fewest Members
- Date Created
Improvements to Town Halls
6. Town Hall Reach Extension
As more and more communities become attuned to using Socialcast Town Halls, one request we hear from our customers is for the ability to embed a Town Hall inside a corporate intranet page or any external system that can reach a broader audience. As a result, we’ve released a new option to our existing Reach framework. Community and Reach admins can now embed their Town Halls in their web and SharePoint sites using Reach.
This view allows members to RSVP for an upcoming Town Hall, attend an active Town Hall, ask questions, and like, comment, or send Thanks on all answered questions.
From a participant’s viewing perspective, we have added real-time messaging to let users know exactly when a Town Hall goes live and ends.
Reach Town Halls will have a banner indicating when the Town Hall is about to start, and automatically close once the Town Hall is in an active session.
As the Town Hall gets closer to its end time, we will display a message alerting users that the end time is approaching.
Finally, once the Town Hall ends, we automatically shut down the ability for members to submit questions, and will show a banner indicating the Town Hall is no longer active and has been archived.
7. Town Halls Added to Search Dropdown
As part of our ongoing work to super-charge Town Halls, we have made them a little easier to search for inside the application. Typing in the name of an upcoming Town Hall into the main Search bar will show and filter results in the suggested dropdown. Clicking on a Town Hall from the dropdown will take you straight into the upcoming Public Town Hall. Still not finding what you are looking for? Typing a few characters of a Town Hall and hitting the Enter key will take you to the Search Results page, where you can filter down and find the exact Town Hall you are looking for!
8. Archived Overlay Added to Town Halls
To help users quickly identify which Town Halls are active versus archived, we have added the ‘Archived’ overlay, similar to what is seen for Archived Groups. Once a Speaker or Moderator archives a Town Hall, members of the community will see the Archived avatar overlaying the icon in the Town Hall itself, or in the Town Hall Directory.
9. Increased Number of Speakers and Moderators
To encourage more engagement and dynamism in Town Halls, we have lifted the limitation to the number of Speakers and Moderators. You can now involve as many Speakers and Moderators as you would like in a Town Hall!
*Please note that On-Premise clients will receive these features in a future release.