Digital Media Buzz > IM on Steroids: Companies Who Yammer Together, Stay Together

IM on Steroids: Companies Who Yammer Together, Stay Together

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By Ned Smith

Yammer is still one month shy of its first birthday, but it’s already becoming corporate America’s top go-to tool for communication, collaboration and that indefinable something called team building.  This microblogging service ― think enterprise-grade version of Twitter limited to users with a valid company email address ― began life as a homegrown internal application at David Sacks’ genealogy site, Geni.

Sacks liked what the new app did internally so much that he decided to spin it off and launched it as a new company at the TechCrunch50 conference on Sept. 8, 2008. Yammer ran away with best-of-show honors as the best Web 2.0 startup: 10,000 people and 2,000 companies signed up for the service the first day.

Social media such as Yammer and its civilian cousin Twitter are playing an increasingly important role in corporations for communicating with employees and keeping them engaged, say the International Association of Business Communicators. In an IABC survey released this June, 29 percent of companies responding said that they intended to use Yammer in the future, up from its current penetration of 20 percent. Today Yammer is used by more than 40,000 companies worldwide, including corporate heavyweights such as the BBC, Cap Gemini, AMD, Adobe and Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG).

SMG is a global media buying and planning agency with 5,800 employees at 110 offices in 67 countries. They introduced Yammer four months ago with the encouragement and endorsement of Andrew Swinand, president of global operations. “Yammer provides SMG with a borderless community of media experts right on our desktops,” he says. “It has provided our multinational client teams with a forum to share regional best practices, toss around new ideas and learn from each other, which ultimately delivers better, more efficient work for our clients.”

They looked into other platforms such as Facebook, says Stephanie Sipe, an SMG digital communications specialist, but picked Yammer because it was a closed network and had more of the features that they wanted, such as the ability to create client-specific groups within the application. That’s particularly important for SMG because of competing clients within the agency. ”Client confidentiality is a high priority at SMG, so the security of proprietary information between our client-specific groups is another reason Yammer made the ideal partner,” Sipe says. “It provides us with a great combination of necessary protection and open-source collaboration,” Sipe says. Since its introduction, 4,000 of SMG of employees have signed on as members of SMG Yammer. “We dabbled with creating our own platform, but didn’t find the usability we wanted,” she says, “so Yammer became the best option.”

There’s no question that top-down endorsement helps speed adoption of services such as Yammer. ClickEquations (CQ), a developer of paid search management software headquartered in Conshohocken, Pa., introduced Yammer almost a year ago. CEO Linda Holt was Yammer’s champion. In her blog, Cereal CEO, Holt wrote shortly after the service was introduced: “I love Yammer. Yammer fills a void in the social media mix to date. I introduced Yammer a month ago and find it invaluable already. People post really interesting things (to me anyway) like what they’re working on, competitor announcements, industry news, client feedback, there are cookies in the kitchen, or that they’re going to lunch. Our dev team updates Yammer automatically so we can all see hour by hour what’s happening. My hope is that this helps everyone stay excited about what we’re doing.”

Real-time information sharing and teambuilding were the driving forces behind the introduction of Yammer at Slide, a 4-year-old, San Francisco-based startup that creates applications like SuperPoke! for social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace. As with SMG and ClickEquations, Yammer started at the top at Slide with an email to the troops from Max Levchin, Slide’s founder, CEO and chairman, asking them to give Yammer a try and let him know if they thought it had value. Levchin, a co-founder of PayPal, was also an early investor in Yammer, but this wasn’t a factor in Slide picking Yammer, says Lily Lin, Slide’s director of communications.  The organization soon realized that Levchin’s entrepreneurial radar had picked up a winner.

“It’s been a really good tool for real-time sharing,” she says. “We’re primarily an engineering shop. One of the things I’ve seen is a lot of knowledge sharing taking place among engineers. What originally would have been siloed efforts are now being shared across teams. People are able to build bridges that originally they didn’t have an opportunity to because it’s broadcast throughout the entire company.”

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