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

IM on Steroids: Companies Who Yammer Together, Stay Together

Next Page « 1 2 »

Yammer also answered Slide’s need for security. “We know that anything we put on there is contained within the employee base,” Lin adds. “So we’re able to share some pretty confidential things that we’re working on.”

The closed nature of Yammers’s system also helps maintain a healthy signal-to-noise ratio.  Utah Valley University, a recent Yammer convert, serves a student population of 27,000. “A number of tech-savvy early adopters latched on first here, naturally, but it has expanded in the past month or two and has proven extremely beneficial for exchanging ideas across a diverse and often very segmented campus,” says Erin Spurgeon, UVU’s communications manager. “This is where Yammer comes into play. My coworker Vegor Pedersen I think states it best in his blog post, “Yes We Yam.”

“For the past week or two, folks at my employer [Utah Valley University] have been trickling into the school’s Yammer site,” Pedersen, an academic advisor in UVU’s communications department, commented. “For those of you not familiar with Yammer it is basically an intranet Twitter site. Only people from your company’s domain can join. You can create various groups, follow co-workers, tag and index topics and fill out things like organization charts. The strength of Yammer is that it unites people who face similar problems who might not normally converse with each other.  Yammer allows me to shout an issue or question and watch the crowd come to my aid.

“What’s interesting about UVU’s Yammer right now, and this seems to be the case with most social media channels in their infancy, is that the community is small enough to be helpful. Twitter was downright hospitable in the early days of its evolution when you were just happy to find somebody else using it. Once the spammers and phishers and the marketing trolls got hold of the system it changed the nature of the conversation forever.”

The protean nature of Yammer also means it’s not a one-trick pony; it has the capabilities to grow organically along with an organization and its users. Brickhouse Security, a New York City-based security product retailer, was originally looking for an enhanced internal chat system when it picked Yammer.

“When they announced Google Wave, I was thinking about how we would be able to use some sort of collaborative system that goes beyond chat,” says Todd Morris, the Brickhouse CEO. “Right now we have a chat system built into our phone systems, and we also use Google Docs, and that has a chat system built in. But you can’t chat out to everyone in the office and ask everyone at once, ‘Hey, does anyone know anything about this customer?’ I was thinking about what we could use as a group chat system. Yammer seemed like the easiest to start and test out. But it became more than a chat system.”

Using Yammer can also be fun, as a number of companies have found. And that aspect is often what leads  an employee to make the move from lurker to active participant. That was the case with Brickhouse. “We used it to plan a bowling night,” Morris says. “We posted the pictures from bowling night and let people comment on them. Once they comment on a photo, they start understanding how it works. I think it’s a morale builder and a way to connect people across different divisions. It’s a way for managers like me to see what people are doing and congratulate them in real time for their achievements. I think that’s been the most useful thing.”

That feeling is echoed by Sue Reninger, managing partner of RMD Advertising, a brand strategy, advertising and public relations agency in Columbus, Ohio. “What Yammer has helped us to do is stay connected and motivated,” she says. “The business of being creative is all about loving what you do and finding it fun. It’s really hard to do if you operate in a vacuum. With us, if it’s too quiet in here, somebody will inevitably Yammer a thought such as ‘Why don’t I hear people? Talk it up, RMD!’ Account wins are always shared on Yammer. Yammer for us is primarily goodness ― we really try to take care of each other and motivate each other. I would say it’s had a huge impact on RMD overall from that perspective.”

As has been the case with other social networking tools, Yammer adoption has also been spurred on by competition, a digital counterpart of keeping up with the Joneses. “We started in Yammer quite a while ago when somebody mentioned it to me, and I thought, ‘I don’t have a clue what that is,’” Reninger says. When the concept was explained to her, she says, “Let’s give it a whirl.”

“We’re always open to social media, especially right now,” she says. “As an agency, we feel a responsibility to try it out before we recommend it. Before we suggest to clients they integrate any particular medium, we want to make sure we understand it. That’s the reason we started using Yammer. But it stuck, unlike a lot of other mediums. Today, it’s our internal team medium. When the Yammer icon jumps up at me on my desktop, it gets my attention right away. What it says to me, unlike any other icon, is that this is a team member who is sharing something or has a question or a need.”

Yammer is also helping chip away at what’s left of email’s crumbling hegemony. “Email is a broken model,” says Andy Abramson, CEO of Comunicano, a Del Mar, Calif.-based marketing consultancy. “Too much, not easily managed. IM is not really good for ongoing conversations that involve some or all of a team. Yammer lets me manage my team, who are 29 members and all virtual, very easily. Group communications is easy, instant and timely.”

Reninger agrees. “When I get emails from team members now, I’m almost annoyed because I think there are more efficient ways to share information with me. Why aren’t we doing that? To us, what Yammer really replaces is instant messaging. To us, it’s IM on steroids.”

Ned Smith is a New York-based writer who reports on business and technology. He can be contacted at nedsmith@gmail.com.

Next Page « 1 2 »