Watching a Yammer network explode

Yammer is like an internal discussion board where anybody can post a response to a message. It helps people exchange ideas and send real-time messages in small or large groups. The “enterprise-Twitter” can also help to break down departmental walls, flatten the communications structure of the organisation and help people get more done by being better connected. You might think of it as a backchannel that links all of the staff in the company.

yammer-560x287 Watching a Yammer network explode

Some of the potential messages you might see flying around include: 

  • Collaborating to solve problems 
  • Discussing projects within Groups 
  • Sharing news and links 
  • Sharing event outcomes and highlights 
  • Connecting geographically isolated staff 
  • Finding local subject-matter experts
  • File or photo sharing
  • Keeping updated with project progress 
  • Finding out when there is chocolate around.

How do you implement Yammer successfully without scaring everyone off?

It’s hard to get any form of social media to take off within an established organisation, and Yammer is no different. People already get on quite fine without it and unless you can show that it adds a significant improvement to what they already do they are going to resist. 

Yammer is social by nature and will therefore reflect the existing social structures that have grown in the organisation. For this reason for your implementation to be successful you need to get these individuals on board as champions – if those guys find it worthwhile they will naturally share it with others.  

At Deloitte Australia it was an email and voicemail from Partner and Deloitte Digital CEO Peter Williams (@rexster on Twitter) that ignited the flurry of growth. Having buy-in from the top is very important. The email was asking staff to suggest tag line ideas relating to traffic lights for a new ad campaign – either through a survey tool or in the Yammer group that had been set up. 

greendotcampaign Watching a Yammer network explode

The next 24 hours saw hundreds of new members to the network. The activity reinforced the Groundswell Profiling statistics that the majority of people will just watch or share, while only a small percentage participate. As with any venture into social media you need to have champions who can field questions and keep the flow of content steady – these people need to be those who are already socially connected within the group or it won’t take off. Interestingly our Innovation Team are some of the most connected people within the network. 

greendot Watching a Yammer network explode

It has to be accepted from the top

If you are trying to establish a new social media communications tool you really need to have buy-in from management. It will really help you down the track, and reinforces whether Yammer really is the right tool for the job. If you have trouble getting management approval then your organisation might not be ready for these types of tools and if that’s the case no amount of pushing will work. 

giam-on-yammer Watching a Yammer network explode

How do you stop all the emails?

One of the first issues that arose was that people get a pile of emails to let them know that people have subscribed to them. This is especially an issue for the most followed people because they get recommended to new users when they sign up – a number of people got 40-50 emails in an hour when lots of people were joining the network. This is where some direction on how to use Yammer can be useful so that you can explain to people how to adjust their email settings, and of course the Yammer team are listening to this feedback and improving the process. 

Desktop app

Running the desktop app in the background has a huge impact on usage because you can watch and contribute to the stream in realtime, instead of waiting for the daily digest emails. People are much more likely to contribute through the desktop app because they can join in with the conversations as they happen. 

Integrate Yammer with your Twitter

If you list your Twitter username on your profile page you can actually crosspost from Twitter. Just write a message and add the #yam hashtag and in a few moments your tweet will appaer in your Yammer feed. This is a great way to leverage your existing tweets to help build the Yammer content stream. 

Integrate RSS

Another good way to build momentum is through the content that you are already publishing. You can set up an automatic RSS feed import to capture things like your company or personal blog posts, search results for your company search terms and much more.  

yammer Watching a Yammer network explode

Share your stories

I have spoken to quite a few people who have found starting a Yammer network difficult, but worthwhile. I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments below.

By Ross Hill - April 15th, 2009 at 9:06am with 4,224 views -

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  • Plurking my Yammer network at http://www.plurk.com/p/4llhx

    Begun almost a year ago, the DETA Yammer has been an interesting way to test the power of communication in a large government organisation. The Queensland Govenrment Department of Education and Training (DET) (formerly DETA - Education, Training and the Arts) has 86 000 employees, 134 of whom have signed on to the microblogging service.

    Very few members are active bloggers - most either lurk or visit infrequently. Librarians are very supportive, likewise IT specialists.

    I'm wondering what to do to celebrate birthday #1. Any ideas?
  • Yammer do (or at least did initially) provide pro-active user engagement and support via Twitter. Read my post from a while ago here: http://delarue.net/blog/2008/09/yammer/
  • @Christoph I think using the hosted Yammer app is a great way to try it out and see whether it is actually a good fit for your company, but depending on what sort of conversations you want to have and how sensitive they are then it would certainly be wise to migrate to the self-hosted version later.
  • Thanks for this great post. I would be very interested whether you had any thoughts about information security. Obviously, with Yammer you have discussions among your people hosted on an external server.

    The main issue I encountered is that Yammer almost tries to be too much. Having a sort of closed user group Twitter would be great and there probably won't be many problems with that. However, Yammer promotes itself as a platform to share and discuss ideas, projects, etc. and store company information.

    In your post you also talk about discussing projects on Yammer. I think our IT security would not be amused if internal projects are discussed over an external server infrastructure.

    So I would be interested to know whether you have some sort of monitoring in place and whether you have a policy on Yammer use. I know, this might all sound rather stiff and regulated, but in my case, the first reaction of senior management was to get Yammer approved by information security.

    Cheers

    Christoph
  • Wes
    @Dan It's about using the right tool for the right job. Having a swiss army knife is great if you don't know what exactly you're going to need. That's what Office is -- the IT equivalent of a swiss army knife. You can do mostly everything somewhat well in it. Yammer is like a really well balanced Phillips-head screwdriver. It only works for very specific things, but it feels great to use... so if you're going to be doing a lot of screwing, you want a good tool, not the swiss army. Hmmm... that didn't come out right.
  • We've been trialling Yammer over the past few months and after opening it up to the wider Consulting body we've had a massive response. Over 100 people have joined up in the past few weeks and that's with a soft launch rather than a official announcement. It's spread viral as all these things do :P

    I would say so far it's proven useful in the following areas:

    CEO opening himself up for questions through Yammer, direct and open communication

    HR (me) sharing regular Professional Development resources

    Groups / Product Teams / Silos having a place in which to share information quickly and easily. We have special interest groups who meet on a weekly basis but don't actually work on the same client sites with each other. It's been great for communication.

    Lastly throwing out questions to the company as a whole. We've been able to get some really good discussions going around topical issues.

    I think the key point though from a HR perspective is that it gets your people engaged with the company, they feel a part of something and have a medium in which they can contribute. Engagement has a positive impact on Retention.
  • @Tim A lot of businesses already use MSN messenger and Skype in a similar capacity for instant messaging in the office, but sharing some of that conversation in a public forum is going to add a lot more benefits. I already saw a post here go by "Consulting already did a model on that, talk to John Smith" - you can imagine how much time that just saved!

    @Steve The regular campaigns are already happening, but Yammer is a great realtime complement to them. The features already exist to remove employees who have left, you can ask them to reconfirm their email address manually or you can automatically sync your directories.

    @Dan The main advantage I have seen is that it is realtime instead of a page-based thing. It doesn't replace email or your intranet (yet!), but it can be a great complement. I'm sure some of these features will be built into other tools in time but this works for now. Regarding security it really depends how you use it. We haven't had any confidential conversations on ours and people will use their own judgment in what to post. I think the security features are pretty good right now but it really depends what industry you are in and how you plan to use the network. I believe there is a version of Yammer that you can install on your own servers 'behind the firewall' if you need to, but the hosted app is just so easy to get started with so that's what we are running for now.
  • Yeah have thought about it,, but really what does it provide much more than what linkedin or your own “intranet” ? For those with SharePoint 2007, office 14 is only around the corner, a number of things they have said to have strengthen are the “Social Media” aspects of the product.. I guess we can only wait to see how it turns out………. Then you have the whole aspect of corporate security...
  • Dude - epic post as always. What an excellent example of enterprise 2.0 stuff to get me thinking.

    Curious to see how it goes in another month though. Do you think the momentum will last? Will you create more campaigns?

    And, devils advocate here - what will you do to ensure that people who leave Deloitte don't still have access to it when they are gone.

    Awesome work Ross, keep it up!
  • It's great to see an example of social media/networking being used successfully in a large corporate! As companies become less reliant on physical offices/buildings and telecommuting increases, I can only see services like Yammer being more and more.

    I think that smaller businesses will start to see more examples like this and will realise the productivity gains they can experience by implementing Yammer or similar tools.

    I look forward to a follow up post in a few months with how it's worked out over a longer time frame.
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