Yammer Resurrection. An experiment in process
by Shiv Singh
Back in September I posted my thoughts on Yammer here. At the time I felt that Yammer held great promise but I was concerned with it competing with Twitter. In a nutshell, I felt that enterprise microblogging would always struggle to compete with broader microblogging unless all our streams could be aggregated. After all, how many conversations can we follow while we’re at work? I have a 1,400 followers on Twitter and I get 200-300 odd emails a day. Can I handle another channel?
Nevertheless, I decided to watch how Yammer was getting adopted in my own workplace. I work for a 2,500 person company and we’re a highly social bunch though most of the communication takes place on our email lists and through our enterprise wiki. Many employees (probably around 150) are on Twitter as well. Would Yammer have a place here?
Over the last five months, adoption of Yammer has been limited. There’s been no shortage of awareness, people are familiar with Yammer and we’ve even discussed its strengths and weaknesses on our mailing lists. But for one reason or another it hasn’t taken off though one team has used it really extensively. I blame this predominantly on the fact that we’re simply an email driven culture and one that collaborates through wikis and online project workrooms. Nevertheless, Yammer deserves another chance. And its just gotten that chance.
We’re running an office wide event (open to around 450 people) in our New York office today. We’re planning to have Yammer streaming on a large screen in the background giving people the opportunity to provide realtime feedback through their laptops. We contemplated using Twitter but decided not to as that would not be protected. Because the event has been promoted quite widely, there’s been a flurry of Yammer sign ups in our organization in the last two days. Will Yammer be used actively during the event and will this jumpstart adoption? Time will tell and I’ll report back on the results soon. Watch the space for more.
Thought...
