Yammer, Twitter plus the corporate directory

by Shiv Singh

September 13, 2008 at 6:19 pm · Filed under Reviews

Sometimes it takes longer than it should for a consumer innovation to gravitate into the enterprise. And Yammer which took the top prize at Techcrunch 50 is a perfect example.

We all know Twitter and it has been around for a few years. Twitter is a remarkable success and has been adopted by millions of people around the world. And as a first of its kind microblogging tool Twitter has jump started a whole new form of asynchronous communication. But it has also been missing something - missing an enterprise component.

Enter Yammer.Yammer takes the Twitter format and puts in the enterprise. It does this by restricting your network based on email addresses. You can join a company network only if you have an active corporate email address. And when you join, you can of course invite others from your company to join too. All communications are restricted to people within the company. It is beautiful and with a business model supporting it, will probably be successful. But the fact that I am asked to enter my contact details is what makes it most interesting for me. It also makes Yammer a corporate telephone directory. It asks me who I report into and who reports into me as well which makes it an organizational chart too. Very clever.

The Yammer concept has some shortcomings though. For example, can I deal with having two microblogging accounts? A professional one like Yammer and then my Twitter account? I’m not so sure. In fact, Yammer and Twitter should merge or at the very least allow users to consolidate their microblogging views into one single interface. Another potential issue, is what happens when an employee leaves the organization. He’ll still have access to the Yammer network and all the information that people are publishing. That’s not safe. Yammer must think of a work around to this. And easy solution not a manual one.

A few months ago, I setup my company president on Twitter with a password protected account. Only employees (who’s usernames are verified) can follow him. He uses it to share insights, case studies, opinions and breaking news. His Twitter usage has encouraged hundreds of employees to sign up for Twitter too. They’ve begun experimenting with the platform. All in all, its been a success. The model isn’t perfect, but it is working.

Yammer can potentially make this easier but until an administrator can automatically (or at least manually) remove ex-employees from the network, serious adoption may not happen. At the moment, everybody is in the “lets test this thing out” phase. Moving beyond that maybe a challenge for Yammer without a few more enterprise management tools.

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Thanks Brian but imagine if you have 10,000 employees using Yammer. What happens when an employee leaves? Does HR manually go into Yammer and search for the email address to delete it? There needs to be an easier way.

“What happens when an employee leaves? Does HR manually go into Yammer and search for the email address to delete it? There needs to be an easier way.”

That’s exactly what would happen. Each employee should have a unique email address and given the admin interface, it shouldn’t be hard to locate a specific user’s account. Search their email, find their account and hit delete.

As for maintaining two separate accounts (Twitter and Yammer), it all depends on what you are looking to get out of each network. Sure you can set up a private Twitter account and only approved users can see your tweets, but it still puts all of that into the public domain. If you only want to have private conversations, why not do them on a private network like Yammer? Also, if you’re concerned about the process for removing a former employee from Yammer, what about the administrative process that must exist to approve users to follow your executive. It seems like that would be much harder to manage then approving/deleting user accounts on Yammer.

I would venture to say that most people using Twitter from a business perspective are doing so to interface with the outside world (ie. their customers), and not using it as a private network of internal employees. If that’s what you are looking for, I think there are better platforms out there to do that.

Anyone in a Yammer network can request that other users re-confirm their company email to prove that they still work at the company. Until the email is re-confirmed, the account can’t log in.

Thank you for the clarifications. That certainly helps with the issue of unwanted ex-employees still being on the network. And I think that’s a great solution - let the community police itself.

I would suggest that Yammer explore integrating Twitter feeds into its interface too if possible. We’ve seen over the last few years that employees do not always separate their organization relationships from those outside the organization whether it be in their professional or personal lives. That’s why Facebook and LinkedIn are often used as business tools too. A single consolidated interface would go a long way. Otherwise, its like having two separate email programs - one for email to fellow employees and one for emailing people outside the organization.

[...] The AppGap » » Yammer, Twitter plus the corporate directory: News, views, and reviews of Work 2.0 … [...]

Thanks for the information on Yammer. I have signed up for an account and will test it later on.

[...] By default this doubles up as a staff directory, social network, and also has a org chart for each person (showing who you report to). For more on the usefulness of micro-blogging check out my post 140 characters to knowledge share…I must check out Socialcast next. [via AG] [...]

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