Technology, Tools, Web 2.0, Website review

Apr 9, 2009

yammer_sm

I spent some time today playing with Yammer, which allows organizations to essentially set up their own private micro-blogging community limited to their employees. Put more simply, it allows a company like us (The Bivings Group) to set up our own private Twitter.

Yammer works great!

There is a lot to like here from a technical perspective:

Sign up is simple. You join simply by signing up with your organizational email address and you automatically join the network.
The user interface is great. The design is very similar to Twitter, so it is very easy to use and familiar.
It has a great Adobe Air client. You can use Yammer via a slick desktop program that is reminiscent of Twhirl, which is a compliment.
There are some great additional features you won’t find on Twitter. Yammer includes the ability to create and subscribe to groups, upload files as part of your updates and view an organizational chart of your company the system creates for you.

This is a nicely made web application.

What’s the point?

After playing with Yammer for a while and inviting some of my colleagues to join me, I’m left struggling to come up with a reason that a company would need a private micro-blogging network. We certainly don’t at Bivings. I have millions of ways to communicate with my colleagues already. I can get project updates from Basecamp, chat on Instant Messenger, send individual or group emails using old fashioned Microsoft Outlook, keep tabs on folks via social networks like Twitter and Facebook, or god forbid, simply walk across the room and talk to folks.

I don’t have the problem Yammer solves. I don’t imagine many others do either.

Confusing to employees?

Jason Fried from 37 Signals wrote a few great posts last week about how Get Satisfaction’s set up sort of passively forces companies to use their service. Yammer has a similar problem.

I was the first person to sign up for the service from an @bivings.com email address. By doing this, I automatically created a network for The Bivings Group without really being aware of it. After joining, I am encouraged to invite colleagues to join me on Yammer as a way of spreading the word, and they are encouraged to do the same after they sign up. With the big “Bivings” branding at the top of the page and a bunch of work colleagues participating, this thing pretty quickly starts to look like a company-sponsored site even though its not. This could lead to confusion for employees at larger companies.

If, as a company representative, you want to take control of your Yammer network to clear up this confusion and exert some administrative control, you have to claim the network on the Yammer enterprise services page. There is a free version of Yammer for enterprises, but to sign up you have to enter your credit card, and a lot of the functionality you’d want as a company administrator is only available if you pay Yammer’s per user fees. For its silver and gold versions Yammer charges $1 and $5 respectively per user, which means the service gets expensive pretty quickly. At 30 people, it would cost The Bivings Group $150 per month for the entire firm to use the product.

Perhaps more importantly, I do not see any way for a company to opt out of Yammer completely should they not want their employees to use the tool. So the only way for a company to really exert control is to sign up for either a free or paid Yammer account for their domain and start monitoring it.

I would be fine if Yammer were either 100% unofficial or 100% official. Trying to have it both ways seems sketchy to me though. This middle ground can lead to confusion among employees and/or kind of coerce companies into using it.

I think Get Satisfaction is a little sketchy in the same way, as it is trying to have it both ways too with its official/unofficial customer services pages.

What do you think?

Crazy Fox

Sketchy like a fox!
http://www.lmediainc.com/?p=176 How Yammer Can Work For You – LMedia

[...] a post today, The Bivings Group (TBG) calls Yammer pointless and a little sketchy. Ironically, my company is giving Yammer a spin. Today I experienced the first “ahha” [...]
Joe

Perhaps you don’t see the value do to the size of your organization. When you have departments of a division that are 20+ people within each, and as a company there needs to be tight integration within those departments – you’ll quickly see the value yammer provides.

Organic grouping is amazingly helpful – “product” teams can be created and people either part of that team or people who need to keep a finger on that product’s development/deployment can do so, easily.

One thing that Yammer lacks (at least the free version) is ability to ACL content/users…that’s my only real ding against the product, but can respect the business model to charge for those extra tools.
http://maryspecht.com Mary Specht

Hi Todd, we’re dipping our toes into Yammer here at Gannett. In fact, I come to your post via a link “Yammed” (?) by a colleague.

Joe’s comment, above, is right: it’s about “keeping a finger on” projects. It’s a place for status updates & transparency, apart from the urgency of your inbox.

It’s a good tool for “pulse” monitoring in sprawling companies.
Bill Harrison

I work in a corporate IT department. In my experience, employees rarely use internal tools unless they are completely integrated into the company work flow. That is why so many intranets fail. While Yammer seems neat, it strikes me as the kind of thing people play with for two days and then abandon.
http://www.bivingsreport.com Todd Zeigler

@Mary and @Joe – Is your use of Yammer company wide or is it just a select group of folks participating? Is it company sponsored or unofficial? I’m glad to hear you are getting value out of it, but am curious to to the circumstances. It sounds like it is operating a sort of souped up version of Google Groups?

@Bill – Yup. That is pretty much my thought too. It really seems like something that would be difficult to sustain.
Sam

I think you are WAY too dismissive here. A pocket of us use it at my company and it has been fantastic at generating discussions that would never exist otherwise.
http://newmediacampaigns.com Clay S

Todd,

Enjoyed the post. We use Yammer at our company and it has been a welcome addition. It certainly doesn’t replace email or IM, but it’s good for a few basic things and for just $1/month/user, it’s worth it.

Also, we have several people who work remotely, and Yammer is a great, easy way to keep people updated. For example, each morning, everyone Yammers their Tasks of the Day (#TOTD in our network) and that keeps everyone updated on what each other are working on.

I wrote a post about our experience with Yammer and how we’re using it when we first signed up: http://www.newmediacampaigns.c.....ur-company

Also, I don’t think it’s nearly as sketch as GetSatisfaction, since the company itself sets up its own network.

Thanks again for the post.
http://www.reedmidem.com Mike Williams

Todd,

Thanks for your thoughts. We’ve just started Yammer and I confess I’m still doubtful about its benefits. Sure it’s an easy tool to work but I seem to have an ever increasing number of communications tools – phone, face-to-face, email, Intranet, facebook, linkedin, Twitter. I can’t (and don’t want to) spend all day following these things. However, I’m something of a Luddite and need help. Here are some of my questions.

It seems slightly difficult to follow conversations – more difficult than scrolling down emails.

If I want to share a conversation with a defined number of coleagues, it seems I’m going to have to build group after group.

Contrary to email, where I get a popup alert for each incoming mail, I have to be on Yammer to read new stuff (I think I tired to install a popup system but I guess our IT platform wouldn’t allow it).

As it was my CEO who started it and who is the most active ‘Yammerer’ I don’t think it’s a particularly ‘open’ communication tool as everyone is thinking very hard before making a post.

My rule of thumb is that if an email conversation generates three or four exchanges between colleagues it’s probably time to walk down the corridor and talk to them. Yammer seems to replicate this problem.

Finally, I remember two years ago when everyone (at least in my neck of the woods) was saying that Second Life was the new communications whizz. Who believes that now?

Anyway Todd, thanks for a thought-provoking article. I hope I’m open-minded enough to be talked around to Yammer, if it really adds to productivity.

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Yammer: Cool, but Pointless and a little Sketchy

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