The other day, I discovered a new online tool, Yammer, which bills itself as “a micro-blogging tool for the enterprise”. I’ve sent various people an invite to it, because it looks like a potentially useful tool for us, or at least those of us with complex working relationships, many different activities, and busy schedules.
So what is yammer? To quote from their overview:
Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”
As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced.
Anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. The privacy of each network is ensured by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. Information is never shared with third parties.
The basic Yammer service is free.
So in essence, it’s a very simple message board for an organisation.
Yammer is an enterprise productivity solution that uses a publish-and-subscribe model to improve communication while reducing email overload. Yammer allows you and your employees to:
- Publish status updates, ideas, news, links, and questions without cluttering up inboxes.
- Subscribe to the people and topics that are relevant to you.
- Reply to status updates and have discussions.
- See what people are actually working on and talking about.
- Search archived messages as a knowledge-base.
- Find people in the directory to contact them or learn more about them.
What yammer is not
Yammer is ideal for quick status updates – for example to let colleagues know if you are out for the day, or tied up in meetings, or busy working on stuff.
Yammer is not intended for longer articles, where complex arguments must be developed, or detailed discussions. These are better handled through email or even Word documents. Or even (gasp!) by talking to people.
So, Yammer is really a lot like Twitter, except that it includes some restrictions on membership (by means of the organisational email address) which provides a measure of security for posts.
Why would you want to do this?
Good question. At first sight, to someone not used to micro-blogging and social networking, this might seem both superfluous and irritating. Why would I want to see updates about what Jane is up to, hour by hour. I don’t usually care what Jane does. But there’s an interesting thing about these kinds of service. Although you are unlikely to care about every activity of your colleagues, you will care about some of them. And over time, you build up – subliminally – an awareness of what they are doing. You’ll feel more involved in their work, and they in yours, because you’ll each have some understanding of what they’re up to and the problems they encounter. And that benefits the organisation, because occasionally you may be able to help with problems they’ve run into; and you’re less likely to be surprised in meetings when they raise something new.
At least that’s the theory. And it doesn’t hurt to try now, does it?
