To Yammer or not to Yammer, that’s the question…

For you who’s not that familiar with Yammer a brief introduction might be necessary. Yammer is presented as “the Facebook of Enterprise”, meaning that this is the place to make all co-workers understand what everyone else is doing and hopefully take part of this exchange of ideas. Yammer got introduced some years ago as a standalone product and rapidly grew within some of the largest enterprise in North America. This of course drew the attention of Microsoft with a successful history of buying innovative companies and then make them more successful by incorporating their software with the rest of the Microsoft family. I guess this sounds like a wet dream for any manager in a company that knows that true success lies within co-operation and with Yammer being part of Microsoft, it should be really easy to make it part of any company IT-platform, right!?

Let me take you one step back here and ask you; have you ever worked in a company with a truly successful intranet? Maybe you have and if so I truly congratulate you! Without looking at statistics here I would say that some 80–90% of the rest of us hasn't. The reason for this is that most people actually are too lazy to open up the intranet site (even more if you have to log in to the intranet if you might be working at home or somewhere else you’re not automatically connected to your company network). It’s far more easy to just text or mail a co-worker that you guess should know the answer to your questions. As a soccer coach dealing with a bunch of teenagers, I would even go so far that this is just the tip of an iceberg. This behavior is growing and as long as we let these persons get away with us doing their job, it doesn't matter how much information you have posted in the Intranet, Yammer or any other network.

So, back to the Yammer issue… is this a god product? Yes it is, at least when you’re using a laptop or tablet. On a smart phone (even on my Nokia Lumia that seriously should lead the way here), it isn’t. I constantly find myself clicking on the “Y”-icon (mainly to get rid of the “unread messages”, but when I can’t even find the unread messages it moves from being stimulating to irritating. And this is actually a person speaking that likes new technology and continue checking out new products. I actually mainly use Yammer to keep updated within the Microsoft area, because the people in Microsoft do use Yammer, a lot!! A friend at work actually suggested we should re-name our company Yammer account to “Tobber” as it seems I’m the only one ever using it.

To round this up, is Yammer a product you as a company could benefit from? Most definitely! Are you to? Most certainly not as long you don’t have a plan on how you (as a company) will use this way of communication. Do you have the stamina to actually order the staff to start using Yammer instead of these endless mail threads we all love? Does your managing team have a plan on how this communication platform should be set up to use its full potentia? Are all executives ready to stand behind these changes? If so, go ahead and use Yammer! You will most definitely gain more efficiency when people don’t have to search their e-mails to find decisions, when all important news are posted at one place and finally when people start exchanging ideas to make the company grow.

Until then Yammer is for Microsoft what G+ is for Google, a product with tons of users, but again compared with Facebook it doesn’t matter how many have signed up if no one is actually using it.

Want to learn more on Yammer? Check out Tieturi's Yammer training on October the 9th >>

Soprano Informator