What I Learned at Yammer On Tour

Yammer on Tour was in Chicago yesterday and I diligently took notes to share with you.
Most of the event was, frankly, dedicated to why social is great, rather than what makes Yammer stand out. Value of social collaboration is a very interesting topic, but when you attend a Yammer event you want to learn about Yammer. So in this post I’m going to focus on just that: Yammer’s niche is in the social ecosystem. At the same time the guest panel had some great insights on adoption that I simply can’t resist sharing. Long preface! Here we go.

Context for Setting our Expectations

“It’s a fast moving train.” Yammer changes in 2-10 week iterations. When users request a new feature, it is quickly built and piloted. If people don’t start using it, it’s cut from the product. There’s a good deal of flexibility with this approach, but you also can’t be sure what’s coming a year from now and neither can Yammer.
Concrete expectations for SharePoint…

1. You will be able to replace the SharePoint news feed with a Yammer feed by end of summer 2013.
2. After Summer 2013 SharePoint activity will start to get synced up with Yammer activity, but the timeline is hazy.
3. Search will be integrated with SharePoint search. Again, timeline and exact details are hazy.
4. They promised smooth integration with Office Web Apps. The demo/video looked cool. We will see.

Good Fit for Yammer

Companies with robust document management system but without a collaboration component

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Yammer provides a collaborative social layer on top of document management. A key point here is “on top of,” because Yammer doesn’t truly integrate with document management systems. However, Yammer can significantly improve communication while allowing whatever system is used to store documents stay in place and do its job.

Companies for which an intranet is not an option

Yammer is a good mechanism to reach out to and solicit feedback from a vast number of employees at minimal cost. For example, Kroger wanted to reach out to all employees asking to contribute examples of great customer service. To provide an intranet account and user training to every single employee is unthinkable, but to deploy Yammer all the company has to provide is an email address. Low risk and low deployment costs make Yammer uniquely useful in this situation.

Companies that will collaborate online using Office 365 several months from now

It’s not even here yet, but integration with Office 365 will be a big deal once it gets here. Being able to collaborate socially will definitely be a useful and unique offering.
 

Bad Fit for Yammer

Companies with a mature social intranet

Yammer does not integrate with other systems at this time. For example , you can stick a Yammer feed on top of SharePoint, but Yammer isn’t really aware of anything that’s going on in SharePoint (e.g. people, groups, documents that you are following). So you end up with 2 separate sets of social activities and it’s just confusing and messy. Once Yammer is fully integrated with Office 365 this will likely change for Office 365, but any other intranet will find itself in the same situation. Messy.

Companies that want more control over their social collaboration

The Yammer motto is “open by default, ” which is not an appropriate model for every business.
For any company that is afraid of the cloud, Yammer is not an option. Whether refusal to go to the cloud is rational or completely irrational, some people just will not move. Count them out.  
When dealing with highly confidential material, Yammer can be problematic since it isn’t aware of file permissions. Imagine the CEO and CFO are using Yammer to collaborate on a file called “Merger with Company X” and a merger has not been announced. If everyone who is following the CEO can see that such a file exists, that could be a problem.

Bonus Round: Tips on Encouraging Adoption

1. The “Start at the top” approach: Start with active users in leadership roles; think CEO. The panelists described how once Yammer became accepted at the higher levels of the organization, it was accepted quickly by the rest of the organization (great strategy!).
2. “The Hammer” approach: Set an official policy that “we are now going to use this tool for …” and require that it be used.
3. The “make them use it without knowing” approach: Integrate seamlessly with other systems. For example, one of the panelists talked about integration with CRM and how people unknowingly use Yammer and others happen to benefit from that activity.
4. The “Post pictures of their grandkids” approach: No grandkids, really! Just post things that employees will definitely want to see but cant find anywhere else.
5. The “Quick Response” approach: A manager can make him/her self more available on the social network than on e-mail or chat. Once subordinates realize that the company social network is the faster way to get what they need, they will start adopting.