Yammer is a cloud-based Enterprise Social Network (ESN) platform that facilitates open communication and collaboration within a private area for employees within the same company. Often thought of as ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’ for the enterprise, it provides familiar features to interact on business content. The key message behind ESNs in general and Yammer specifically is ‘work openly’. By sharing what you do or openly asking questions, you and the rest of the organization can seamlessly discover new information and provide insight that is not possible through traditional communication tools like email or instant messaging. As the people in the company continue to work this way, Yammer becomes the knowledge repository for the organization.
While the tool is familiar and it is easy to get started, there are a number of functions, capabilities and best practices that take some time to master. At Perficient, we have conducted a number of social projects and speaking engagements on Yammer and as a result get asked lots of great questions about the platform and how to drive engagement. We thought this would be a good opportunity to share our collection of experiences and Yammer expertise in a new blog series called “Yammer 101”. We are calling it ‘Yammer 101’ as this is typically one of the first groups we create in a new Yammer instance; it is the place where users go to ask questions or find links to Yammer training items.
Here is an initial list of topics we plan to cover over the next few weeks.
- Posting – Review the types of posts available and share what makes a good post.
- Groups – How do you find and create groups? We will also discuss one of the more popular questions, “why would I create a new group?”
- Topics – Why are they important and what can you do with them?
- Search – The ability to search in Yammer is just as important as posting.
- Reporting – A look at what data is available to understand the adoption of your Yammer Community
The authors for this series come from Perficient’s team of Yammer experts, all of whom are certified Power Users, Administrators and Community Managers. The information they provide comes from their product knowledge as well as their practical experience from working with customers like you who are going through the process of creating a community on Yammer.
This series will appear every Friday and can easily be grouped together by viewing the tag Yammer101 or alongside other content published to the Perficient Microsoft Community rss feed. If you have questions or topics you would like to see included, post them in the comments below and we will work them into the schedule.
