I get asked more often than not these days how can my organization get value out of Yammer. Today I am going to share with you 3 reasons why Yammer can bring value to your organization. There are many, many more but let’s start with 3 to get your started on your journey with Yammer.

Let’s jump right in and cut to the chase.

Reason Number 1:

Quite simply Yammer can help accelerate the pace in which information sharing. Consider the typical organizational announcement and how it get disseminated within said organization. It might look something like this

This top down communication strategy can be effective but no incredibly fast and can break down within the lower brackets which can fester a number of additional communication and cultural issues.

Yammer allows you to take the information from the source and share with the entire organization within a single action, The Yammer Post. Now where that information should be posted is a topic for another day. One nugget of advice to consider when determining what information gets posted – Ask yourself this simple question. Does everyone in my organization need this information or is this communication for a targeted audience. Consider how you use email DL’s today. The other factor to consider is time saved. By communicating information via Yammer you post it once (to the appropriate group) and you’re done. If you were using the top down model there would be a number of people reading the communication and then passing it along the chain of command until it reaches the bottom of the model.

The Experiment:

At Avanade we have a very vibrant enterprise social fabric. We migrated from an on premise solution that had been in place for years to Yammer last year. Now we are using communities for that and so much more so I decided to run an internal experiment to baseline and measure the effectiveness of this usage within my own company. We have a lot of data and often our sales team is looking for very specific information for RFP responses and anyone who has responded to an RFP in their career knows that no two RFP’s ever look the same. Internally we have a great sales enablement team we refer loving to as our “SET” team. Typically we would email the SET to request specific materials and they are our corporate curators of all our reference able work that we have done for customers. I decided to see which channel would provide me the quickest and richest response to a request for customer stories. I sent the traditional email to the SET team and also posted in our community on Yammer. Typically through email turnaround for a request like this gets turned around in 2 days. Leveraging our Yammer group I have responses within hours with also spurred a great conversation which ended up helping others across the globe looking for similar information at that time. The amplified effect of this “working out loud” experiment was a great success and I encourage you to find 1 or two use cases where speeding up information sharing can help your organization. To find out how others are doing this here is a link to one of the many stories you can find out on the Yammer channel on YouTube.
Yammer makes a difference at Nationwide.

Reason Number 2:

Powerful tool for both internal and external Collaboration. Imagine if you could easily and securely collaborate across traditional boundaries with your customer, partners and suppliers. To take this a step further what if enabling this capability only took minutes as opposed to days or weeks? Wouldn’t that be dreamy? Well I’m here to tell you Yammer can bring this dream to reality for your organization. You can use yammer to build rich external networks and groups. What if you could collaborate with your customers to help innovate on your next product or service? Crowdsourcing ideas internally and externally is a low cost way to feed your innovation funnel is a very low cost solution and who better to tell you what they want to buy than your customers and partners.

In the screenshot below you can see that I am a member of number of external networks. Some for product feedback, some to organize events and non-profits I give my time to, others to collaborate with colleagues in the industry who don’t work within the walls of my company, and a few that are for collaborating around a specific event not as an organizer but as an attendee and community supporter. Within each network you can have a number of groups to facilitate different conversations with different purposes. The possibilities are only limited to your imagination.

Reason Number 3:

Communities of practice can be the key to the ignition for capturing precious corporate knowledge. Communities of practice provide a way to share domain-based knowledge that is shared and maintain by the group including frameworks, tools, ideas, stories and documentation. One of the best ways to get started in building these communities of practice is to promote storytelling and provide an onboarding plan for new members.

Get started today with these 3 easy ways to bring value to your organization leveraging Yammer as your secret weapon to impact the way your organization leverage Enterprise Social today!

About the author Michelle Caldwell:

Michelle is a SharePoint Solutions Architect and Director of Collaboration at Avanade. She is a Microsoft SharePoint MVP and has over 16 years of experience delivering business solutions to diverse organizations. For the past nine years, she has focused on delivering enterprise SharePoint solutions across multiple industries while leading teams that have won outstanding achievements in Web Development. She is a founding member and President of the Columbus, Ohio SharePoint User Group (BuckeyeSPUG) and actively shares her real-world experience through her blog www.shellecaldwell.com and conferences across North America. She also sits on the board of two Columbus, Ohio non-profits in support of her local technology community.

Check out last years European SharePoint Conference video:

European SharePoint Conference 2015 takes places in Stockholm Sweeden from 9-12 November 2015. View Programme>>