Author Archives: Stuart G. Hall

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Yammer time

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Yammer event notes – for your ease of scanning:

Introduction

Yammer won a 2011 Forrester award working with Deloitte Australia.

Big plus is its availability as a mobile app.

Checkk out the Forbes article – Social Power..(7 Sept 2011)..as way of background.

Yammer now does the job of external partner networking too.

Secret sauce = Yammer’s governance tools..

Integrates with MS Sharepoint, same profile data..

Check out the network toggle – it means you can easily switch between internal and external Yammer networks. One account solution, with multiple instances, is unique to Yammer.

Yammer is safe harbor compliant too.

Also contains (as with LinkedIn) a Groups functionality..for example create a group to handle urgent requests to ensure the network is not overloaded, was one case cited.

Question?

Is there an issue with global collaboration when questions and answers are out of sync due to time differences..what’s the solution apart from start early and work late?!

Benefits

Communications internally needs to be transparent, agile and fast – which allows for innovation to be transparent, agile and fast too.

Generally speaking you want to use tech tools to accelerate your business; eg so in case of Yammer to use it for HR on-boarding to get up to speed; plus advantage when asking real time questions in the field, with cross-company response.

Also use for mergers and acquisitions. Can see big four firms using this for best quality advice, and to enable their clients to take advantage of it to ensure smooth mergers.

Forrester found ROI payback on Yammer is on average over company study 4.3 months.

Adoption

Issue with getting ppl to take part? Create mini case studies of benefit. Is there a profile search where the admin can see who might be interested in topics? Might help uptake… Need to create guidelines like Flickr to encourage use by grassroots and by a snr exec to create a safe and shared culture of corp conversation.

Sell the benefits to snr exec in terms of grter visibilty, wide area geo coverage, not to mention vs competitive advantage;-)

Case Studies: To get adoption LexisNexis forced conversations via yammer and bked by ceo. Challenges for execs in dealing with 2 way comms. So ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ comms.

Really intuitive simple features appealed to Shell.

Used by ACCA too in working with KPMG. Helps to encourage ‘b2c’ tone of conversation to Yammer;-) in theory mean better fit to talk online to real ext customers. Most successful use is mobile rather than desktop feed.

Trick of balance btwn control and innovation;-)

Tips. Put exclusive content on Yammer. Plus make sure execs are engaged.

Yammer for R & D?

Duplication and discovery of existing innocation. Speed to delivery. Ppl faster to get up to speed! Phew:-)

And finally, back to Deloitte Australia to conclude!

This video mentions the value of fun in getting adoption – certainly can help seems to be the consensus as long as it’s handled right.

Are you listening hard enough?

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A while ago I went for an interview at social commerce innovators mydeco, who I really admire. I don’t recall who interviewed me at mydeco I do recall the useful feedback, which was that I listened too much in my interview. Funnily enough at a Shopping.com offsite in late 2010 in sunny Marbella I highlighted “listening” as a key strength during a cross-company workshop.

At a more recent meeting with a social media guru he asked me hypothetically what  I would say to a tea retailer client, armed with market research data which showed their customers drank a lot of tea at midnight. He believed the right answer was to advice the client that they need to produce a low-caffeine tea to meet the late night tea behaviour need.

My answer (OK, polished up a tad in hindsight) would be to make the strategic assumption that the tea customers knew they were drinking normal caffeinated tea at midnight; and start a discussion with the customers on that basis, before talking to the client as to how to develop their offering. How does that sound?

My one-liner taken from the '60 Insights from Experienced Community Managers eBook' published by Blaise Grimes-Viort

The value of listening in building a community isn’t just in terms of you as a CMO listening to what your customers say; it’s also the same mechanism which drives the value of a community in the interactions between members. Take the example of Stocktwits which I blogged about in 2008, and which I heard recently has also invested in UK-based City Index – currently loooking to recruit a social media planner. To quote Roger Ehrenberg, founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures from that time:

“Stocktwits massively leverages the power of the long tail, but the reason followers are able to rapidly identify value is because of reputation.

“THE STOCKTWITS COMMUNITY IS A MERITOCRACY. Those that hem and haw and say little don’t get followed. Those who are insightful, sharp and decisive command large readership. And this is the way it should be.

“We’ve only just seen the tip of the iceberg of what the Stocktwits community can and will become.  But the power of the platform is clear.”