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.