From their website:
Yammer is a simple way for employees to connect and share by posting messages. As employee participation grows, Yammer becomes a corporate social network, discussion board, and knowledge base all rolled into one easy-to-use interface.
From my point of view:
Yammer is a fancy Twitter.
As a Twitter enthusiast, perhaps I’m not the right person to rely for opinions on Yammer, but to me it seems like a great tool to keep everyone on your functional or project teams informed about what you’re doing and also the other way around too, letting you know what your colleagues are doing.
Obviously we have to be careful about the purpose of this new tool and what to use it for. From my point of view, Yammer is not here to replace a report sent by e-mail or the official company’s internal communication method. For those thing we have e-mails and IMs. Think about the reliability of the information, storing method and coverage. You cannot guarantee that all employees will receive it, or even if all employees check it frequently. Also, for important information, the kind you have to keep, Yammer creates a problem. You cannot control for how long they will keep this information.
My tip here is, account for these factors when deciding how to implement this tool on your company.
Wait a second, things are not all bad. There is a really good things about Yammer. Quick team discussions (many to many conversations) are a great use of it. If your whole team is using it, it keeps things simple and avoid all those “Reply to All” e-mails.
Project status report is also a great use for Yammer. On most projects I work, my tasks depend on tasks performed by other project members and the other way around too. Keeping everyone informed about what you’re doing and what things are holding you back is always useful. It also helps keeping the status meetings short, since everybody will already know what other people are doing.
If you’re curious about it, have a look at yammer.com!
If you have ideas about how to use Yammer or Twitter in your company, feel free to leave a comment!