Last week I discovered Yammer, a Twitter-like tool used to communicate within private company networks. The concept is simple: sign up with a company email address, follow your co-workers, “tweet” about what you’re working on and start a group to add more segmentation to the full company network.
After only a couple days of using Yammer at my company, the tool has gained a wide level of acceptance and I’m gaining a new perspective on how people use social networks. A casual user may be unlikely to start a Twitter account if they have privacy concerns or are worried about how to get started and make a contribution to the community. Put this same user in a Yammer network, however, and they are able to flourish more in communicating with people they are already familiar with.
The groups feature in Yammer is brilliant. Anybody can create a group for any reason, i.e. a project or team. Groups can be made public or private. Instead of searching through emails for that important attachment or scrolling through a marathon email thread, just look on the group page for everything organized in one area.
How could you not be more productive communicating this way with your co-workers? I’m looking forward to seeing if Twitter develops a similar tool for companies. What do you think about Yammer?
