Inside//Out: Yammer

What do you get when you take Twitter, make it private and add some security/privacy restrictions? You get Yammer. Yammer is a private micromedia community where businesses or organizations can sign up for their own "private" network. This is not the same as installing something behind your firewall, the information is on shared servers and could be a liability depending on your industry. If you need it protected and super private then check out identi.ca.

Use is the same as on Twitter and Yammer has released decktop, BlackBerry and iPhone apps. It does not, much to my dismay, integrate with Twitter or any other existing network. For me, this is a killer as I cannot keep more than a few accounts active and still add value.

Yammer burst on to the scene on September 10 when it won the top prize at the TechCruch50 competition. The opinions were split at that time as well. Some people thought they just copied Twitter and put a spin on it, others thought the spin they put was a large enough point of differentiation to give it top prize. I'll let you decide.

Here is a quick video tour of Yammer:

[Feed readers please click through to the post if you cannot see the video.]

My key takeaways:

• The potential for knowledge management is tremendous; aggregating links, identifying trends and business development identification are just a few of the major points
  
• If your company is new to this space, this is an easy, low-cost entry point that allows some control
  
• Lack of tie-in with other services is a hinderance to the super-connected who would most likely have championed Yammer (it's not too late guys)
  
• Portability and device support is on par with anyone
  

I asked about Yammer on Twitter yesterday and here is what people had to say:

What are your thoughts on this? Are you using it? Did you try it and abandon? What would it take to succeed with your business?

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Technorati Tags:
Identi.ca, marketing, Matt Dickman, micromedia, social media, social networks, Techno//Marketer, trends, Twitter, Yammer

Comments

[Heather Rast]

We tried using Yammer...for like a week and a half.

Thought those most likely to use Yammer were those who already "got" Twitter. Turns out it was just double the work--you don't want to stop Twittering, do you?

So updates just slowly started to fade away.

[Matt Dickman]

Heather -- Thanks for jumping in here. I think the result you saw is pretty typical. The people using Twitter see the value, but it's too hard to do both passionately.

Anybody having success adopting it?

[Aaron]

never tried yammer yet but for kauai massage business I will be needing to add some online support to help promote my massage blog..............thanks lol ;)