Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
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John and I are getting ready to go out for one of his last Halloween trick-or-treat adventures. He’s only 9, but he looks like he’s 12. People don’t like to give candy to kids who are bigger than they are.
John’s costume isn’t as good as last year’s, but it’s tough to beat a cluster of concord grapes.
A couple of colleagues have mentioned that with the recent upgrade to Yammer they have been getting many more emails than they had previously. This post is intended to show them how to prevent the overload, and how to be sure they get the emails they want.
By default, the new Yammer has you subscribe to your general network feed (in our case the mayo.edu network.) That may be fine when you only have a few dozen members who aren’t especially active. But as the numbers grow, and as people start yammering incessantly, you don’t want to get an email message every time.
So, to preserve your sanity (and to realize the promise of Yammer to make your emails more targeted and relevant, not overwhelming), here’s how I recommend adjusting your settings.
On your Yammer home page, click the little (i) next to My Feed
Then, when you see a window like this, be sure to uncheck the top box, next to your Network feed (the one that refers to your email domain’s general feed)
Then click the Members, Groups and Tags links to select the updates you do want to receive by email. You may want to follow your manager or assistant, for instance, under the Members tab. You will definitely want to receive yammer email updates for a Group established for your work unit. And as described in Yammer 103, you’ll want to follow some tags about particular topics, even if they aren’t from a member of one of your groups.
Then you might want to go to the email settings tab and choose to get not only “My Feed” sent by email, but also to have new groups you join added to your feed. That way you don’t need to remember to update your email settings whenever you join a group.
And you wouldn’t join a group unless you wanted email updates, would you?
Once you’ve got these settings in place, it’s a matter of all users learning to Yammer in the right place.
In this way, Yammer can make it easier to collaborate and share information within a group (and keep the discussion limited to that group) when necessary, but can enable broader discussions and access to information when the need for confidentiality isn’t as great.
Yammer Groups are a powerful addition to its micro-blogging service, particularly for larger companies.
It’s great to have a Twitter-like service limited only to your company, but in a large organization there are frankly discussions (particularly frank ones) that should be kept to a smaller group.
Otherwise, if any employee can have access to any message in the company network, the conversation will need to be limited.
For example, when we get calls from journalists working on a story, we need to be able to discuss who would be the best subject expert to answer the questions. That typically happens by phone or e-mail, but a service like Yammer would be a great way to quickly alert our whole team about the request and to gather feedback and ideas. But that conversation shouldn’t be open to (potentially) several thousand employees.
In the old version of Yammer, as I described in Yammer 103, sending out a press call alert could be done by tagging the post as a #press-call-alert, and then inviting members of the media relations team to “follow” that tag. But anyone with a mayo.edu email address who had joined Yammer would have been able to see those posts (and perhaps follow that tag.)
With the new Yammer groups feature, it’s a lot more secure. You can create two kinds of groups:
A Public group could be used when you want to create a community of interest that doesn’t need to be exclusive. An example might be people with a common subject interest, such as marketing trends, or cancer research, or human resources news.
A Private group is more appropriate for a defined work unit or team. For example, this is the group I started for the work division in which I am a manager:
I made it a private group, because it should be limited to people who report to my division chair. But I chose to list it in the Group Directory because that way I can start the group without inviting everyone. Yammer users can see the group and request to join. For a small work unit, though, you may not wish to include the group in the directory, since you can easily invite everyone who is a member of the team.
One of the neat parts about the groups feature is that when you start to invite someone who is already in Yammer, it quickly scans and suggests matches based on the first few letters you type. And if it doesn’t find a match, it still lets you invite people to the group based on their email address…which also invites them to join Yammer. I believe this will be an important feature for Yammer’s growth, as people invite their closest colleagues to join their work groups and therefore Yammer.
To make the groups work efficiently you need to have members adjust email settings so they get notification when someone in your group posts a Yammer. Each member needs to do this. Mine looks like this:
You can decide which groups’ updates are sent to you by email, or you can check the bottom box, to “Subscribe to new groups I join via email.” That way you will automatically get the updates for any group you join, without having to remember to change your email settings when you join a new group.
Following tags is a good way to engage on specific topics, and to know when discussion is happening on subjects that interest you, across your company.
The Yammer blog has more detail on Groups.
For the last week or so I’ve had the opportunity to preview the new Yammer (which includes a much-needed Groups feature) on a staging server, with a limited number of colleagues. It was rolled out to all Yammer users last night, and I just created my first “real” group.
The Yammer Blog has an in-depth post on the new features. I will have more on it later today (including a new course in the SMUG Yammer curriculum), but my initial review is that they’ve done an excellent job with this upgrade.
If you haven’t tried Yammer, do it. And then share your comments below:
In a playful, tongue-in-cheek, maybe even SMUG sense, I’ve previously called LinkedIn “social networking without the social.” So the announcement last night of its Applications platform raises its usefulness significantly from my perspective.
I first saw this news in my WordPress dashboard as I was writing a post last night, and went to install the WordPress application, which is supposed to display the most recent posts from my blog. Note: it didn’t work in my Safari browser, but it did in Firefox and IE. Hopefully either the WordPress gang or LinkedIn are listening like Yammer and will figure out and fix the Safari problem.
Here’s what it looks like when you add the WordPress application:
All you do is paste in your URL, and hit “Save”
And the widget (which you can drag toward the top of your LinkedIn profile) looks like what you see above. Another great reason to have a WordPress blog, huh?
I think this is a huge development. My friend Jeremiah thinks it could mean the end of the intranet.
It’s important because by opening the platform as Facebook did, LinkedIn is saying “we don’t have all the smartest programmers in the world, and we sure can’t afford to pay them. So we will provide an opportunity for others to enhance the usefulness of our site, and connect their sites and services to ours.”
Jeremiah’s point is similar: many (if not most) corporate intranets are missing the consumer-grade social networking features users have come to expect on the Internet. (Isn’t it funny that consumer-grade means higher quality on the Internet, while “business” or “professional” grade is clunkier? But that’s a topic for another post.)
Especially in today’s economic climate, corporate IT departments aren’t going to be able to afford hiring enough programmers to recreate that same level of social networking funtionality (or to put it another way, to “reinvent the wheel.”)
Open source (like WordPress) and Software as a Service (Saas – like Yammer or Salesforce.com) solutions will be smart ways for organizations to get world-class user experience for employees at significantly lower costs.
Jeremiah thinks his yet-to-be-born kids won’t have any concept of a corporate intranet. I’m not so sure about that, but I’m casting my vote with him. He’s a Forrester analyst, after all. (You can cast YOUR vote below!)
But certainly there are some data elements and resources that your corporate IT department is currently paying boatloads to store and back up, that you could instead have outside your firewall. My blog, for example, is out on the Internet for all to see anyway. And Flickr photo streams or other resources could be “cloudsourced,” which would have the benefit of creating more links to your corporate or professional sites.
The LinkedIn announcement suggests that it could be the major hub for integrating this information. And as more applications are developed and security is proven (and as the economic climate puts more pressure on corporate IT to deliver more services for less), even more highly confidential data could be integrated in a hub like LinkedIn.
What do you think? Is Jeremiah right? (No, not Jeremiah Wright…that’s again another topic.)
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