Yammer | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Yammer 103: Coordinating Media Relations Idea Gathering

Among the benefits of Yammer is the ability to subscribe to, or “follow,” conversations or “tags” that you find interesting.

So instead of a mass e-mail going to 100 people in your department, you can Yammer with a tag, and only those people who are following that tag will get the e-mail.

Then they can respond by e-mail, and it all gets gathered, archived and redistributed through Yammer.

Here’s a practical example.

Suppose you have a geographically dispersed media relations team. You want to gather recommendations for potential subject experts for a story in an article you are writing for a publication.

Old Way #1: Send a mass e-mail to your whole department. Annoy most of the recipients with what they consider spam.

Old Way #2: Send an e-mail to a distribution list you have created, those who work in media relations. But no one who isn’t on your list gets the message, even if they might have something to contribute. The message is locked up in your recipients’ e-mail inboxes.

The Yammer Way: Go to Yammer and post your question with appropriate tags. It will look something like this as you enter it:

And in the Yammer timeline, it will look like this:

So, for colleagues who have followed the #press-call-alert or #media-relations tags, and who have their e-mail settings set appropriately, like this…

…will get e-mails sent directly to them. If they reply to the message, their responses also will be posted to Yammer.

The other benefit is that by being in the Yammer timeline, your message is available to others in your workplace, who may not have originally subscribed, but who might see that a conversation is occurring and decide to chime in.

And through Yammer tags, people subscribe to messages of interest to them. You don’t need to have someone maintain a master distribution list or, what’s worse, have each individual on the team maintaining his or her own distribution list. The lists maintain themselves in Yammer as people “follow” given tags.

The other benefit is that instead of having the info locked in e-mail inboxes, the Yammer site is searchable, creating a knowledge base for the workplace. But we’ll discuss that more in Yammer 104.

Assignments:

If you are a Mayo employee in Public Affairs, click this #public-affairs link and see if you can get signed up for and have access to this Yammer tag. You also could try following #social-media-team, #medical-edge, #media-relations and #press-call-alert.
If you are NOT a Mayo employee, I would be interested to find out what happens when you click those links in #1 above, or specifically whether you can see this particular Yammer. Part of the benefit of Yammer is that you can limit your updates to be only visible by your co-workers. If you can see mine (or if you can’t), I’d appreciate knowing that.

So let me know how this works for you in the comments below!

Yammer Time(s)

Yammer, which I have been featuring in a new curriculum offering, was featured significantly today in the New York Times and its Technology blog.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Successes like YouTube, the online video site sold to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, convinced some venture investors that building a Web site with a large number of users could still be more valuable than making money from paying customers.

Now, as the global economy enters a severe downturn, the relative merits of these two philosophies will be tested again.

The two poles of the debate are apparent in the world of microblogging, where people use the Web or their cellphones to blast short updates on their activities to a group of virtual followers.

…

Yammer’s business model is compelling, Mr. Sacks said, because it spreads virally like a consumer service, but earns revenue like a business service. Anyone with a company e-mail address can use Yammer free. When that company officially joins — which gives the administrator more control over security and how employees use the service — it pays $1 a month for each user. In Yammer’s first six weeks, 10,000 companies with 60,000 users signed up, though only 200 companies with 4,000 users are paying so far.

The founders and backers of Twitter, which has reportedly raised $20 million from venture capitalists, are just as adamant about their decision to grow first and monetize second.

I love Twitter. In fact, a Tweet from Dennis McDonald is what alerted me to the blog post, which led me to the article. But I think the real strength of Yammer is precisely that it didn’t make a choice between growing and monetizing.

It has a business plan.

It can grow immensely (as it has) through viral, bottom-up adoption. It’s mode of adoption isn’t really much different from Twitter. Anyone can sign up for free using a company e-mail address, and can invite co-workers. The only limit is that people from outside your company can’t be part of your network.

But for most businesses, that’s actually a plus. I can talk with my co-workers about what I’m working on, or share links, without the whole world seeing.

And I’m betting that with this New York Times coverage, the growth is going to greatly accelerate. I recommend you check out both the article and the blog post.

Yet despite being positioned for strong growth, the Yammer leadership actually has a plan for how to make money from the service; a fee amounting to $12 per employee per year.

Some companies may try Yammer and then decide to go with their own microblogging networks, completely behind the corporate firewall. But at least through Yammer they can experiment with the concept for free instead of spending a bunch of money on a new software package and trying to get employees to use it.

This is a variation of how Microsoft has driven Sharepoint, except the Microsoft staff already has strong relationships with the corporate IT departments. Microsoft gives Sharepoint to companies for a free trial, and then charges a large fee if they end up deploying long-term.

Yammer doesn’t have those IT relationships, and so is using a bottom-up strategy.

I will still use Twitter for connecting with the world, but it’s going to be fun experimenting with Yammer to see how it can help workplace collaboration.

Do you use Twitter? Have you tried Yammer? What do you think of the two services and how you might apply them in your work?

Yammer 102: Your Yammer Profile

This course is part of the Yammer curriculum for Social Media University, Global. It shows you how you can adjust your personal settings to tailor Yammer to meet your communication needs.

After you’ve experimented with Yammer, please share your impressions in the comments.

And if you find this course helpful, you can use one of the buttons below to share it with your friends or the broader community.

30 Ideas in 30 Minutes: My Ragan Panel Contributions

I’m serving on a panel to close the Ragan conference hosted by SAS in Cary, NC. The goal is to give participants a list of actions they can immediately implement as practical steps when they return home to work.

I was asked to provide six suggestions, and the other four panelists also are responsible for a similar number. We get a minute to describe each idea, so I’m writing this post to provide links to mine. I’ll likely add links with some of the other panelists’ suggestions after I hear them.

I’ve also included more than six ideas because I don’t know what the others will be offering, and if we have duplicates I don’t want to be left without something valuable to recommend. Besides, I can’t limit myself to just a half dozen.

1. Get a Flip video camera. This is the only recommendation of my main six that costs anything. You can get a Flip today at Wal-Mart or Best Buy or some Target stores. The Flip provides miniDV quality video and is completely portable. You copy files to your computer via the built-in USB instead of having to digitize tapes. And you can have video uploaded to YouTube within minutes, as I did with the David Pogue musical parodies. The cost of buying a Flip is less than a quarter of the cost of hiring a professional videographer for a single day, and you can use the video you shoot to pitch stories to journalists. Even better, you can make the video available directly to consumers.

2. Become a SMUGgle. In the Harry Potter books, a muggle is an ordinary mortal without magical powers. A SMUGgle is also an ordinary mortal, but one who wants to accomplish really amazing feats using social media tools. You become a SMUGgle by enrolling in SMUG. This will be a gateway to your learning about lots of other social media tools you can apply to your work.

3. Try Yammer. Yammer is Twitter for the enterprise. It offers a way to take advantage of the functionality of Twitter, but to limit the participants to employees of your company. The big value is trying before buying, so you can see whether you get user adoption before you sink a lot of money into a tool that people may not use. It seems to have potential for powerful collaboration, allowing coworkers to opt-in for e-mails about subjects they find interesting, and also can serve as a massive General Reference database of facts, links and other information employees have found helpful. I did a Yammer 101 course and expect to be doing more on SMUG.

4. Start a WordPress.com blog. It’s free and you can do it in 5 minutes or less, as my Dad did. If you’re a coward, you can make it a private blog invisible to anyone except users you invite. Then just invite your communications colleagues to have access. Getting this hands-on experience will show you how easy it is to publish content to the world. You also could use WordPress.com to publish your Web site, having it serve as your content management system. The SMUG blogging curriculum will help you learn.

5. Create your own free personal podcast. The SMUG Podcasting curriculum takes you from the very basics to having a podcast listed in iTunes. When you’re familiar with the process, you will have complete confidence to recommend doing podcasts for your organization with higher production values, better microphones, etc. The mystery will be eliminated.

6. Join a Social Network such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Or both. It’s essential for professional communicators to understand how social networking sites work.

Bonus Items

Build your own on-line newsroom. See our Mayo Clinic News Blog for an example.
Get a YouTube account. If you’ve only watched YouTube videos, you haven’t understood full potential. And if you work for a nonprofit, starting a branded YouTube channel is a no-brainer – it’s free. A Flip camera makes it easy for you to produce and upload videos
Get an iPhone. This is another one that’s not free, but professional communicators need to understand potential of phones and applications.
Try Dropbox. Its main purpose to sync files across multiple computers, letting you store your precious documents and files “in the cloud” so you have safe backup. The neat feature, though, is that it is a way for you to have the equivalent of an FTP site without the annoying hassle of log ins and passwords. You get two GB of storage free, and the paid option is something like $50 a year for 50 GB.
Read a good book. Here are three must-read books that will change the way you work and live, and you could perhaps read one by the end of the weekend.

Rules to Break and Laws to Follow – Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. I haven’t reviewed this yet, but plan to do so soon. I have been listening to it through Audible.com. It’s an excellent book about how a focus on short-term results can’t be the only measure of business success, because you may be draining or harvesting customer equity, and therefore actually reducing the value of your business.

Getting Things Done – David Allen. I have several related posts about the GTD subject matter.

The Reason for God – Tim Keller

Updated: My fellow panelists are

John Mims, Altyris
Becky Graebe, SAS
Bruce Johnson, Davis Wright Tremaine, LLP
Mark Ragan, Ragan Communications. CEO@ragan.com

Here are some of their ideas:

Becky – Embrace individual customization on the intranet. Let employees upload and display their own photos instead of the staff photos.
Bruce – Look for Alliances. AP came from this concept. Use a similar approach to find like-minded sites with which you can share.
John – Have interns start a blog. “Outsiders’ view from the inside.”
Mark – use LInkedIn journalistically. Send out requests for quotes or sources.
Becky – Don’t overlook interns. They understand these technologies naturally and can give you insights. SAS has a student intern site.
Bruce – Anonymity is dead. Make identity work for you on the internet.
Customize your name. There are 266 John Mims in the U.S. The guy to my left uses his middle initial to identify himself. Good thing Lee Aase is relatively rare.
Mark – Sign up for Google Alerts on your name or your company.
Becky – Google your stuff to see if it shows up. If not, use titles and tags to optimize your content.
Bruce – Get blog aggregator/RSS reader.
John says you should have your posts published on days when people are reading. Write on the weekends, but set them to post on the weekdays. Here’s how.
Becky – Use blogs to come together during difficult times. UNC Chapel Hill with student body president being killed. Created a blog to share special memories. Print all the comments and share with the family.
Bruce – Create a wiki approach to document creation. Bruce had a colleague create a wiki certiori petition in the 9th Circuit.
John – Comment on other people’s blogs. Make meaningful comments which will get people to visit your blog.
Mark – Try Blog Jamming. Spend 48 hours in intense blogging about a particular issue. Then have the blog go away.
Becky -Hand over the reins for Web 2.0 video. SAS hands employees Flip cams. Let them duct tape to handlebars during bike to work day.
Mark – Search for Bloggingheads on NY Times.
Use RSS feeds for internal news, just as you do for external.
Mark – Check out everyblock.com. Everything that has happened on your block. It’s in beta now in 6 cities. News at the block level.
Bruce – Beware the privacy trolls that may require encryption through legislation that is being adopted in various states. This will slow down all of your on-line transactions on your Web site. So what can we do about it?
Mark – If you’re an editor, use Bullfighter or mystery matador.

As I count it, that makes for 34 ideas including my two extra books, which means we exceeded our quota by 13.3 percent. And I know I didn’t get all of my fellow panelists’ ideas recorded. I hope you see some things here you can apply immediately in your work.

I’m happy to have participated in this event, and would love to connect with others who are interested in these issues. You can get in touch with me on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

I’d also welcome any comments you have, or other ideas you’d like to share.

Yammer 101: Getting Started with Yammer

I’ve previously written about Yammer and how I think it has some neat potential applications. I’m actually writing this post to show some work colleagues how to get started with Yammer and how it could practically help in

Limiting the mass e-mails that tend to overwhelm our inboxes,
Ensuring that we are included in conversations that interest us, and
Making non-confidential information that could help anyone in the organization easily available to everyone in the organization, instead of having it locked in the inboxes of a few.

Here’s a slideshow that takes you through the process, step-by-step, of joining (or creating) your company’s Yammer network.

I had originally planned for this to include a narration track (as you see in this video I shot in the SMUG Annex last night), but I think the slides themselves are fairly self-explanatory.

As we get into some of the subsequent courses in the Yammer curriculum, there will definitely be a place for screencasts and slidescasts. But for now, here are your…

Assignments:

Create or join your work-based Yammer network.
Share your questions or comments about Yammer in the comments below, so they can be addressed in future courses.

Thanks to my colleague, Bob Nellis, for serving as the guinea pig and allowing me to capture screen shots of his sign-up process.