Yammer is a social networking program that connects all your company’s employees through one central communication channel. It’s free to use, it’s totally private, and it’s only for your company.
I first read about Yammer in a business magazine, where a boss was talking about how he was connecting easily with his employees and keeping everyone on the same page. “Wow”, I thought, “this program is for me.” I thought since I travel a lotand I have employees often working on projects that I should know about, this would be the perfect way for me to pull them all together.
Wrong! But here’s how to know if it’s right for your company. Click here to read the rest of this article (or whatever you say).
Yammer is quite an innovative program. Yammer allows you to set up an email communication network with your employees through their computers and smartphones. As the owner, you start the ball rolling by inviting all of your employees to get Yammer on their computers. One requirement though: all employees must have a verified company email address, or put another way, they all must have email addresses that end in the same company domain suffix.
This all is activated by you, as the initiator of the network, by emailing all of your employees and telling them to download the free Yammer software into their computers, and to download the software into their smartphones, if you want to also communicate with them through their phones.
Right away, you can see some of the parameters that have to exist for this program to work for your company: multiple employees in various locations who have computers or smartphones. If you and two employees are in the same physical location, there’s no need for Yammer.
But if you do have multiple locations with several employees, Yammer allows everyone to hear the same information coming from you. I can see a real advantage of this when you want to convey one message to everyone. But unlike emailing a group of employees, Yammer also allows them to contribute and bounce ideas off each other through your private Yammer network. For those of you who have several stores, with employees in each store, I see Yammer as a way to get your employees more involved in discussions and to get them to contribute with their ideas. Of course, as the contributions happen, everyone connected to the Yammer network sees all the conversations.
I can see the strengths of using Yammer for some of you. Check it out at www.Yammer.com.
