My thoughts on my thoughts on the session on Yammer
Apologies, this is overdue. Blame the real world.
On Saturday, I attended LocalGovCamp 2011 in Birmingham. Others are writing it up in general terms better than I can, and there is a post-conference site here, run by Dave Briggs, to whom all thanks be given, etc... At the event, I facilitated a session related to the Yammer social media tool, jointly with Helen Reynolds from Monmouthshire. This was interesting in several ways. Much of what was on the eventual agenda of LocalGovCamp split into three types of session, I suggest:
- Stuff we need to be thinking about
- How to do stuff
- What happens when you do stuff
There was a bias towards the first two categories; our session was firmly in the third. Not about how to get Yammer in your organisation, not about how to sell it to your people (not directly about that, at least), but about what happens when you have it, it’s running, and people are using it.
My own interest is not as someone with any responsibility for getting it in Kent, where I work, or about running it. I described myself in the session as an “evangelist” about it, and as a “super-user”. That is to say, I am someone who is convinced by it, sees benefits from it, and rather than shoving the concepts down other colleagues’ throats in a shouty way, I aim to use it in a way that will both engage them, and make them want to use it too.
To the uninitiated, Yammer is an in-house, freely available social media tool. Think sophisticated version of Twitter, without the 140 character limit, if it helps. Think in-house mini-blogging, support, discussion, questions, groups for people with shared work interests that cut across the organisation’s formal silos, etc..
Our session contained the full range of experience and users. There were people curious about where Yammer might take them. There were small organisations wondering if it was for them, and there were larger organisations thinking about the effect Yammer was already having, and wanting to compare notes with others.
I do hope everyone went away with something from the session. The “sharing experiences and current position” stuff we did to kick it off was really useful in terms of norming and realising there were indeed several common issues about how people approach these sorts of tools. Most agree about the benefit of viral growth rather than imposed membership routes to populating Yammer - clear the former works, but the latter has its place in situations where you need all people in, say, a particular or dispersed work group, all to be there.
I have a firm view, echoed by some points made by others, that while many threads on Yammer start there, bloom and fade away, a lot of conversations - as is the case on social media generally - start outside, come in, for a variety of reasons/motives, grow, and then fade. Or do they fade? There is evidence in my own work world that they often actually go offline, and often become mainstream topics in “real life”, as it were.
Yammer can be a safe way to teach people social media skills. I’ve been to sessions elsewhere which have majored on this. Partly true. The discipline of 140 characters is strict, and peer pressure in Twitter etc more exacting. However, Yammer often has stuff to learn from its cousins. I have a colleague who has brought posts about meeting agendas and webcasts into the organisation, by posting on Yammer, instead of majoring on just tweeting the links to these to the world at large. Popular it is, too.
Good discussion about the little-known ability of Yammer people to create communities that link up people on a number of different Yammer networks. Helen Reynolds spoke of the work she has done to create the LocalGov social media community, and the effect it is starting to have. Expect new applications to join it will abound.
Another point covered was elected Members and Yammer. We have them, and potential benefits are great. A barrier buster.
The session was filmed, and is on the video list for Localgovcamp.
Please post any points I overlooked. Many, I expect.
Tom Phillips ( @tomsprints )
