Chat Away Inside the Corporate Firewall with Yammer

Who doesn't like the versatile communication tool Twitter? Recently on the Social Media Minute Sara wrote about Improving the Twitter Experience, which was a great article if you get a chance give it a read. Twitter is an amazing tool to communicate, share, and connect with others but what if you want to bring that type of engagement a little closer to home?

Social media has phenomenal possibilities for your external communications but what about your internal? Wouldn't you love to have your very own Twitter like communication platform inside of you company? Well you can, and it's called Yammer.

Yammer works very similar to Twitter with the biggest distinction being that only people within your company can use it. To setup it up is easy, just visit Yammer, put in your company email address (ie me@mycompany.com) and Yammer basically does the rest. Inside of Yammer you will have the main feed that everyone can see and participate in which is perfect for a one to many type of communication.

Yammer has the same basic functions of being able address someone in particular using the @ symbol and you can send direct messages using to:User-Name to keep sensitive communications private. Other than it being free (for the most part) to use that's where the similarities end.

Yammer doesn't restrict you to 140 characters, it doesn't allow public access to your communications, attach documents to your messages, and has some advanced administrative options (which do cost to use) that Twitter doesn't have. There's also the feature that I think is the most useful within a company and that is groups.

With the groups you can create separate rooms for the various departments within your company. These groups can be set to be accessible by either the entire company and used to corral certain conversations or they can be set to private. When set to private the group creator will be able to accept or deny the requests to join and all communications made within it will only be visible to group members.

Add to this Yammer's desktop client (which they created) and you have an all in one internal communication tool that can improve internal communication and productivity. Especially when dealing with off site employees.

I know what you might be thinking right now, I have email, why would I want to use this? That's a valid question and the simple answer would be, because it's easier and more organized. When you email a group of people and you want feedback what happens? You get multiple emails back, people saying the same thing, or getting the conversation order mixed up, and all sorts of hassle. Using Yammer you can inject some order and everyone can see what everyone else is saying and have an organized conversation even if they're in different states.

This is a great tool for keeping remote or field agents in the loop. It can help them get instant answers to questions or advice from all their peers all at once. Yammer is a powerful communication tool that can really help your company communicate better internally and since it's company specific you don't have to worry about any of the potential security risks that come from using traditional Instant Messaging clients.

If your company is thinking about getting into social media there is no better place to start than within your own company.

Josh Peters is a freelance social media consultant/coach and internet marketer who has worked with fortune 500 companies like Symantec and lives in Salt Lake City. He has yet to miss a single Social Media Club meeting and maintains the blog Shuaism. He is currently writing a book about social media marketing titled TwittFaced which will be out this fall.