Thursday 12 February 2009

Yammer….internal social media in the workplace.

I got an invite today to yammer from work colleagues. It’s basically an internally networked twitter. If you have the same email extension (eg dan@localauthority.gov.uk) then it will hook you up and give you somewhere to communicate.

To quote yammer:

Yammer is a tool for making your organization more productive through the exchange of status updates and group messages.

You can use Yammer to:

  • Stay connected with co-workers
  • Start a discussion
  • Share news, documents and links
  • Ask or answer questions
  • Create a group mailing list
  • Look up a co-worker's contact info
  • Search for a topic
  • See what's popular and who's influential

This is particularly relevant as I had a brief tweet with the SDCDevTeam team guys about internal social media. It’s a brilliant concept, and could be really useful for internal comms on a more “friendly and social” level. Who knows – information sharing throughout the authority without “just ticking the boxes” could promote best practise and allow services to actually communicate in an effective manner.

However, its early days and I have reservations. This isn’t a Wayne’s world environment where “if you book them they will come”. As already discussed with SDCDevTeam – you can lead a horse to water, but not force them to drink. I believe a tool like this could really work but only if there is an effective internal marketing campaign to promote it, and a reason to ACTUALLY use it.

No comments:

Post a Comment