Submitted by: Reed Wilson , President and Founder of PTG, a Microsoft Tier 3 Cloud Champion, Cloud Accelerate partner and Cloud deployment partner providing technology solutions including Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Private Cloud, and IT Infrastructure to businesses and enterprises nationally.
I hate email. I get too much of it . More than 50% of it is stuff that may be important – but not urgent. 40% is stuff that is not important or urgent. Maybe 10% is stuff that I really need to read and requires my action. If you have email overload – implementing an enterprise social strategy via Yammer may be a good fit for you.
Ask yourself these questions:
1) How many times a day do I get an email that says: “There is cake in the conference room!”? Or, “Today is the last day for open enrollment for benefits, if you haven’t signed up, do it today!”?
2) How many times a day to I find myself searching my Deleted Items folder (because that’s where you file stuff) for a ‘How to’ document, an update about a client that was sent to the whole company, a marketing piece, or whatever?
3) How many times is important company wide information sent to the entire company via email? Only to find that a key staff member was on vacation and missed that communication? Or a new hire started 3 weeks later and, as a result, never got the email?
Enter Yammer. If nothing else, Yammer is a great way to reduce the amount of email that is passed back and forth inside your organization. It’s searchable. It’s as relevant as you want it to be and you can be as engaged (or unengaged!) as you choose to be – similar to Facebook or LinkedIn.
Yammer is built around the Group concept that you may already be familiar with from social sites like LinkedIn. Inside our business we have the following groups:
1) All Company (everyone is in this group)
2) Sales and Marketing (by default, this is just for sales and marketing members but anyone can join)
3) Services (by default, this is just for services members but anyone can join)
4) Leadership Team (only members of the Leadership Team can be a part of this group)
What groups are relevant for your business? Human Resources? Clinical Research? Tax Experts? Development? Training? These are all groups we have seen (and helped) customers implement.
At PTG we started with a Core Team that represented the key functional areas of our business. The Core Team helped shape the right Yammer groups for us. This is a key step in the process – you have to involve your staff. Social is, by the very definition, all about engagement. If you are tempted as the administrator, CEO, VP of Sales, etc., to start creating groups to drive engagement – you are missing the point of social in the enterprise.
In our next post, we will talk about ways to drive engagement across the enterprise. Read Part 3 now >>
