This is a guest post by Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of PR 20/20, a Cleveland-based inbound marketing agency, and author of The Marketing Agency Blueprint (Wiley). 

After a one-month beta test with a small group of PR 20/20 employees, we rolled out Yammer as our internal social network in December 2010. As our staff grew, we needed a solution to encourage collaboration, continuously transfer knowledge, and perpetuate our culture. Yammer provides all of that and more.

Our team has come to rely on the network as an outlet for information and resources related to the agency and our clients, and it gives us the ability to respond to the real-time demands and opportunities we face on a daily basis.

Based on our experience, here are five key benefits of Yammer for professional service firms in general, and marketing agencies in particular: 

1) Streamline Communications.

As an agency, we suffered from inbox overload. A simple question via email could spark a chain of emails so deep that it was hard, and inefficient, to follow. Since implementing Yammer, we’ve significantly decreased the number of emails circulated internally. Team members are now able to get the information they need quicker and in a much more digestible format through threaded discussions.

2) Facilitate Collaboration.

Prior to Yammer, information would get lost in the day-to-day shuffle (e.g. client developments, industry updates, best practices, events, etc.). With Yammer, employees much more readily share information, seek resources from each other, and ask questions.  

3) Keep the Mobile Workforce Connected.

As PR 20/20 grows, it’s become more common for people to work from remote locations. For instance, one employee regularly works from Denver (we’re in Cleveland) and another from her home. Yammer keeps these individuals informed of what is happening in the office, and vice versa. There’s no longer a need for check-in calls or emails.

4) Enhance Culture. 

While Yammer is primarily used to share work-related information, it’s also become a way for employees to offer glimpses into their personal lives and get to know each other better. Within our portal, you’ll find wedding and baby photos, invitations to happy hours, funny YouTube videos, sports polls and more.

5) Nurture Career Growth and Development.

We regularly post educational resources to our Yammer portal, such as relevant news articles and upcoming events. We also use Yammer to facilitate professional development exercises. Here, we’ll post prompts or hypothetical situations, and then ask employees to share how they would respond. These exercises are a great way to get the group thinking critically, and see their peers’ approaches in real-time.

The Launch of an External Learning Network

Seeing how well Yammer worked at spreading ideas, sparking innovation and generating collective wisdom within the agency, we decided to take its benefits to our external Marketing Agency Insider community through a learning network. Here’s how:

On Oct. 25, 2012, we launched a seven-part webinar event for marketing agency professionals, The Client Services Series: A Year in the Life of a Hypothetical Account, and Yammer is playing a leading role. Each attendee is invited to a private Yammer network for real-time collaboration throughout the series.

Attendees are encouraged to share related resources, ask questions, stimulate discussions and post key takeaways within the network, as a means to improve webinar engagement. We also evolve curriculum each week based on attendee insight, giving it a choose-your-own-adventure feel.

Yammer makes this crowdsourced, adaptive approach possible, and we see enormous potential to further integrate this model into all facets of our business.

Are you coming to Lucene Revolution? Our search architect Boris Alexandrovsky is going to be there and speaking in a 10:45 session called “Real-time search at Yammer”.

Want to learn more about Boris and his methodology? Make sure to check out his interview with DZone and Lucid Imagination.

Many of our Yammer enthusiasts have been asking for keyboard shortcuts to make collaborating on Yammer even faster. Without further ado, here are the shortcuts:

To enable a shortcut, just hit the corresponding key. To view these keyboard shortcuts inside Yammer at any time, just hit "shift" + "?"

Enjoy!

“Increasingly, Systems of Record have become a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for business success… What will enable this transformation are Systems of Engagement that will overlay and complement our deep investments in systems of record. Systems of engagement begin with a focus on communications,” said Geoffrey Moore

On the heels of last week’s announcement about Yammer’s Activity Stream and NetSuite integration, we are delighted to announce a suite of products that will further solidify Yammer’s position as a system of engagement. We held a press conference earlier today, where Yammer CEO David Sacks and team announced the following:

 

• Activity Stream - A new “Activity Stream” tab on the Yammer website aggregates stories about coworker actions in their enterprise apps, making it easier than ever before to discover — and collaborate around — relevant business data. The Stream is automatically populated with activity stories generated in Yammer, such as when coworkers join groups and follow topics, and activity from other apps can be added via an API (see below). Yammer’s Activity Stream includes roll-up logic, which batches related stories into a single item in the feed, reducing noise and enhancing the user experience. The Yammer Activity Stream is available immediately.

• Activity Stream API - The Yammer Activity Stream API will enable third-party developers to publish activity stories from business applications into the Yammer Activity Stream, accelerating the availability of new integrations.  Last week, Yammer announced Activity Stream integration with NetSuite, the leading vendor of cloud-based ERP, making NetSuite data available in Yammer upon customer request. With the availability of Yammer’s Activity Stream API, any source of enterprise data can flow into Yammer, enabling recipients to quickly and easily collaborate with their colleagues around this information. A draft spec for the Activity Streams API is now available for comments on the Yammer developer site and is expected to be finalized in early June after the comment period.

• Yammer Embed - As its name suggests, Yammer Embed allows Yammer feeds to be embedded inside virtually any business application through the simple use of an embed code (similar to how YouTube videos can be embedded in any webpage). This enables employees to easily view and participate in relevant Yammer discussions without leaving their business applications. Yammer Embed will be compatible with any HTML or JavaScript-based business system that supports extensibility and will function similarly to Yammer’s existing Microsoft SharePoint integration.

• Enterprise Extensions to the Open Graph Protocol - Yammer extended the Open Graph Protocol, which was developed by Facebook, for the enterprise to include extensions for business-specific objects such as employee, customer, office, and document. Leveraging the Open Graph Protocol enables Yammer to treat any resource on the web, on company intranets, or within enterprise applications as objects within the Yammer Social Graph. This results in efficient linkage of information and roll-up of related feed stories — reducing noise from feeds. A draft spec for Enterprise Extensions to the Open Graph Protocol is now available for comments on the Yammer developer site and is expected to be finalized in early June after the comment period.

At the press conference, we also announced 7-Eleven as a new customer; 7-Eleven will be rolling out Yammer companywide.

Just minutes ago, at NetSuites’s Suite World, David Sacks and Zach Nelson announced an integration between NetSuite and Yammer. As a result of this integration, records and data within the enterprise (via NetSuite, a system of record), are socialized within the enterprise by being transmitted to an activity steam (via Yammer, a system of engagement). This way, users are able to follow a sales opportunity or a customer record in NetSuite and receive an instant snapshot of NetSuite activity inside Yammer, where they can easily share and discuss with colleagues.

How It Works

In NetSuite, a new SuiteApp called SuiteSocial allows users to automatically ‘socialize’ business data. Users can follow records of interest in NetSuite, and as important activities and updates occur, SuiteSocial content is automatically generated. It is then integrated into and presented to Yammer users as activity stories in Yammer’s new Activity Streams. Activity Streams are currently displayed as a separate feed in Yammer and in the future the most relevant stories will be elevated into the user’s primary feed.

Yammer Activity Streams

The NetSuite integration is the first sneak peak into our vision for Yammer Activity Streams. We see these activity streams as a social fabric unifying enterprise systems of record and enterprise systems of engagement. Activity streams will aggregate activity stories from a wide variety of enterprise applications, of which NetSuite is the first. Now you can easily keep track of important activities happening across the enterprise. You can:

• Follow records, accounts, or specific fields within a variety of enterprise systems – from CRM, ERP, collaboration tools, to directory systems – to stay informed of changes
• Quickly take action right within Yammer
• Activity stories generated within Yammer will also appear in the Yammer Activity Streams tab.

With Yammer activity streams, you can discover new groups to join, topics to follow, and applications to install. Yammer activity stories are generated when relevant colleagues:

• Join a Yammer group
• Follow a topic in Yammer
• Add or change profile information in Yammer
• Install a Yammer application

Yammer Activity Streams will be displayed as a separate feed, with the most relevant stories elevated into the user’s primary feed. This design will help users manage their feeds better and focus on the most relevant stories first.

Yammer Activity Streams are expected to launch in Q2 followed by the NetSuite integration in early Q3. The Yammer Activity Stories API is expected to be made available to all third-party developers in Q3.

We have listened to your feedback on our desktop application, and are truly thrilled to announce Yammer Desktop 2.0. We have built this app from the ground up, to deliver notifications, threaded conversations, and direct messages — in real time — directly to the desktop. We will be rolling this out to existing users of the Yammer desktop application over the course of several weeks. You can also download it directly from the website.

The new desktop application leverages features built for the Yammer web application. As you can see from “My feed” below, the new desktop user experience is comparable to the web experience:

New features include:

• Threaded Conversations – Easily follow conversations with replies displayed underneath the original message.
• Notifications – Keep track of new messages, @mentions, replies and more with notifications. View all notifications on a separate tab to ensure important messages are never missed:

• Direct Messages - Communicate privately with one or more colleagues and add additional participants to the conversation at any point.
• Topics - Create, edit, and use topics to tag content, enabling better curation and discovery of conversations.
• Document Viewer – Instantly access, edit and comment on documents appearing within the feed via a browser-based viewer.

Enjoy, and let us know your thoughts!

- Maria

Yammer’s mission is to transform the way you work, making it easier than ever to communicate, collaborate, find and share critical information with your colleagues. To achieve that mission, it’s key for us to be where you are, integrating with the tools that you use every day. We are excited to announce our new integration with Xobni, allowing you to respond to your colleagues’ updates right from your Outlook inbox. While in your inbox, you can now follow the people and information that matters most to you – and even post your own status updates – all without leaving Outlook. How’s that for multi-tasking? Check out the screenshot to get a sneak peak at the integration:

You can even reply to Yammer messages right from Xobni, like this:

You may already be using Xobni. If you’re not, and you are an Outlook user, you should definitely check it out! Like Yammer, Xobni gives you at-a-glance information about your work relationships to help you work more productively. Plugged into Outlook, Xobni brings together individual email threads, exchanged attachments, appointments and shared links, along with social media content (Facebook and LinkedIn updates, Twitter tweets, etc.), to create complete profiles for your contacts. Now,the Yammer “Gadget” integrates Yammer into Xobni, providing what we modestly consider the ultimate Outlook productivity tool.

“Ok ok enough talk,” you may be thinking. “How do I start using it?” Just click over to the Yammer Gadget page on Xobni. You’ll see instructions on how to get the latest version of Xobni, which now supports all kinds of Gadgets. It’s so easy to set up, you’ll have Yammer updates appearing in your inbox in a matter of moments. From there, you can quickly look up a colleague in the Xobni sidebar before meeting them to see what they’ve been up to – and much more…

For now, this is an Outlook-only feature, but if you’re on another email system, hang in there—Xobni and Yammer are already working to expand to additional platforms. After all, something this useful should be available to everyone.

FOR DEVELOPERS – Xobni is hosting an event at their offices in SOMA the night before Google I/O. Developers interested in hacking and exploring how to work their products or services into Outlook in a meaningful way to users should attend. They promise good prizes. RSVP here.

Today, we’ll be releasing several features including an upgraded in-line document viewer and an upgraded new user activation flow for the paid networks utilizing AD Sync.

Upgraded In-line Document Viewer

We understand that document sharing is a really important aspect of your day-to-day collaboration with peers. That’s why we’ve been working on ways to continue improving the document sharing experience – so that your life can be just a little bit easier.

With the upgraded in-line document viewer, you can:

• Easily recognize documents within your feed with thumbnails.
• Quickly install documents directly to your computer.
• View and comment on documents right within Yammer.

Upgraded New User Activation Flow for Directory Sync

Maximize employee activation with a brand new user experience. When you use Directory Sync, you can now:

• Greet users with a welcome message that emphasizes why using Yammer is important to your business.
• Provide a shortened activation process that also utilizes Directory Sync data to auto-fill form fields.

In the next few weeks, we’ll also roll out a new design for the network sign-up/log-in page and add the ability to send customized invitation e-mails to employees added with the Directory Sync Utility. 

As our customers’ Yammer networks grow, we are developing features to help you manage your streams with the most efficiency. To help users easier identify messages that need attention, we are rolling out improvements to our notifications systems, as well as better unread message management.  Many of you may have already noticed a change in how unread messages are displayed within your Yammer “My Feed”. We just rolled out new features for the Yammer web application that better differentiate new replies from old ones – so you can easily keep track of the conversations that matter most.

All unread messages and messages with new replies are displayed above a grey Previously Loaded bar.

New replies to messages are highlighted with a vertical blue bar to the left of the reply.

The reply alert bar indicates the availability of new replies to a message you are viewing. Clicking on the bar loads the new replies.

The message alert bar indicates the availability of new messages since you last loaded your feed. Clicking on the bar loads new messages into your feed.

Whether you use the Yammer web application, the desktop client, or one of the mobile applications, your unread status is synched across them all. This way, your unread messages are truly unread.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

Yammer will be attending the following events. Come find us, say hello, share your story, ask us questions!

March 28th – 30th – Web 2.0 Expo

• Yammer CEO David Sacks will be speaking alongside Christine Herron (Intel Capital), Aaron Levie (Box.net) and Natalie McCullough (ServiceSource) on Disrupting the Traditional B2B Model
• Connect with our Head of Community Maria Ogneva at conference events to learn more about Yammer, ask questions and tell your story.

March 28-30 – Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2011 Los Angeles

• Yammer Enterprise Social Networking Strategist Greg Lowe and VP of Product Management David Stewart will be attending. Connect with them to learn more about Yammer, ask questions and tell your story.