Companies often witness high levels of Yammer adoption and engagement amongst its employees. Increased company-wide knowledge sharing through a model that enables efficient knowledge consumption is one contributor to the rapid adoption. Also, Yammer's clean and simple interface makes it easy for everyone to start using right away. No training is necessary.

Nigel Dessau, Chief Marketing Officer at AMD, discusses how and why AMD employees adopted Yammer so quickly and why Yammer has become an integral part of how they communicate internally. To learn more, watch the video below:

You should also read the AMD Success Story that outlines how AMD employees are deriving value from Yammer. 

Download the AMD Success Story

If you would like to share your Success Story, contact us. We'd love to hear it!

IABC – June 9, 2009

"Current use of social networking sites such as Twitter (21 percent), Yammer (20 percent), and Facebook (18 percent) is significant, but organizations are planning to use those tools even more in the future."

It is noteworthy that 29% of respondents intend to use Yammer in the future, the third such highest rate. While 33% of respondents intend to use discussion boards in the future, we believe Yammer is your company's discussion board as well, making it a powerful and encompassing internal communication tool.

Tell us what you think by joining the discussion!

Yammer Helps to Cure Brain Cancer

Case Study by Oliver Bogler, PhD

The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center is a comprehensive cancer center that delivers cancer care to thousands of patients, and seeks advances in treatment and diagnosis through research (www.mdanderson.org). In my laboratory we are interested in understanding glioblastoma, a very aggressive form of brain cancer. I have 10 co-workers, who spend their day moving between the laboratory, instrument rooms, tissue culture rooms, seminars and their desks. Meanwhile, I am either at my computer in my office, or often at meetings all over the Texas Medical Center or even out of town at conferences. Keeping up good communication is, therefore, a major challenge. I try to walk through the lab once or twice a day, and have an open door when I’m in my office, but I don’t catch up with everyone often enough. More importantly, I am no longer an efficient information conduit between members of my team – I am tired of checking whether the right people were cc’d on e-mail, or forwarding messages to others who need to be involved in the conversation. 

About a year ago I started holding a weekly “huddle” to improve our communication – we stand in a circle in the lab, and everyone says, in a few sentences, what they achieved in the past week and what they are working on. We stand to encourage brevity and form a circle, as the idea is for everyone to listen equally to everyone else. It is amazing how often connections are made at the huddle – “I could use that, too” or “I did that in my previous lab, and you should try such-and-such an approach” is said almost every week. It also builds a good team spirit as people feel comfortable sharing their problems, not least because they often get help. Once a week for half an hour is great, but how do you keep it going the rest of the week?

That is when I heard about Yammer. With Yammer we can keep a virtual conversation going all the time. There are several key aspects of Yammer that distinguishes it from other microblogs – the main one for us is that you can easily control who sees what you write. Yammer requires an employer-issued e-mail address to access the site, and it is easy to make a private area for your own group within that. So, while we sometimes Yammer in the broader @mdanderson.org area, we usually communicate within our Bogler lab private thread – this gives everyone security that what they say is only heard within the team. Adoption by my lab was almost instantaneous. As people move around during work and circle back to their computers several times a day, they catch up on what is being said and chime in. Sometimes they logon from home, too. I often Yammer from my iPhone as I go from meeting to meeting, or when I’m traveling. Even when I don’t post myself, I like to read what others are saying to keep in touch. A key feature is that the posts persist forever, so that if you miss a little you can catch up. It has proved to be a great tool that fills the gap between e-mail and face-to-face meetings, helping us to keep the conversation going. I would like to give a big thanks to Jennifer Texada, our social media guru at M. D. Anderson, for bringing us these great tools.

If you've had a positive experience with Yammer, that you would like to share please contact feedback@yammer.com

This is the third year CNET has hosted the Webware 100 -- they had about 5,000 qualifying submissions from which we're honored to announce they selected Yammer as one of the final 300.

We feel privileged to be selected as one of the finalists in the Communication category, but we're really excited to see if we can win.

Please show your support and Vote for Yammer Now! 

Welcome to Yammer, the micro-blogging tool for the enterprise. Stay tuned to this blog for all the latest Yammer news. Here is the press release from earlier today announcing our launch at TechCrunch50:

YAMMER.COM LAUNCHES MICRO-BLOGGING FOR THE ENTERPRISE AT TECHCRUNCH50

Los Angeles, CA – September 8, 2008 – Yammer (www.yammer.com), a micro-blogging tool for enterprises, officially launched today at the TechCrunch50 conference. 

Selected from among thousands of applicants, this “Enterprise 2.0” startup allows companies and organizations to take advantage of a technology that has exploded in popularity among consumers on sites like Twitter.

On Yammer, co-workers exchange short frequent answers to one simple question: "What are you working on?"

As employees answer this question, a company feed is created in one central location, enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information.

The company feed can be accessed in real-time via the web, IM, SMS text messaging, an iPhone application, a Blackberry application, a desktop application, or email.

Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge-base where past conversations are archived and easily searched.

Unlike traditional enterprise tools which must be installed by the company’s IT department, anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. This means that Yammer can spread virally through a company like a consumer social network.

At the same time, Yammer ensures the privacy of each network by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. The model is similar to Facebook’s beginnings as a college social network, when students had to validate a college email to join their college network.

The basic Yammer service is free, but companies can pay to claim and administer their networks. The cost is $1 per employee per month, after a free three-month trial period.

Companies who claim their network can configure their own security requirements by setting stricter password policies or restricting use to their office or VPN. These settings are also used on sites like Salesforce.com.

Yammer was originally developed at internet company Geni.com as an internal productivity tool. Explained David Sacks, the founder of Geni and Yammer, “We were looking for a tool to keep our company connected. Something like an enterprise version of Twitter would have been ideal, but it didn’t exist. So we built our own.”

Over time, the product evolved into a full-fledged company intranet / social network, adding features not available on consumer micro-blogging sites. “We have all worked at multiple companies and understand the needs of companies to share information within a private network. We had the luxury of building the solution that we wanted to use ourselves,” said Sacks.

Geni’s 30 employees used the product internally for six months, creating over 15,000 messages. Eventually Geni decided to spin out the product into a new entity so other companies could use it too. 

Enterprise 2.0

Yammer is part of the “Enterprise 2.0” movement, which seeks to bring technologies popular with consumers into the workplace.

"People get to use great consumer internet sites, like Facebook, Twitter, and Geni, to communicate in their personal lives. Then, when they get to the office, all the software is antiquated and hard to use -- that doesn't make sense. We want to do something about that," said Sacks.

The solution is good for companies as well as employees. In 2007, The New York Times described email as "a $650 Billion Drag on the Economy", with email inboxes overflowing with unwanted messages. Meanwhile, people who need to see the information never get it. Yammer solves these problems by increasing communication while reducing email.

Increasingly, companies and organizations everywhere are finding that maintaining all of their applications on their own servers and by their own IT departments is not only costly and time consuming, but potentially disastrous if exceptional care is not taken in backups and security. The new generation of online enterprise applications, including Google Docs, Salesforce.com, and Yammer, solves this problem by remotely hosting software and data.

About Yammer:

Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: "What are you working on?"

Yammer was founded by former PayPal COO David O. Sacks and officially launched on September 8, 2008. Yammer’s management team includes seasoned industry veterans drawn from the ranks of PayPal, eBay, eGroups, Tribe, and other leaders in the software industry.

Our User Forum is open for business, hop on over and let us know what you think.