Have you tried Yammer in your agency? Yammer is like an inside-the-firewall version of Twitter, enabling you to create a members-only social network inside your agency – instantly and for free. It operates a lot like Twitter, but with some nice extras. You can create private groups, add RSS feeds and the update field isn’t limited to 140 characters, as in Twitter. If appropriate, you can also cross-link Twitter posts into Yammer.
At NIST, Bryan Klein started the network about 5 months ago. Since then, there’s been a slow but steady increase in new members. Not sure we’ve reached a tipping point yet, but there are a few folks who yammer news, links, ideas, and questions regularly.
If you’re using it inside of your agency, would love to hear how you’re using it and what you think so far.
Yes we Yammer. The use of groups is great. It also helps connect with other collegues. The biggest problem is time. Time to tiwtter, yammer, blog, email and have meetings.
The group part of yammer is great and we can discuss things on yammer the rest of the world does not need to hear: “starting reorg of test citywide test tables for cw00 to cw10, over by 6pm” Important stuff but not to those I twitter to. Twitter helps me find answers, yammer helps me work.
Thx, Allen – nice distinction between finding answers vs. helping you work. To save time on posting, have you tried linking your Twitter and Yammer accounts? You don’t have to post every tweet to yammer, but if you add a #yam to selected tweets, they’ll automatically show up in yammer for you (need to integrate twitter into your yammer account first – see profile setup for instructions). Also, you might want to check out apps like ping.fm that let you post to multiple social networks at once. Then there’s AlertThingy that puts a dashboard on your desktop for all your feeds. Am a big believer in integration and aggregation and these tools help.