Time to start Yammering?
Posted by bmackay on March 14, 2009
Of course Twitter has become a social phenomenon. It is successful because it focuses on only one thing, 140 character “tweats” to followers and the world. Heck even Barack Obama and Stephen Colbert are followers of little old me – brimac, apparently. Imagine that. Too bad I never use it.
While tweats from US presidents or Johnny Depp are far more interesting than from your humble correspondent, there is something captivating about the technology. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m seeing social networks like facebook more of a broadcast technology than intitmate social experience. Twitter on the other hand, is more conversational and two-way.
The winner of techcrunch50 2008 was a technology called Yammer. Yammer is basically twitter behind the corporate or institutional firewall. Only those users with a valid @tru.ca email, for example, can participate. It is also twitter with a business model: the idea would be that yammer quickly becomes your communications tool so other features are available to support the community at a cost of a couple dollars a month per user.
I’ve already registered tru.ca and added a few colleagues. The idea is that this could be an effective internal communications tool to let people know what is happening, updates from the president, and a forum to address the issue of the day. Having all 1,700 or so employees on here would be cool.
I have no idea if this will take off – but in an time where ideas (and Ideas Management) are keys to success, it can’t be a bad thing. Further, IT and HR departments should be proactive with these technologies, as they will probably be used more and more as the virtual water cooler, like it or not.