Yammer.com

Yammer is a new social networking site that combines the capabilities and usage of Facebook and LinkedIn. It is revolutionizing the world of internal corporate communication by allowing all of a company's employees (from the CEO to the Entry Level Employees) to communicate easily and efficiently inside a safe, secure, private network. It connects remote workers, eliminates some needs for quick meetings or briefings and gives all employees access to enterprise tools.

In able to access a company’s network you must have a company email address. This eliminates the general public and main competitors from hacking or simply making a profile just to see what your company is up to. You can microblog (chat, post, and share content), create and join private or public groups to collaborate in smaller teams, upload documents, use yammer to connect with coworkers in other departments, increase control with administrative tools, tag content and messages to make your work easier to organize and discover, install third party applications, use a cloud to message privately and create external networks with partners. You can even upload and fill in a contact card of your expertise and past work experiences (especially for larger corporations), increase your company's knowledge base by archiving every conversation and be able to search for content, and access all of these tools via your smartphone.

According to the Boyd-Ellison article on Social Network History, in September 2005 Facebook expanded from closed networks such as Harvard only, and professionals inside corporate networks (BE 2008). Open signup still meant that closed corporate networks still required an appropriate .com address to gain access. Facebook developers also started to use and build “Applications” to personal profiles and perform other tasks. Yammer uses these approacheswith its own site and focuses not on applications such as games, but on applications and tools for companies and enterprises to study their analytics and send important documents over a secure network.

Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) suggest that Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections, as opposed to meeting new people (BE 2008). I think that Yammer.com does this very well and that it is crucial to bridge these gaps in the workplace. For example, for people that work in different departments, you can see someone every day, know their name and department, but not really know what they’re about personally. With yammer.com you can feel more comfortable adding that person and talking with them online and potentially creating a base relationship to later work and collaborate on projects. Having a relationship even a small one will make it more comfortable in the future to interact on both parts and increase productivity.

All of these tools allow you to access a wide variety of information all in one place for your company. Barring an internet connection and a profile your options are limitless. Yammer.com gives users many attributes to make their choice easier. The information about the audience is simply just having your company registered and a valid email address that corresponds so you can make a profile and log on. To communicate effectively you need a reliable internet connection either from a computer or a mobile phone. Some time constraints that might interfere with some of the tools and services are, employees not being online at the same time, interrupted internet connection/poor connectivity, and time differences in networks that have employees in different parts of the country or world. Purposes of this communication tool are to communicate efficiently and effectively in one place that enables you to share and view content enterprise wide.

References

Danah M. Boyd, Nicole B. Ellison. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13. 2008. https://blackboard.albany.edu/bbcswebdav/courses/2119-ACOM-375-9281/boyd-ellison%20social%20network%20history.pdf