Don’t write Yammer off yet

Dan Thornton | October 21, 2009

This is the first post by new contributor Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.

Yammer seemingly suffered the fate of many internet startups. It benefited from the initial buzz of being a new brand, with the handy association of both microblogging and launching at TC50 , but failed to retain the traffic. The site traffic for the ‘Twitter for companies’ has been largely unstable, certainly not following an upward trend, failing to get anywhere near the initial 200k visits it reached on its launch in September 2008.
For many of us, Yammer was exciting for a few days, before we neglected the site and focused our full attention back to Twitter. I don’t think we should write Yammer off just yet though. Yammer is not like most social media tools out there, because it’s focused primarily on companies. I believe this is the key to why it’s success has been slow.
Affecting change in a corporate environment is still an incredibly slow process. Sure there would have been one or two social media heads within organisations that would have been embraced it, but this isn’t sufficient for the service to function properly. If there’s only a few of you using it, you might as well just DM each other on Twitter.
There are also issues of security. I remember talking to someone in a pharmaecutical company who was effectively using the site with a number of her employees. Then IT caught wind of this and blocked access to the site amid concerns of privacy. But although this highlights the nature of trying to introduce social tools within companies, I don’t think Yammer should be written off just yet .
Another reason to keep an eye on it? Two interesting moves. In August of this year the company moved closer to Silicon Valley, and shortly after was joined by Sean Parker, Founding President of Facebook,  and co-founder Napster and Plaxo. Not a bad name to have to your company and a sure sign that there’s more to come from Yammer.
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  • You're right, Yammer does have a lot of promise, but there are so many choices in the socnet / collaboration space, I can see why retaining users would be a problem. Yammer is so stripped down, I could see why Sys Admins wouldn't like the look of it.

    Hope it survives, but it's going to have to be more assertive in it's marketing. "Build it and they will come" may have worked in Costner's "Field of Dreams", but certainly not on the internet.
  • Hi, you're absolutely right about it being in a crowded marketplace. Although it's certainly an attractive option for many purely because it's free.
    I hope we see more marketing of this, I do think we're about to see a second wave for it.
  • dunkndisorderly
    I really like the principal of Yammer. I think you make a good point though if you are woprking in a reasonably large sized company getting everyone to embrace new technology when they don't have a facebook or twitter account or even know about instant messaging is very difficult. You tend to get a few users trying to push it and without someone championing it and communicating the benefits people don't see the value. I know here at Pure360 there was an initial attempt to get it started and several people joined but activity levels just dropped after no real take up. The problem is there is no real promotion. I think you need someone actually driving this from within. Probably easier to integrate the technology somehow with exisiting systems everyone is used to already using. I agree with SEOcopywriter in that there is clearly a lot of choice out there for collaboration type tools.



    I agr
  • Hi Duncan - intergrating with an existing solution is a really interesting point. Collaborating somehow with a site like basecamp or huddle (though they offer similiar functionality) could be where the future lies for Yammer. Effecting change is going to take a long time so benefiting from an existing system could be incredibly valuable for the site.
    I think a lot of people were in the same boat when it first launched, in that a few people used it for a week or so but without enough involvement internally, the benefit of it is negligible.
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