140Char

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.

Comments: Comments
Categories: Microblogging
Tags: adoption, blocking, implementing, launch, lauren fisher, techcrunch50, traffic, yammer
Comments rss
Trackback

Twitter starts filtering links to malware

Dan Thornton | August 3, 2009

As more and more people use Twitter, so the number of spam/porn messages has increased – partly due to users succumbing to the numbers game and blindly following and re-tweeting anything they see.

So it’s a good move for Twitter to start blocking malware, as spotted by the F-Secure blog earlier today – making the service a little safer for the less-savvy.

It seems that the filtering itself comes via Bit.ly, checking against spam filters SURBL and Google Safe Browsing, and then adding a warning, as shown in the screen below from F-Secure (Obviously I don’t know any dodgy sites!):