Now that you are trained in Yammer community-management and user-engagement techniques, the time has come to implement them. In this chapter, you will get an idea of how you can run a campaign on Yammer, what the different techniques are to execute such a campaign, and the benefits of running a campaign on Yammer. Finally, in the last part of the chapter, you will find some innovative ways of using Yammer.
Today, whenever a company launches their products, services, or even when they acquire a new company, these achievements are communicated internally to employees or externally to the world in the best possible way. To communicate this news, events are organized, company branding is done on available channels, and campaigns are launched. In these ways, organizations are able to communicate the information they want in the most effective manner. Companies allocate a huge budget for executing marketing campaigns, for hosting events, and for branding and communication. External social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram are used to launch these promotional activities. These activities have led to the evolution of agencies (a type of specialized organization) that help companies build content for branding, campaigns, and events.
People/diversity, organization-level tools
Advertisements and branding
Environmental sustainability/smarter travel
Learning
Values, compliance, and ethics
Community
Information security
Cyber security
Data privacy
Community
People and culture
Global sports such as Rugby or football World Cup
The preceding topics can get promoted internally so that organization-level objectives and messages are communicated to employees. Internal campaigns based on such topics often lead to employee engagement and participation as they voice their opinions. In some organizations, rewards and recognition programs are linked to employee participation. Huge investments are being made to implement such campaigns. Internal marketing and communications teams play an important part in rolling out such internal campaigns.
Getting Started with Yammer for Campaigns
About a decade ago, only two basic platforms were getting used to launch campaigns: email and traditional Intranet (i.e., only hosting content). With the evolution of platforms such as Yammer, things have changed tremendously. Reach and user participation are vital to any campaign, and maximizing them has become possible through Yammer. Internal campaigns launched through Yammer have become a key enabler in the age of social media. Marketing content can be easily shared with a vast audience by internal communication and marketing teams. Not only this, but employee engagement can also be energized during such campaigns.
It may sound surprising, but Yammer has the potential to make your campaign awesome. In my experience as a community manager, I had the opportunity to launch a variety of campaigns, including one-week focus campaigns; business-specific campaigns that ran for more than a week; campaigns related to specific achievements, such as an organization turning 50, which would run between six and nine months depending upon the budget; and some people- and culture-related campaigns that ran through the year.
Publish communication on campaign
Create #tag for campaign
Publish Yammer masthead (now this feature has moved to Office 365 admin)
Post Yammer poll #Yampoll
Organize YamJam and YamChat. YamJams could be weeklong as well.
Promote intranet articles
Link Yammer group URLs in mailers and email signatures
Launch brownbag session and post photo on Yammer
Publish marketing collateral, such as animation, posters, and screensavers. Also, cross-reference Yammer hash topics and engagements on marketing collaterals.
YamChats were one the hottest sites of action in the one-week focus campaigns as they involved the top leadership team’s participation on Yammer, sharing their views and opinions with the audience. YamChats were conducted at 12PM CET so that employees from almost all time zones could participate.
Yammer is such a lively platform that it can help things in any campaign go viral. Internal communication team members could do live reporting on the status of a campaign in their respective regions. During a campaign based on Yammer itself, we circulated Yammer posters and asked people to talk about them, print them out, and put them on their desks, escalators, reception areas, cafeterias, and other crowded places. We then asked them to share photos of the posters up in their respective locations. Posting photos on Yammer is easy, and thanks to the Yammer app we received photos from Mumbai, San Francisco, Paris, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and various other offices. Some executives had put their Yammer posters in their offices so that individuals visiting could take note of them. It is quite amazing to be a part of such a campaign, where stuff easily goes viral on Yammer. The importance of Yammer can be realized when you imagine such a campaign without Yammer—email and traditional intranets would not have helped or paid such rich dividends.
For campaigns with other business focuses or that lasted months, Yammer was used to share content, publicize the theme, and encourage user participation through photos or events such as YamJams or YamChats. During Capgemini’s 50th anniversary year, there were plenty of events that took place and had coverage on external social media channels, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other channels. Yammer was also one of the ways to communicate anniversary-related information. During the 50th anniversary, marathon runs took place in different locations, and Yammer was used to post photos from the live events. Not only this, but people who participated in the events also could share stories about how they felt both to be a part of Capgemini for many years and to take part in the marathon. Internal communications team members were doing live reporting of the event. If Microsoft can launch a video feature in Yammer in the coming years, then it would be surprising to see any difference between a journalist and an internal communication manager covering external events.
Let’s attack the question on which this chapter is based: How do you run campaigns on Yammer? You will find that you do not need to be a Yammer champion or expert to run a campaign on Yammer. You need to know Yammer features and have a passion for using Yammer for campaigns—Yammer and its user community will help with the rest.
As mentioned earlier, campaigns launched with emails and intranets have a very limited reach and limited employee engagement and participation due to the nature of the platform and technology. Campaigns were one-way focused and were meant only to communicate; nobody thought of communicating both ways until the birth of Yammer.
With Yammer, communicating the objectives and message of the campaign became very easy. Not only this, but sharing marketing collaterals—such as posters, animations, cards, and other stuff—has become easy, and the budget required to share such things across global offices turned to zero. Most important, launching campaigns on Yammer has become a two-way street. Campaigns are launched to relevant teams, but user feedback—or the voice of the employee—can also be captured in real-time. That’s a big change.
With Yammer, people started coming up with new ideas to run their Yammer in the most effective manner, one result of which was the new name for campaigns: digital campaigns. Here are seven ways to launch or run a campaign on Yammer; they are listed based on Yammer my experience.
You Do Not Have to Be a Yammer Expert to Run a Campaign on Yammer
When I started using social media platforms such as Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, nobody trained me, or nor I trained others. These platforms are so appealing by design that users do not require any training material, classroom training, or masterclasses. People of all ages, educational backgrounds, and professions, such as information technology specialists, doctors, lawyers, scientists, and others, can use social media platforms effectively and in an efficient manner. This reminds me of the print media, i.e., newspaper. Across the world, millions of different newspapers are getting published in different countries, and people from different educational backgrounds, professions, and age groups can read the newspaper and understand it. Nobody trained us to read a newspaper, and we never attended a masterclass. It just happened, and we have been reading it for many years.
Group creation (Figure 4-1)
Create a Yammer group
Create hash topic (Figure 4-2)
Create hash topic #test
Publish conversation or announcement (Figure 4-3)
Share conversation or announcement
Like and share a conversation (Figure 4-4)
Like or share a conversation
Upload attachments (Figure 4-5)
Uploading attachments
Add users to groups (Figure 4-6)
Adding users
@mention to call relevant people in conversation (Figure 4-7)
Use of @mention
The preceding listed features will help you run a campaign successfully on Yammer. These features are very basic and very easy to use. So, you do not have to be a Yammer expert to run a campaign on Yammer.
Do a Proper Launch on Yammer
Post an announcement.
Define a hash topic for your campaign.
Add the group URL where you will create Yammer engagement in your email signature.
Send a mailer through your leader’s mailbox to all employees highlighting good things about campaign.
Put a Yammer video or animation in your reception area.
Ask your employees to sign up for Yammer by putting computers in your reception area or cafeteria.
Ask people what they expect out of the campaign .
Remain Engaged on Yammer During Your Campaign
Be active on Yammer during campaigns. You need to post conversations, reply to messages, tag conversations with hash topics, encourage people to post, ask for feedback, ask for suggestions, reply to user queries, post pictures, request people share images, share marketing collaterals, ask people how they feel about the Yammer collaterals, moderate YamJams, moderate YamChats, and just be engaged to make a difference.
If you do not remain engaged then people will not be inspired to post messages. Only limited people will participate, and consequently the campaign will die and you will not achieve the desired results. So, it is very important that you remain active in Yammer campaigns and drive the campaign.
Involve as Many People as You Can
You can run a campaign on your own or with a group of people. If you have a group of people driving the campaign then you will be able to get more attention for the campaign and engage more people on Yammer during campaigns days. It is not only about having people to drive engagement on Yammer during the campaign, but also about inviting people to be a part of the campaign. For example, involve your leadership team during YamJams and YamChats, involve your design team on Yammer to get suggestions or feedback on marketing collaterals they created so that during the next campaign they will meet people’s expectations, involve your global teams based in different locations so that they will know like-minded people beyond their area, and involve your supervisors, managers, directors, and vice presidents to make campaign successful.
If you have limited people engaging, the campaign will not be a super hit, as you would likely expect. In this developing world, it is always best to grow mutually and collaboratively, and therefore it is very important to run a campaign on Yammer by involving as many people as you can.
Be Innovative: Think of Viral Ideas
Ask people to post photos during campaigns. With smartphones, people are fanatics about taking pictures and sharing them with those they know.
Organize gifts during a Yammer campaign. I am not talking about an expensive gift, but a small gift—a pen or a diary—could make hardworking employees give broad smiles.
Ask people involved in the campaign to do brownbag sessions so that people can participate, know the objectives, and ask others to contribute.
Ask your leadership to post a message on Yammer. We do not expect them to remain active throughout the day, but the seconds required to post a message will make a difference.
Use graphics during your Yammer campaign. People are normally bored of reading text, and graphics will give them a change and trigger them to contribute.
Ask people to post their stories. When you ask people to post stories related to work or their achievements, you will get a response for sure.
@mention people so that they feel good and respond to your message on Yammer.
Host YamJams and YamChat sessions with leadership teams.
Make your campaign gamified.
Develop marketing collaterals.
We live in a digital world where content is a game changer. These days, people do not like to read text, or they feel quite bored reading text. Therefore, pictures or gamified objects or animations would make them happy—it would be easy to understand the objectives of the campaign without spending too much time reading. Create posters, images, cards, screensavers, animations, and gamified objects so that people remain engaged while looking at them. Long, hard text can be easily ignored. Technology has made people too lazy to read text, and they have developed the expectation that they should be able to understand everything quickly.
If you do not have the budget to develop exciting posters or animations, just keep it simple. Go for simple images or ask people to post images from their smartphones to make it a digital campaign.
Hold Yammer Network Event During Campaigns
A Yammer network event is a company-wide social event designed to increase adoption of and build excitement about Yammer. It typically combines offline promotions and in-person activities with online usage of Yammer.
If you are rolling out Yammer company-wide, a Yammer network event helps you promote the use of Yammer and creates momentum. As for a launch event held during a campaign, it is best held after the initial active directory sync and once your senior leadership has made an official announcement introducing Yammer.
Yammer network events aren’t limited to initial rollout, however. They can be held at any time; for example, in conjunction with major company events or any other significant organizational change. One of the most popular and beneficial events is a Town Hall on Yammer featuring some senior executives sharing insights about a critical topic important to a wide audience of employees. This can be a great way to involve new and existing users by engaging them in a substantive, focused conversation during a set period.
For best results, we recommend holding at least one Yammer network event per quarter, if not more frequently as resources permit. You can also encourage departments and teams to hold their own Yammer network events, or even challenge each other to raise participation rates.
The following Yammer network events are provided as examples for you to consider and adapt for your company and audience. The Launch and Training tabs of success.yammer.com contain additional messaging and communications content that may be useful as you plan and prepare for these events.
Yammer Network Event Ideas
A social media conference: educate employees about the benefits and differences of using social tools like Facebook, Twitter, and Yammer. You can use your company’s external Facebook page and Twitter profile as a comparison with the internal communication and collaboration that occurs within Yammer.
An internal collaboration expo: showcase social, mobile, and other collaborative projects occurring within the organization using the tools you recommend. Invite project team members to share the specific ways they managed projects and coordinated work, what they learned, and best practices.
Welcome to Yammer Open House: hold informal Yammer learning and orientation sessions in the same space every day for several days. Share sample messages and dos and don’ts and encourage users to sign on and post to Yammer during these sessions.
Yammer Profile Photo Day: organize a headshot photo shoot in a public place such as the cafeteria (you can even use Yammer to find a volunteer photographer within your organization!). Encourage employees to be themselves and show some personality.
Power User Friday: encourage power users and champions at your organization to wear Yammer shirts and badges that say, “Ask Me About Yammer” in conjunction with a brownbag lunch discussion or other informal get-together about the best ways to engage and collaborate on the network.
Power Yammer Session: encourage users to post as often as possible during one period, then reward the most active employees. While casually referred to as a SPAM Yammer day, it’s important for group admins and event promoters to recommend specific topics or questions to address so that the conversation is always constructive.
Philanthropic event: use Yammer to promote a charity fundraiser, food drive, or other philanthropic activity. You can use Yammer to identify volunteers and organize the event, apply a related hashtag, and update frequently with progress toward goals so that everyone is informed.
For any of these events, keep in mind that you can always recognize top participants, including those who post the most, those whose messages are most liked, those who were most helpful, and so forth to promote certain types of behavior on Yammer.
Conduct a Yammer Town Hall During Campaign
A Yammer Town Hall is a moderated, live Q&A session open to employees throughout your organization. The primary benefit of a Yammer Town Hall is the open, focused discussion that occurs from which interested followers and the company at large can benefit.
These sessions are typically between 30 minutes to an hour in length and feature a C-level or senior executive discussing the latest company news or other subjects that are top of mind among employees. They can also involve Yammer users of a similar function or in the same department sharing news and best practices.
For best results, recruit designated conversation leaders along with a group of engaged users who can help promote and facilitate the conversation by asking questions and encouraging others to participate. You and your conversation leaders can determine in advance which questions to cover or decide to keep it open for employees to ask what they choose. Typically, four to six questions are enough for an hour-long session, depending on the level of conversation and audience engagement.
Sample Town Hall Topics
Change management: discussion about reorganization activities, including acquisitions, mergers, or divestments
Regulatory changes and industry news: impact of new regulation and industry changes upon your business
New leadership: new executives can introduce themselves and engage with your employee base by sharing their vision and plans
Conclude Your Campaign with Thanks
The start and the end of a campaign are the two most important components. At the start, the launch is very important and helps to communicate the objectives of the campaign. The end is equally important. Once your campaign is over, use the Yammer praise feature to praise people who have participated in the campaign. The people being praised will be excited and would likely willingly offer you help during future campaigns.
Besides using Yammer praise, you can remain in touch with these heavy users by creating a dedicated Yammer group for them. Nurture them, get ideas from them, and encourage them to be Yammer champions so you can make changes with their assistance. The end of a campaign is not an end, but rather a road leading to the start of a new campaign with a new set of people with innovative ideas.
Example Campaign
A week before the start of the information and cyber security campaign, a list of planned user-engagement activities was announced on Yammer. Also, a Yammer hash topic—for example, #infosec2018—was announced.
On Monday of the campaign week, various intranet articles involving information and cyber security were shared on Yammer. Also, a weeklong YamJam was announced.
On Tuesday of the campaign week, Yammer polls were published on Yammer.
On Wednesday of the campaign week, users were encouraged to share their stories involving security issues.
On Thursday of the campaign week, security SPOCs for different regions shared their experience working on security matters.
On Friday, the concluding day of the campaign, a YamChat was organized with Information and Cyber Security management.
The preceding list of activities contains too much if you have a large network; you can cut down based on the availability of resources. The five days of campaigns like this are the busiest days, and you should enjoy them. Finally, at the end of the campaign, users were praised for their support, and a report was shared with Information and Cyber Security teams.
Benefits of Running a Campaign on Yammer
We will learn about the benefits of running a campaign on Yammer in the following sections.
Platform
If you want to run a global campaign—let’s say, across different countries and offices and among people with different cultural backgrounds—and you need to circulate content, encourage participation, and get people onboard, what should you plan to do? You might use emails and the traditional intranet, as well as ask the people managing the campaign to launch it into working areas, but do you have enough people to do so? How do you circulate content? There are many hurdles and challenges. How do you run a global campaign in a non-IT company, where people do not always have access to laptops, desktops, or intranet connections? How do you run a global campaign among sales colleagues in a pharma company, where people from sales are always traveling? How do you run a campaign such as One Team between people who work at the factory level? How do you run a campaign between a set of professors at a university?
Yammer is the answer! If you want to run a campaign across different countries and offices and among people with different cultures, and circulate marketing collaterals to them, Yammer is the answer. Yammer is as awesome as you make it. Access to Yammer is so simple and easy, and there is no training needed to learn how to access Yammer. With a simple URL, www.yammer.com/companyname.com , you are into Yammer, or you can download the mobile app. Posting messages on Yammer is easy. You can clearly communicate your campaign objectives, connect with people based out of different countries, and reach people with different cultural backgrounds. It’s quite simple with Yammer.
Today , we live in a digital world, and almost everybody has a smartphone or mobile device independent of their profession. People have company email addresses, as email is still the basic channel of communication for any organization. They know how to access apps, so they can download the Yammer app and start using it. So, if you want to run a campaign in a non-IT company, where people do not have constant access to laptops, desktops, or intranet connections, it is possible with Yammer. If you want to run a global campaign among sales colleagues in a pharma company who are always traveling, then use Yammer. If you want to run a campaign such as One Team between people who work at the factory level, then use Yammer. If you want to run a campaign between a set of professors at a university, then Yammer is the answer.
Reach
Before the launch of Yammer, connecting with people was difficult because it was close to impossible to reach hundreds or thousands of people over a single platform, allow them to share their opinions or views with others, share content or messages with them, connect with them for their expertise, do crowdsourcing, ask for ideas or solutions, or establish a long collaborative journey. It was possible though through face-to-face interaction. Yammer made things that were impossible, possible. Now you can connect, collaborate, and share with people in different countries; it does not matter if you know them or not, and time zones do not matter. People from one country in one time zone can connect with people from other country in another time zone. Life has become simpler with Yammer.
Involvement
What is the point of a campaign if we do not have channels on which to share views, opinions, and feedback? What is the point of a campaign if it is one-sided and is just communicating one way? What is the point of a campaign where there is no participation or engagement? Nobody would want to be a part of a campaign where there was no opportunity for involvement. People’s involvement during a campaign has become possible with Yammer. Getting people to participate on Yammer during campaigns has become easy. With easy access to Yammer using a link or mobile app, along with easy-to-learn Yammer features, participation is more possible.
Power
Power here means you will have influence, authority, and control over as many things as you want during the campaign. You can be innovative in your approach. For example, if you do not get the level of involvement you expected, then you can extend the campaign by simply adding a conversation on Yammer. Another example would be if you wanted to share content that was not part of the plan, in one click you could share that piece of content. There used to be many limitations when managing a campaign, but with Yammer it has become easy.
Once, as moderator for a YamChat session (a question and answer session on Yammer), I was informed that the leadership team was unavailable for the scheduled YamChat—and this was just 30 minutes before the start of the YamChat. Since the YamChat was at the global level, I requested replacements; otherwise, users would express negative sentiments on Yammer, and it would get out of control. The concerned team was able to organize replacements, and I was able to conduct the YamChat and moderate it. The easiest part, though it appeared very challenging, was announcing the change in guests for the YamChat in real time. Yammer made it possible with a lot of comfort, and that’s the power of Yammer—you are in control of the situation at any point in your campaign.
Flexibility
Yammer helps you to stay flexible when you launch a campaign. In traditional settings, where only email or traditional intranets are available to launch campaigns, the focus is often put on completing the deliverables planned for the campaign rather than on the campaign objectives. With the launch of Yammer, we can stay focused on driving the objectives by involving people, creating engagements, sharing content, publicizing, sharing images, and doing innovative stuff. By doing so, you put more emphasis on the campaign to fulfill its objectives. The time horizon to launch campaigns using Yammer is different and allows you to stay flexible.
During my experience while driving a YamJam, campaign owners requested that I change the YamJam schedule from 30 minutes to one week so that people could contribute whenever they had time, and we got plenty of ideas. This last-minute change was communicated successfully on Yammer, and by the end of the week we had received more than 100 ideas.
#Benefit
During any campaign, your network will contain valuable conversations that show how Yammer has helped employees to collaborate, communicate, and get more done. Normally, people tag such conversations using the hash topics #benefit or #yamwins.
Examples of #benefit conversations involve instances when employees have used Yammer to ask questions and find answers faster; collaborate to solve a problem; discover valuable information from past discussions; connect individuals to expertise and information; connect individuals across geography or job titles; and much more.
Tagging conversations with the topic #benefit or #YamWin can be a great way to organize quality Yammer threads and make them easy to find. However, sometimes reading a thread doesn’t expose the inherent value that lies underneath. The guide in the next section of this book will help explain how to uncover the underlying business value.
Yammer Is as Awesome as You Make It!
Whether you are an employee at a startup or CEO of a multinational corporation, your workplace is an important key to the success of your job and your company. In an organization, communication between employees is important to the business. Most organizations that have adopted Yammer have found it to be an excellent communication platform for internal collaboration between employees, for sharing content with global teams, and for connecting employees across geographies. Yammer puts communication at your fingertips, is easy to use, and is a user-friendly technology to adopt.
In this section, you will learn 43 different ways to use Yammer during a campaign or in general to create user engagement. We are thinking out loud here to get ideas that will create the maximum benefit. I hope you enjoy it.
43 Awesome Ways to Use Yammer
- 1.
Work loudly using Yammer. Tell people exactly what you are working on. Yammer is an excellent platform for collaborating and connecting people working on various projects and sharing innovative ideas to build winning opportunities.
- 2.
Communicate your expertise through Yammer. Normally, a job title or designation will not explain the work you do, and you may be more than that. Talk about your educational experience, different languages you know, number of books or white papers written by you, countries you have traveled to, pets you have, cooking experience, etc. You never know how these can help you.
- 3.
Call experts by tagging them in Yammer conversations using the @mention Yammer feature. Community managers, or any user, can use an @mention to tag the relevant user for assistance or feedback.
- 4.
Add your professional avatar to your Yammer profile to let know people know that you are real. Along with text messages posted by you, when people notice your avatar on Yammer then the discussion is likely to spread offline.
- 5.
Use Yammer on sick days to remain engaged and see what’s happening on the network.
- 6.
Yammer is designed for people to collaborate on business-related stuff. But it can also help people be happy and relieved from stress in their day-to-day work. This is achieved by creating non-business-related groups for people to discuss their out-of-office hobbies. If you love photography, then create a Yammer group on photography; if you love French, then create a French language learning group; and if you like comics, then create a group to share and talk about comics. It’s amazing.
- 7.
Find people with common interests. Check user profiles and discover things they like to do. You may find a good reason to follow a user and further develop a mutual interest. You can mention this mutual interest in conversation and see where it leads.
- 8.
Upload Word docs, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets, as Microsoft Office documents can be uploaded and edited on Yammer. Share your project-related content, whether it is your logo, team event photos, or photos taken during a customer visit. Upload any file of almost any type. It is easy to share content or URLs with global teams on Yammer. Add a hash topic to make it easily findable later.
- 9.
Give a hash topic to each post. Community managers and users can tag conversations with hash topics to make it both easy to find later and easy to link older conversations to new ones.
- 10.
The best way to engage users is to ask for feedback or suggestions, and this will trigger some response from the user community.
- 11.
Always say “Thank you.” It will cost you nothing but will reap huge benefits. All organizations have barriers, such as cultural differences, the internal hierarchy, communication, and others. It is natural to have such hurdles in an organization, as no one is perfect. You could reach out to people on Yammer to ask for help, whether it’s asking for an answer on an issue, finding a bigger office space, requesting a point of contact for cross-selling, or connecting with a marketing and communication campaign. Once you receive help and the issue is fixed, let everyone know about their contribution and thank them for pitching in. Next time, they might be excited to assist you, and others as well.
- 12.
Yammer is the best place to share what you have learned at conferences, seminars, or product launches you have recently attended. Share best practices or what other companies are doing that is different from your organization. Yammer is the most convenient place to share such learnings from any event you attend. Also, it takes very little time, and you do not have to repeat the learnings once they are shared.
- 13.
Discover what competitors are doing by reading a blog or article on the internet, and then share it on Yammer so that your company colleagues can keep watch and be ready for the competition. With Yammer, communication is changing, and you are able to disperse vital information organization-wide within seconds. If you are not using it, then you are missing something. Two or three such updates on a daily basis will make your people aware and could be a game changer.
- 14.
Share a URL from the internet, share the business issue you are facing, update on your next business trip, or publish information about the next holidays. Post something every day on Yammer.
- 15.
Post an idea—everyone knows we all have some in us.
- 16.
Share pictures from big meetings, town halls, events, conferences, summits, and community events. People in the office and outside the office will welcome pictures from office-related events. Yammer is the perfect channel and place to do this.
- 17.
Ask questions. Asking a question is one of the best ways get replies, as it is human nature to start thinking of an answer once a question is read. You don’t even need any evidence of this, as everybody knows it’s true; the internal communications team might have more insight on this. Ask questions. Who can help me with this project? Who’s handling this account? I’m new to the company. Where can I find xyz? Can’t find solution to this error, who can help? Cannot solve this high-priority incident ticket—please help! Has anyone worked on SAP-RFID integration? Looking out for a new opportunity? Help me! Who is a good caterer for a big meeting? Harness the invaluable pool of knowledge that is your Yammer network.
- 18.
Answer queries. Questions are meant to be answered. Share an answer to a question if you can, or @mention somebody you know can answer. Today, if you answer somebody’s question, then tomorrow your question will be answered by others. Contribute so that you will receive contributions. Employees from one country or region can ask a question, and employees from other countries or regions can respond with crucial real-time information and suggestions. Through external groups, client services have improved a lot, and now clients based in different countries or regions can collaborate in real-time with a service provider based out of a different country or region.
- 19.
Start a Yammer group for your team/business unit/ country or whatever suits your needs the best.
- 20.
Ask someone for advice in their area of expertise. Everyone in the company is an expert, and Yammer helps you discover experts. Yammer gets all the experts together under a single platform.
- 21.
Make your profile magical. Normally, a job title does not reveal your full potential. You are a communications manager, but you also have interest in creative animation work, or you are an SAP expert who likes database technologies, or you are a business-unit head but have an interest in coaching. Put everything in your Yammer profile. Put what you’d like to be doing more of in your profile. Pop it in your interests and see what magic happens.
- 22.
Ask people for feedback, opinions, and views on a specific topic. Crowdsource a topic of interest on Yammer. Yammer was made for crowdsourcing new ideas that were hidden in people’s minds.
- 23.
Yammer is about collaborating on business-related matters. Post your challenges, issues, and ideas to let people in your organization know about them, and use the knowledge capital embedded in your organization’s DNA. People will be empowered if their views and opinions are getting used to resolve business problems, and as a result they might prefer to stay in the organization for a longer time.
- 24.
Follow someone to learn or get input. Following someone will help your learn unexpected things. If you are followed by a lot of people, it is something to be proud of, and it shows you are an asset.
- 25.
Introduce yourself to colleagues located in different areas. On Yammer, there are no frontiers, and you can collaborate, connect, and share with your colleagues even if you have never met them. Yammer helps you build connections across geographies, which will help you with cross-selling and creating new stories.
- 26.
Never underestimate any team or department. Ask your IT or admin departments what they think can be changed in the working culture so the organization can be become better. Big ideas can come from anywhere in the organization.
- 27.
Meet the customers, suppliers, and partners. Build communities using Yammer external networks or create an external group to collaborate, connect, and share regarding your business activities. Also, having some common interests with these groups outside of the business arena is not a bad idea.
- 28.
You might not be able to reply to a conversation due to a lack of knowledge, but you can “Like” it to acknowledge the conversation. By doing so, you are creating an opportunity for users who follow you to react to it. The “Like” may seem like a small feature, but it is powerful and will unlock doors to new opportunities.
- 29.
When you meet in person, if possible, say, “I have seen you on Yammer, and your posts are exciting.” Connecting with people makes a big difference in achieving your business goals.
- 30.
Yammer facilitates collaboration between strangers. Participate in discussions started by people who are not from your project or department. Talking to strangers will help you share your ideas and opinions. Discover a learning opportunity with them. In the future, it may happen that strangers will save you from a difficult business situation.
- 31.
Normally, people like to hear thought-provoking stories—it is a normal human tendency. Use Yammer as your story-telling platform. It could be a story on new customer wins, how Yammer helped resolve a business problem during a critical time, how you discovered a new opportunity, or how you found new colleagues for carpooling. It can be your experience at a customer event or a global conference. Be ready to share your story.
- 32.
Build a learning journey with Yammer. Just think about this! You have a one Yammer network, multiple expert groups, people posting different messages and uploading files, stories being told, and champions continuously being engaged. In addition, the community manager executes campaigns, YamJams, and YamChats. It’s all happening on Yammer. It’s a learning goldmine!
- 33.
Sometimes on Yammer you will observe some discussions that are a little immature, and they need some encouragement to improve the discourse. Use the private message (PM) feature to encourage users to make this discussion more positive without losing enthusiasm. You need to be careful when using private messages, as people may resist changing. Stay positive, and it will make others positive. Sometimes you are unable to correct people in the group feed, and in that case you can send a private message. In YamJam events, sometime the discussion becomes hot, and to make it cool you can use private messages. It may happen that you are not comfortable starting a conversation, as you are directly related to the area in question, and in such a situation, you can send PMs to relevant people requesting they start such a conversation.
- 34.
Introduce yourself on the network so that network members know who you are. Members will know you only when you tell them about yourself. So, do not miss the opportunity to introduce yourself.
- 35.
Talk about clients behind their backs. It is for their own good. The more information you and your colleagues share about a client, the better you can meet their needs. In our organization, we use Yammer to collaborate, connect, and share business-related activities to meet clients’ demands and requests. If we do not discuss what our clients want, we cannot improve our client services, and thus we cannot be successful in a competitive market.
- 36.
Host a YamJam or YamChat. Do not miss the chance for a brainstorming session, as it will encourage people to participate. Hold a YamChat with leadership teams so that people get a fair chance to ask them a question.
- 37.
Plan events on Yammer. Host a YamJam and YamChat. Create a plan for them and share with end users. Plan webinars, conferences, team dinners, office get-togethers, town halls, holiday parties, team outings, and happy hours. Planning events on Yammer creates user engagement, and you will hear plenty of new ideas relevant to your events.
- 38.
Discover social knowledge management through Yammer. It is possible that the business problem you are facing today was already tackled by another team, who fixed it successfully. Yammer helps connect the dots, and you might get connected to a reusable solution that already exists in your organization.
- 39.
Organize a drill on Yammer. What if there are heavy rains or snowfall and as a consequence metro or trains do not function? For Yammer, there are no obstacles; whether rain or snow, user engagement will be still possible. When holding such a drill, discover how people remain in touch with each other despite difficulties and how they ensure urgent customer deliverables are met while enjoying their day working from home.
- 40.
Organize a “No email day” in your organization and use Yammer instead. Stop email distribution lists and use Yammer for open communication. If you are not comfortable with open communication, then use private messages for one-on-one communication. Using Yammer rather than email will create a new working culture and will make people more social. Host quizzes and contests with exciting gifts on Yammer to reward user engagement, which will allow people to forget the siloed world of email for a little while.
- 41.
Sometimes you will find the same question, which was already answered, gets repeated. In such situations, share a link to the previous conversation where the answer exists. After some time, you will learn which common questions are often repeated, and it will be the right time for you to create a FAQ containing links of Yammer conversations with overviews of those conversations. This is knowledge management; you are not reinventing wheel, but rather reusing existing knowledge.
- 42.
Often there is no time for user engagement. However, people remain engaged on Yammer during office hours, out-of-office hours, holiday season, weekends, public holidays, and natural disasters, such as heavy rainfall or snowfall. With Yammer, the show of user engagement goes on and on.
- 43.
Tell me how you use Yammer by writing to [email protected]om.
Note
As a Yammer community manager at Capgemini, I had multiple opportunities to attend Yammer events. In one of these events, I received a small booklet on “43 ways to use Yammer,” which was so mesmerizing that I kept it with me until today. It inspired me to write my own 43 ways to use Yammer based on my own experience.
Where Do You Use Yammer?
On your desktop/laptop
On your mobile phone
At home
At the airport
On a bus
In a car (but not driving!!)
On your iPad
In bed
At the theatre (during intermission)
Under the sea
On a boat
At the salon
At the library
At your work
At an office event
During an office meeting
During internal campaigns
During team offsite event
During office party/lunch
During business travel
During customer meeting
During town hall
During exposition
During community work
At office pantry
In the office cafeteria
In conference rooms
At a conference or summit
During a felicitation ceremony
During a fire drill
At sports tournaments
During vacation
During sabbatical
On a national holiday
During festival times
During a colleague’s birthday celebration
At a colleague’s farewell party
Anywhere with an internet connection
Summary
I believe that we now have enough information on how to run a campaign on Yammer and have mastered the techniques required to execute campaigns. With such experience, you can plan various campaigns based on your business needs. You have also been exposed to different ways of using Yammer through the sections “43 Awesome Ways to Use Yammer” and “Where Do You Use Yammer?” With such knowledge in your armory, you can create a Yammer army. In the next chapter, you will learn how you can keep your entire organization engaged on Yammer, and with this current chapter now in your tool belt, one of the ways is by running a campaign.