What Are You Working On? - The Rapid Rise of Yammer
I will be the first to admit that I was slow to latch onto Twitter.
It initially seemed silly, not entirely useful and certainly not relevant to my professional or personal social life or networking goals. Over the course of several months this spring, however, I gradually began to realize how much insight could be garnered from the now virtually mainstream micro-blogging service—be it information on the next Forrester Wave Report, who at the WSJ is now covering the consumer technology beat or where to find the best cup of coffee in downtown San Francisco. Twitter went from being a curious annoyance to a friendly ally, but the process was slow, onerous and when things get particularly hectic I’ve been known to go weeks without checking in with the Twitter-sphere through even a single “tweet.”
Yammer, on the other hand, was an easy sell—and the speed with which we as an office have adopted the service has been startling, speaking to both the company’s unique value and ultimately the pure ease of implementation.
Yammer officially debuted at the TechCrunch 50 conference in September 2008, taking home the top prize and associated unbridled publicity. Transforming Twitter’s “What are you doing?” to “What are you working on?”, Yammer introduced a new mode of office communication, reducing internal emails and providing a fresh breeding ground for sharing information, articles, thoughts and questions, from requests for dentist recommendations to insight into hot new companies.
Within a couple of days, every LaunchSquad employee had registered with the service, downloaded the Yammer widget and sent his or her first “yam.” New hires are now introduced to the service within their first few hours on the job, and as Claire Cain Miller wrote for the NYT, it continues to provide an exceedingly valuable “new way to do a lot of stuff we already do at work.”
The larger story behind Yammer’s rapid infiltration of our office, however, comes back to how painfully simple it is to get started. All you need is a company e-mail address—no IT department is required to step in, no permission from higher-ups, no cost, no product evaluation—essentially, zero adoption curve. All it takes is a few people and use of the service gradually, naturally begins to spread. It quite simply could not be easier, and the company’s success (thus far) can hopefully be seen as a sign of things to come as increasingly more businesses look to decrease the adoption curve on their services while providing huge business value.
If there’s anything Yammer’s rapid rise has taught me it’s to be careful when you decide to take a week off for vacation—you just may come back to find an entirely new communication channel—don’t be left in the dust.
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