We started using Yammer, the 2008 TC50 winner, at our company when they first launched.
Personally, I had high hopes for a work based private status updates. Open communication amongst your peers is never a bad thing. We actually had roughly the same idea back when I worked at SugarCRM. (What better pre-built network of colleagues than a CRM system that every worker already uses anyway?)
At AdMob, Yammer started out with some good status about actual work related items. I learned a bit about what everybody was working on and waited patiently for more and more people joined the network. About a week into the experiment the only active yammers were engineers. However, more disheartening was the fact that the core concept of Yammer (What are you working on?) completely went out the window. Soon it was a full blown chatroom.
What went wrong? It’s the stickiness of the app, more specifically the lack of stickiness. The number of active yammerers went down dramatically after ‘launch’ either due to lack of content or people simply forgetting about it.
I’m not sure how to fix that, perhaps it’s a problem that doesn’t need to be fixed. We’ve mostly resorted back to email.
