Mário Andrade

Yammer is a communication tool developed for companies to help them communicate more effectively. It was created by Geni and lunched during Techcrunch50 which gave it an enormous buzz which and ended up winning the award for best presenting company taking home a check of 50,000 dollars.

As Techcrunch calls it, Yammer is a kind of Twitter with a business model. A very easy and interesting tool that can help small and medium company employers to communicate and share files easier.

It works just like Twitter but every company has it’s own personal stream and only users with a valid company email can access it. Eventually you can create communities, which I call projects, and invite other users, with different emails without the restriction to valid company email, to those communities.

Communicating with other users in Yammer

Like I mentioned Yammer works very similar to Twitter so you can use basically the same commands to communicate and search. For example you can mention someone by adding @username to your “Yam” or send a personal direct message by typing to:username.

Yammer allows you to attach files up to 50Mb with no limit in the amount of data stored at your network, meaning you can upload as many files as you want, as long as they are not over 50Mb.
Another great feature is the ability to follow people and tags, allowing you to be on top of project conversations via Yammer, E-mail or RSS feed.

Pricing

Yammer has 3 pricing plans with fairly reasonable pricing per user per month, Free, Silver and Gold.
If you are simple looking to communicate the free version is all you need but if you are looking for more control a paid version is advisable. Check Yammer’s pricing page for full list of features available on each plan.

How I use it

In March 2010 I started working on a startup company called Oferta Global – Web marketing services as a web and seo consultant. I felt the need to implement a few tools to improve our archiving and communication.

In April Oferta Global implemented Yammer to help improve organization and project management and with it the whole theme has a common place to share conversations and files regarding the projects we are working on, categorize messages using tags and keeping an archive of all the exchanged messages. The best of all is that Yammer works just like Twitter which made it a whole lot easier to use.

For me the biggest difference I find using Yammer comes when I’m searching the archives for a specific message or file when comparing to the hundreds of emails, many times what I want is a reply between many other replies and the whole email system is just a mess.

I recommend you give it a try, it’s free. It might not be the perfect tool for all businesses but can really improve internal communication. And in case you are still suspicious about giving it a try, companies like Adobe, AMX and Fox use Yammer so why shouldn’t you?