MCDM group on Yammer. Reasons for failure
Last year Yammer won the TechCrunch50 prize for most innovative startup. It seemed to be promising because of its very viable subscription model that was intended to simplify interaction among peers within a “closed garden” environment. Unfortunately, I don’t have any examples of Yammer successfully entering corporate environments (that doesn’t necessarily mean those don’t exist) due to natural corporations’ unwillingness to give up their potentially proprietary data to third party managed services, especially free ones.
Yammer: An Experiment In A “Closed” Tweetspace, post by Kathy on November 12th, caught my attention and I decided to give it a try.
Today, almost 3 months later, I recovered my password and went back to check it out.
There are currently 7 u.washington.edu groups on Yammer. None of them show too much recent activity. 3 of them have 0 messages.
Looks like I wasn’t the only person who didn’t feel Yammer to be a fit for my needs. So, what were the reasons that made me abandon it?
- Lack of novice. That wasn’t something new, and I was supposed to use this advanced Twitter clone for interacting with people I already followed on Twitter anyways
- There was no need for the “walled garden”. I didn’t mind my comments to be public
- Not too many people used it due to the subscription model limitations
- Inability to integrate Yammer account with other platforms I use (which is pretty obvious in a “walled garden” case)
This case clearly illustrates that Yammer didn’t work either for UW in general or for smaller groups within the UW community for a number of reasons. However, I do believe Yammer is a great solution for smaller businesses with multiple locations that collaborate remotely.
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3 Comments, Comment or Ping
Margery Nabors
This is the first I have heard of Yammer. So after reading your blog post, I did a quick trend search on BlogPulse to see if blog mentions of Yammer measured up to Twitter. They didn’t. Now I know the BlogPulse tools only offer a cursory gauge of buzz, but I thought that Yammer would trend marginally higher than 0.0% in the last 6 months.
Hypothesis: The people who are using Yammer are, by their very nature, inclined towards closed networks. So I really should not have been surprised that they are not talking about Yammer in an open network.
That being said, I think a good way to gauge interest and excitement in this site is to longitudinally watch membership enrollment.
Feb 7th, 2009
Brook Ellingwood
In the past few months, I’ve seen Yammer fail to take hold both at UW, and at the company I was working at. During that time I put a little energy into evangelizing it at both, and noted it getting some pretty good press, including a feature story on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
I think it hasn’t worked in limited networks because the function it’s trying to replicate is already owned by Instant Messaging, and Yammer offers no improvement over that. In fact, it’s less utilitarian because, unlike IM in a business, you can’t have discrete messages containing privileged information or subversive comments about your boss.
Feb 7th, 2009
adriana
I wasn’t a fan of Yammer for the reasons Brook and Ivan cite, wall-garden, nothing new etc. But I’ve found a good use. We use it at my agency quite a bit and I the advantage is the closed-garden and a place where things can be stored (and then searched) instead of sending pesky emails.
I think in our environment (MCDM) there’s not much that needs to be discussed behind closed-doors so it became redundant.
It was a good try though, it’s interesting to see what stick and what doesn’t.
Feb 8th, 2009
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