New Comm Biz

Last month I gave Yammer (a product I like) a hard time because it doesn’t integrate with microblogging clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck and I feel that their pricing is prohibitive to large, enterprise companies.

I got several comments from people and had some really good discussions around the use of Yammer and the good and bad people face with the product. To my surprise the most engaged commenter was David Sacks, Founder and CEO of both Yammer and Geni, was previously the COO of Paypal and if that wasn’t enough, producer of the movie Thank You For Not Smoking.

I’ve been meaning to, to do a follow up post on what Yammer decided to launch instead of the features I thought they should have implemented but yesterdays Social Business Summit provided the perfect fodder I needed.

Lane Becker, CEO of Get Satisfaction, made the comment that we need to create more edges in our companies. Edges are where the cool things happen, it’s where conversations with partners and customers happen; it’s where innovation occurs.

John Hagel then later made the comment that companies need to move from knowledge stocks (proprietary IP that they milk dry) to knowledge flows (rich interactions and collaborations with stakeholders).

Earlier this month Yammer released Yammer Communities a tool that can do just that.  From the Yammer blog:

This new product feature enables companies and organizations to create a new type of Yammer network that is not restricted to a common email domain.  Yammer Communities provide companies with a secure, private, and separate space to communicate with their external business contacts.

This is an excellent move for Yammer. Traditional “partner portals” or “extranets” are secure, intranet like sites where companies can share things like documents and announcements with partners and over the years extranets have grown to include some level of collaboration. Most extranets suck for two reasons:

• They’re hard to use have horrible UX
• People don’t want one more place they have to remember to check

I have no doubt Yammer will destroy current extranets on both accounts. However I still think that being able to access Yammer from an aggregated application like Tweetdeck or Seesmic will make the service much easier to use. But David is a successful serial entrepreneur, the one category of business person I have the most respect for, obviously knows what he’s doing and shouldn’t be listening to every blogger with an opinion and an overinflated sense of importance.

I’m looking forward to giving the new communities feature a test to see how well it works.

It’s pretty long (just under 30 minutes) but if you’re interested here’s an interview Robert Scoble recently did with David.

I chat with the CEO of microblogging and corporate social service leader, Yammer, about what they are doing and how the enterprise market is becoming hyper competitive with companies like Salesforce, Jive, Socialtext, SocialContext, Google, and Zoho all angling for the market that Yammer was first in.

Internal social media is about to go through the growth external social media went through for the last few years. It’s going to be exciting to watch.

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