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VHT Chief Technology Officer
 
Group: VHT Sales
Last Login: 3/8/2009 9:44:16 PM
Posts: 17,
Visits: 60
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It's been a very busy first week back from vacation. So many ideas and plans for making this year a great one...and then of course there's a mountain of email to go through. Oh brother, is there an email end in sight? I would venture to say that most people have the same problem of taming their inbox. So I started looking around... found something, had and idea, then gave it a try. It's a Web 2.0 micro-blogging product called Yammer.
Yammer is very similar to Twitter, which I thought was somewhat useless for business...until I ran into Yammer. While Twitter asks the question, "what are you doing?" Yammer asks, "what are you working on?" and people post short "yams" instead of "tweets." Interestingly, it's tied to your domain (virtualhold.com) and people who join with virtualhold.com in their email address are automatically placed in the Virtual Hold group. I asked two fellow employees, Rob Brazier and Jeremy Starcher to sign up with me and give this a try because they don't work for me, but I am very interested in what they are doing AND I did not want to get into email exchanges with them about it. So, I have my Yammer window open and it looks like a scrolling news feed, similar to what you'd see on facebook. More importantly, I'm getting little tidbits of information from my coworkers who are yammering on about an RFP for this prospect and yammering on about a technical problem for this customer and in just a few hours I feel smarter, more aware, and in a better position to help the organization with what it needs. Then Jeremy invites his whole department to join. Likewise with Rob. Then I invite the Marketing department and before you know it there's 16 people at Virtual Hold yammering throughout their work day with one-liners and everybody knows what each other is working on. Suddenly I start seeing yams like, "I didn't know they were a customer yet...I better look into a press release." And stuff like, "I didn't know you were spending so much time troubleshooting with this customer...let me come over and help."
Yammer is slowly spreading throughout VHT. I think we're up to 24 people. I'm not advertising it and it's not something you make people do. But when my associates yammer on... about this... and about that... and it's all there in a public news feed for everybody to see, it increases awareness and this is the key to increasing responsiveness and pleasing customers, which is a goal of ours.
All of this information, wow... and none of it came from an email (that may have gotten lost in the shuffle.) All of this information, and none of it came from another dreaded meeting.
Speaking of meetings...department status meetings are amazing now. It goes something like this, "Ok, I know what everybody is working on and how it's going. So, before we get back to work...does anybody have any questions or need clarification?"
Nice... very nice.
Edited: 2/26/2009 4:53:31 PM by adrienna
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