This is the first post by new contributor Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.
Yammer seemingly suffered the fate of many internet startups. It benefited from the initial buzz of being a new brand, with the handy association of both microblogging and launching at TC50 , but failed to retain the traffic. The site traffic for the ‘Twitter for companies’ has been largely unstable, certainly not following an upward trend, failing to get anywhere near the initial 200k visits it reached on its launch in September 2008.
For many of us, Yammer was exciting for a few days, before we neglected the site and focused our full attention back to Twitter. I don’t think we should write Yammer off just yet though. Yammer is not like most social media tools out there, because it’s focused primarily on companies. I believe this is the key to why it’s success has been slow.
Affecting change in a corporate environment is still an incredibly slow process. Sure there would have been one or two social media heads within organisations that would have been embraced it, but this isn’t sufficient for the service to function properly. If there’s only a few of you using it, you might as well just DM each other on Twitter.
There are also issues of security. I remember talking to someone in a pharmaecutical company who was effectively using the site with a number of her employees. Then IT caught wind of this and blocked access to the site amid concerns of privacy. But although this highlights the nature of trying to introduce social tools within companies, I don’t think Yammer should be written off just yet .
Another reason to keep an eye on it? Two interesting moves. In August of this year the company moved closer to Silicon Valley, and shortly after was joined by Sean Parker, Founding President of Facebook, and co-founder Napster and Plaxo. Not a bad name to have to your company and a sure sign that there’s more to come from Yammer.