My Microsharing Success Story.

Note: This blog post was linked on Yammer’s forum under the title: “Yammer Enables Fewer Meetings – Saves Forrester $10,000 a Month”.  Although I intended this post below to highlight a success story courtesy of the features provided by Yammer, I think their title took some liberties on this blog post.  I invite you to read this post and the follow up here.  Tell me what you think about all this. — Gil Yehuda, April 28, 2009

Note: I’m just a bit surprised that Yammer’s PR team does not get it.  After misquoting this blog post, constructing a fake case study without my permission, and being quite explicitly asked to remove any unauthorized citation from their website by my former employer’s legal and citation department, Yammer still lists the blog post as a reference on this page.  I’m quite disappointed that no one has offered an apology to me, and more shocked that they think they are doing themselves a favor here. — Gil Yehuda, June 25, 2009

I’m a fan of microsharing.  I’ll use the term microsharing, not microblogging, since I’m influenced by Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting.  I think she’s right — the term microblogging is too limiting.  I’m not sure if microsharing is descriptive enough either.  But it works for me.

Let’s define microsharing: it is using a collaboration network to share informative notes.  Whereas email is asynchronous messaging, and IM/chat is synchronous texting; microsharing addresses a gap between the two.  Microsharing allows you to broadcast messages to many, who may or may not be on-line.  Messages are persistent and addressable by URL.  The communication is search-able and transparent, but there is also a back-channel via DM – Direct Message – that allows for private communications.  Microsharing is not bound to a computer — so you can collaborate from your mobile device, cellphone, and eventually via automated sensors.   And most interestingly, the protocol forces you to keep your messages small, hence the “micro”.

A simple way to view the difference between microsharing and blogging, is to consider that blogging is like writing a letter, whereas microsharing is like passing a small note.  The difference is not just the size of the paper, but how you use the medium.  You typically just share an alert, a bookmark, or a short request – but not a story.

This is what Twitter is all about — but it’s a public network.  About 20 other vendors have created variations of Twitter that are geared toward enterprise use – private sharing of information within organizations.  One of these products, Yammer, enjoys great press for being a “Twitter for the Enterprise” tool.

To be fair, Yammer is not the only tool that provides microsharing for private networks.  But it is a very good tool.  I have my reservations about some of the details of the Yammer model, but I also have very positive experiences with it.  So I’d like to share a success story with you, because I think it will inspire you to see value in the microsharing behavior.

In my last job, I led an internal collaboration effort with a group of analysts to coordinate our research agendas on a regular basis.  Because of the way our company was structured, we found that many analysts cover similar topics, but at times were not aware that a peer was about to publish a report or conduct a project that would have significant impact to the other analysts.  In theory, research directors were supposed to coordinate activities, and research assistants were supposed to help.  But the model did not always work.  And when there was a collision, it was a problem.  Much like the reality in most companies — it’s hard enough to keep on top of your own work, and it’s nearly impossible to keep on top of other people’s work.  We needed to know about each other’s work, but we were not organized in a way that made this easy.  Not at all.

At first we set up a monthly meeting where all relevant analysts were invited to join.  The agenda was simple:  I’d ask each participant to share information about their work that others should know about.  Everyone has a few minutes to share, and sometimes we’d discuss something that piqued our attention.  Otherwise, we’d document the updates and suggest that if people needed to follow up with someone else on the call, they should do so.

It was a pretty lightweight meeting, but it was tough to sustain.  First of all, analysts are incredibly busy – so even getting one hour a month was tough. Many times we had only half the participants.  Secondly, our time was valuable.  Just considering our consulting hourly rate and multiply by the number of people we had in an average meeting and we realized that each of these meetings offset about $10,000 of potential consulting revenue.  Meaning: if each of us was with a client for that hour, instead of talking to each other, the company would book $10K of revenue for that hour.  Whoa.  The opportunity cost of that meeting was high.  Even though the collaboration need was also high — and the risk of failing to collaborate and thereby having a preventable research train-wreck was also high.  But we had to ask if there was a better way to meet our needs without holding this meeting.

We were experimenting with Yammer — and this seemed to provide a perfect solution.  Rather than restrict the sharing behavior to an artificial meeting on the second Tuesday of the month — just give everyone a Yammer account and encourage them to share when they have something to share.  So we set up a “Yammer group” that included all the people in the meeting, as well as those who never had time to show up.  And we started to model the behavior by sharing information when something was worth sharing.  And we cancelled the monthly meeting.

The results were mixed at first.  Some people just don’t like to share, and I was not going to bother trying to change them — it was not my job.  Believe me, I wish it was.  But many people do share, and they are the valuable team players.  They are the go-to people when you need something done.  Eventually more sharing took place.  I can’t tell you how much is going on now, since I’m not there any more.  But I’d consider this experiment to be an overall success.  Why?  Since we eliminated an expensive meeting and replaced it with a more efficient way to work together.  Analysts could easily share their research agendas and ideas with each other – and many did.

It might be simplistic to say that we saved $10,000 a month using Yammer.  But in some way it’s a reasonable way to measure the value that open microsharing brought to the company.  After all, it freed our time, it allowed valuable communication to happen as needed, and it opened the conversation to others who would not have participated otherwise.

I call that a success, thanks to microsharing behaviors.

Tagged as: analysts, collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Forrester, success story, tool, workplace