Interface: Tech trends
GOING WITH THE FLOW There are some useful ways to tap the power of social networking, writes Rachel Botsman.
THE WAY we communicate and how we share ideas at work tends to get tangled up in the hierarchies of organisational charts. Getting information to flow freely across departments and geographies, and up and down organisations is a common blind spot. Yammer, an enterprise social network that was sold to Microsoft in June for $1.2 billion, is a tool that help transform work processes and culture. “What companies are finding out is that the way they are structured and communicating through an org chart is just too slow,” says Yammer’s 36yearold chief technology officer and cofounder, Adam Pisoni. In 2006, Pisoni joined David Sacks the then chief executive and founder of Genie.com, a social platform that made it easy for people to collaboratively build an online family tree and then connect with relatives.
“We knew social networking was going to be a big deal,” says Pisoni, “Something that was going to change the way we interacted with people: the way we communicated, the way we learned.” Genie was living proof that people wanted multiple social networks to fulfil different purposes and groups in their lives. Six years ago, energy and investment around social networks was primarily in the consumer space. Facebook was taking off, Twitter had just launched and YouTube was only a year old. The world was enamoured of these new tools that made it easy to share things like photos, music, daily thoughts and videos. “From the beginning, people thought that social meant connecting on a personal level only,” says Pisoni. He and Sacks were already looking at a different space, the work space. “We believed so strongly that social networking was going to go into the enterprise,” he says. “At the time, companies had emails and an intranet which only let you talk to people you already knew. It felt constrained.” The entrepreneurs saw a window of opportunity to be the first to put social into business, and, with Sack’s track record as a former chief operating officer of PayPal before its acquisition by eBay for $US1.5 billion, they had the clout in Silicon Valley to pull it off. Indeed, Yammer raised its initial funding from Peter Thiel – Facebook’s first major investor and PayPal cofounder – and Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame sits on the board of directors. In 2007, the cofounders launched the first
iteration of Yammer. “We didn’t know how hard it was to get into enterprise but in fact our lack of baggage about the space helped us,” reflects Pisoni. The future they saw was that every company would have its own social network. “It would become the dominant way that people in companies would communicate but also connect all the things they do – apps, documents, ideas, and conversations.” Sacks’ and Pisoni’s timing was perfect. Companies were starting to move their applications from running on hardware to cloud services, literally creating the space for Yammer. Today, there are more than 200,000 Yammer company networks across 150 countries with a total of about 6 million users – 400,000 of whom are in Australia. They include startups, notfor profits such as UNICEF and major brands including
Shell and Ford. In Australia there are networks in Telstra, Westfield, Suncorp, AMP and Deloitte. That said, trials by some government organisations have struggled. Eighty per cent of Fortune 500 companies use Yammer. Part of the appeal is that the basic features – group pages, polls, events, file, image and video sharing – are free so companies can see if users find value in it. The free platform can also be integrated with other tools companies may use such as Salesforce, SugarCRM or SharePoint. Yammer has a long list of competitors, which can be viewed on question and answer forum Quora as responses to the question, Who are the top competitors to Yammer?, posted by James Patterson, the company’s chief product officer. “Our team continues driving the freemium model [part free, part paid] because we see that it’s just a better way to build and sell software,” says Pisoni. Companies tend to upgrade to paid plans that range from $3 to $8 a month for each user to get more security through sophisticated tools and administrative rights over the network. Yammer’s product vision never shifted. They set out to build the thing they are building today. From the outset, they identified why traditional enterprise software was so bad and why consumer software was so far ahead. “The buyer was not the user in enterprise
software,” says Pisoni. “This may seem obvious in hindsight but it was a huge guiding realisation to have from day one, to design the product for users.” Integral to the consumer approach to building software the company rigorously uses behavioural data to iteratively develop the product, from big new features to seemingly minor design tweaks. “We can make assumptions but we have always used data to listen to the silent majority to confirm or deny if we are headed in the right direction,” explains Pisoni. “Everybody thinks the secret of Yammer is great design, but it is actually a process of being empathic and iterative with your users.” A couple of years ago, customers were coming to them requesting more features like topic tags. “We dug in to find out exactly why they wanted these features,” he says. “It turned out that in 38 x AFRBOSS.COM.AU x FEB.13
HATCH, SPREAD AND STICK
Kai Renier, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney, recently conducted an indepth study on how user adoption of Yammer happened at Cap Gemini. Adam Pisoni confirmed that his findings reflect how the social network emerges in most organisations and that each step is crucial for Yammer to successfully hatch, spread and stick. 1 STARTUP: Early adopters start experimenting with the new service. Messages left are selfreferential comparing to existing tools/experiences. “What is it for?” 2 NEGLECT: Platform is discussed quite negatively and adoption is at risk of failing. People are trying to make sense of the platform. “I’ve seen better.” 3 EXCITEMENT: Interest in use grows as people have positive Yammer experiences and start to talk about it. “It’s useful try it.” 4 PRODUCTIVITY: Individuals and teams start to use the platform productively. Earlyadopters support new users and help set shared norms. “Can’t live without it.”
some networks there was too much noise and they wanted more relevancy in the content.” But when the Yammer team looked at user data it turned out that people didn’t actually use tags that much. The product team tried a couple of different topic feature iterations but it simply didn’t move the needle on getting people to use topic tagging more. “It’s really hard to accept that a feature we think is core is so rarely used,” Pisoni says. “But the data forces us to think of other ways to solve content relevancy problem.” During my conversation with Pisoni it becomes clear that Yammer is in fact not a technology company; it’s a cultural change product. And helping companies completely rethink the way they work starts from how they themselves operate.
“Yammer would have a hard time convincing their customers if they couldn’t create an open communication culture ourselves,” says Pisoni. So what’s the true return on investment on Yammer? In November 2012, at YamJam, the company’s first customer conference, chief executive David Sacks laid out the three main ways social technologies can unlock business value inside companies: employee engagement, team collaboration and speed. Sacks explained: “When you make employees feel more connected to each other and to their company’s mission, and you remove the barriers that cause frustration that get in their way, their engagement has gone up.” A recent study by Gallup reported that companies with high employee engagement averaged 12 per cent higher profitability. Personal social networks often get a bad rap as a time wasters or a distraction, but a recent report from McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) found that when enterprise social technologies are fully implemented they can boost the productivity of interaction workers – highskill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals – by 20 to 25 per cent. In one immediate return, Yammer customers report a 30 to 40 per cent reduction in email. This is welcome news: the average corporate user sent and received 112 emails per day in 2011. Suncorp has actually dropped using email internally after adopting Yammer. Adam Pisoni refers to a shift that happens in companies when Yammer is rolled out widely as a cultural calibration that leaders must show they are comfortable with. “One major difference between social and email is that social is open by default. People who have never really had a voice before come out of the woodwork,” he says. Indeed, a significant part of Yammer’s mission is to help companies break their traditional silo structures and decentralise decisionmaking to empower the people closest to the problem to find a solution. “That’s the power of social; it lets people self organise and pull in the resources they need to accomplish things,” Pisoni says. He is an advocate for the link between transparency and employee empowerment. “Open communication leads to a lot of the right behaviour that motivates people.” he says. “Employees can see the big picture, they can understand, they get purpose in what they are doing because everything is transparent.” Not having a company social network could be like not having a phone system or not giving employees email. And the shift will happen earlier than we think. “Businesses are just starting to see social tools are not just about socialising,” Pisoni says. “We are about rethinking how agile and how empowered your company can be.” FEB.13 x AFRBOSS.COM.AU x 39