How to Ease Your Law Firm into Social Media: Yammer
Dec 30th, 2008 | By admin | Category: Featured, Law Office Software, Lead ArticleIf you're new here, and interested in using social media in the legal profession, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on Twitter @Rex7. Thank you for visiting SocialMediaLawStudent.com.
Tired of a dozen emails clogging up your email client all saying: “out to lunch”? Sifting through these can be a waste of your precious time. Maybe try Yammer.
Many of my readers and blog subscribers are trying to introduce social media to their enterprises and law firms. I often get asked about strategies for introducing social media to business. One route to achieving this goal may be the social media tool called Yammer.
Yammer is a micro-blogging tool, very similar to Twitter, limiting your conversation to your particular company or business.
Twitter asks: “What are you doing?” while Yammer asks: “What are you working on?”
A Portion of Yammer’s Press Release:
“As employees answer this question, a company feed is created in one central location, enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. The company feed can be accessed in real-time via the web, IM, SMS text messaging, an iPhone application, a Blackberry application, a desktop application, or email.
Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge-base where past conversations are archived and easily searched.
Unlike traditional enterprise tools which must be installed by the company’s IT department, anyone in a company can start their Yammer network and begin inviting colleagues. This means that Yammer can spread virally through a company like a consumer social network.
At the same time, Yammer ensures the privacy of each network by limiting access to those with a valid company email address. The model is similar to Facebook’s beginnings as a college social network, when students had to validate a college email to join their college network.”
This may be a good way to ease your company, or law firm, into social media because Yammer is web-based, social, and closed to the public.
Also, it seems to be cheap. More of Yammer’s features can be found here.
Other ideas on easing your law firm into social media? Any experiences with Yammer? Please submit a comment below.
Related Twitter Post: Yammer to Present at the Social Media Conference in Miami on January 22-23
At my firm, we are entering the mysterious world of web 2.0 via internal blogs and wikis first. I would LOVE to introduce something like Yammer to our firm, but think we’re not ready for that yet (plus our IT Director just left so we’re lacking in IT leadership at the moment!). Plus, I’m not convinced that Yammer is really ready for prime time. However …
Honestly, I think, although law firms are well known for sticking to tradition (for tradition’s sake, usually) I see law firms as places where innovation, when it is socially focused, may take off with less ado and fuss than would be expected. Lawyers are quite social by nature, and this should make good sense to them. Lawyers are also typically impatient, so the speed of communication should also be desirable.
I’m just glad that I can play a role in evagelizing and help shape the use and management of this stuff at my firm. An exciting challenge, for sure!
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Tread lightly when using these services for potentially sensitive information. The price of the service being free is that you have a fairly limited guarantee (if any) of service. From my blog postings on the topic:
“Yammer, much like AOL Instant Messenger, has the potential to put company information outside of the company’s hands. Every user *does* need to sign up and verify through a corporate e-mail address. Moreover, those who have left the company can be requested for removal (one would have to wonder the validation steps here.) Nevertheless, there is no guarantee or auditing of the controls that would keep a company’s data private, and the actual transmission of the data may contain unexpected vulnerabilities.”
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