Since being given the responsibility of managing a team in my current role at fuse8 I’ve been thinking of ways we can interact, share ideas, and generally keep each other updated about what we’re working on, other than face to face meetings (you can’t beat those! – although they’re not always practical). As a test I decided to start using what has been labelled ‘Twitter for Business’, Yammer.

At work we’ve always relied on email and MSN, so basically you get a lot of emails containing links, location updates, invitations to nights out etc etc, all amongst the stuff that matters….work. MSN just adds to the interruption with people expecting instant responses, meaning concentration can soon become a pretty much impossible task. So I was worried that Yammer would just add to the noise, and end up distracting people and harming these concentration levels.

The initial testing group consists of me and 5 of my team. These include an Information Architect, Concept Director, User interface developer, HTML coder and an SEO consultant. Some were avid Twitter users, a couple of them don’t use it at all. So…a mixed bag. It’ll give me an idea whether using Yammer would work across the whole company…the suits, the hardcore developers and even the creatives. I started by introducing it to the team as an experiment in the hope that the actual usage of the tool would give us a good insight into how it could work. The results so far have been very positive.

It’s proved a good way of team members updating other’s what we’re working on. We all work in for a digital full service agency, so everything is relevant to everyone, meaning everyone can have input. There have been several occasions so far where we’ve collaborated on a project which we wouldn’t have done in the past, and ended up improving the output. It’s also helped keep track of where people are. In the past I might have popped into a meeting, and if someone was away making a cuppa they wouldn’t know where I was. Now they do.

To share articles, inspirational websites, and videos we all use Delicious, but people still send links around via group email. It’s just a quicker way to get everyone looking at something you think is interesting. On Yammer I can share links with an individual (via private messages), group, or all of the team. You can also integrate it with Google Reader. Also, just like Twitter, Yammer has it’s own iphone app, and also works via SMS. So if someone’s gonna be late in, they just Yammer it. Easy as.

All in all, it’s still early days. It’s a test to see if it really could change the way the whole company communicates. I’m fairly optimistic that it will.

Ed – Since writing this I’ve found this great article on The Economist – worth a read.