Yammer - useful or not?

Ever heard about it? No, it's not a speech delivery, it's the way some professionals are interacting nowadays. Yammer is a facebook-ish tool that lets you connect with anyone within your company. You simply post status updates on your profile which automatically shows in your company feed. Assuming that you all have the same business email address, the same email domain,  just invite other employees to join in and voila, anyone from your company whether overseas or not, can create and join in on your conversation. If you want to address a particular message to a person, use @username or you can just simply say "to:person". You can also reply directly to their messages by simply typing in the reply field box. Think facebook and you'll easily understand the process.

You could also send files, images, links, create polls & events and even make an organization chart. 
Its really a radical way of communicating not only with in-house peers but also with your client, contractors, fans & followers of your brand/company. You just set up a community for people outside your network (company), invite them and you can instantly communicate with them by reading and answering their feeds.

You don't have to worry though about confidential posts being directed to a client or a contractor. Only those within your company can see your udpates. Client, contractors and other outsiders are meant for a community, an altogether different group from your own company.

Check this out:


Pretty interesting huh?

I haven't completely immersed myself in this tool but the idea is quite compelling & revolutionary, especially if you're a part of large company that wants to stay as tight and as open as possible. I'm not sure if they'll be able to steal some of the thunder from Facebook but this seems quite an amazing tool to communicate with anyone.

Unless of course, you count out emails.