Monday, August 2, 2021

Yammer Customer Best Practice and Brainstorm – Episode Two: Going Native

Last week we gathered with customers from across the globe, the majority based in Australia, to have a conversation about Yammer best practices. We had an open-ended conversation with Matt Dodd, Jason Soo, Richard Cartmell, and Pete Johns. Check out the recording of this session below!

 


Native Mode and governance with Yammer  

 

The first topic of conversation was the Native Mode migration to Yammer.  

 

What is native mode? We want Yammer to feel native within the Microsoft 365 suite.  Here’s a step by step guide for Yammer Native Mode. Overall, we want Yammer communities to feel more “native”. Moving to Yammer Native Mode will make sure your communities are backed and managed by Microsoft 365 Groups. This will provide all sorts of benefits such as having a SharePoint library for Yammer file storage, the ability to run Live Events in your Yammer communities, eDiscovery, Data Retention, and more. Check out this article to learn more about the Microsoft journey in Native Mode.  

 

Additionally, there was further conversation about governance and setting up structure for creating and establishing communities. Pete Johns from NRMA shared a bit about building positive friction into the system. Encourage people to engage with the way that communities are built to last which brings value to the business.  

 

Leaders using Yammer – who is doing this well?  

 

It was a great conversation with good ideas about bringing leaders into the communities in Yammer. Here are a few highlights: 

 

  • Know your leaders 
    • Sliding scale of readiness and how your conversation with leaders start. 
    • Share how leaders can gain business value from a tool like Yammer
  • Find the core motivation for leaders to participate 
    • It’ll vary between leaders – you may need high touch, resistant, or they might need light touch, and they are on their way.  
    • Who is doing well in this environment? 
    • Modern leadership – caring about your community. 
  • Leaders love data – data drives decisions  
    • Show content amplification - conversation insights can help share this!  
    • Show content by the numbers – the reach and what it could do for campaigns. 
    • Pull together a comms report on the leaders, the stats, the hot conversations going on, and leaderboard – the executive team and the competition alone drove engagement. 
  • Get 5 minutes directly with that leader!  
    • Everyone had their own view of what the CEO would think about Yammer, but once the team got 1:1 with the CEO and added Yammer to their mobile device, their perspective shifted.  
    • Be guarded about the preconceived ideas of how leaders may respond, or how the other people guard their access.  
    • CEO Chat Channel  
  • Reminders as you work with leaders...  
    • Kill the bells and whistles and keep it basic! Be human!  
    • “Speed trumps perfection.” - Matt Dodds
    • Shift your mindset – you are offering them an opportunity to help themselves and their people. 
    • Create a simple cadence or rhythm to add to their content and editorial calendar.  

More resources for Leadership Engagement 

 

Yammer Campaigns  

 

Much like the previous episode, we went around and had as many people as possible share their favorite Yammer campaigns. Listen to the recording for more details about each one. There were so many creative ideas that you can try in your own networks!  

 

  1. “What I miss” campaign – With a return to the office, hybrid working – This campaign went viral.
  2. Mine your network for ideas. 
    • Where can you piggyback and showcase the campaigns going on
    • Fearless follower - the people you need to get the campaign go viral – 2nd or 3rd poster to the campaign, can you encourage people to tag someone or reply
    • Show the leader that it is OK to respond to posts
    • Don’t make the campaign about Yammer, figure out what’s important to your community and just use Yammer as the vehicle to share
  3. #outandabout – take a photo and added a two-minute story.
  4. Use incentives. 
    • The leader gave away a day of leave if the post got “400” likes – naturally it went viral 
    • “Thank you so much for the gift voucher”.... – people share what they are going to spend it on and it turned into a “treat yourself” campaign
  5. I “engineer” impact – you can move things along, or inspire others.
    • Strategic selfie with the logo and it was shared along with the values of the company
  6. #thankfulThursday – this person is doing great job…   
    • Where do you post this?  This went across different communities
    • Community – “Gratitude changes everything” – culture of gratitude, people who go the extra mile, culture of recognition is built 5 days a week
  7. It takes time to build momentum and get the ball rolling.
    • Consistency overtime builds the sustainability
  8. International Women – Choose to challenge – Tried to ask people to post in a community, but it actually took of in the community what people.
    • The hashtag took off across the network, outside of Yammer, you can pull those things together
    • Getting the cultural hashtags that live longer than the campaign

 

More Resources:  

 

Official Communities 

 

Official communities are coming soon in Yammer, and what are the guidelines your organization will enable for these types of communities? Here’s a few that were shared during the conversation... 

  • Managed and activity monitored by community managers 
  • Company wide  
  • Relevant to everyone beyond what's relevant to a specific team/project 
  • Strategic  
  • Open and public; not private  
  • Unique, prevents multiple communities with similar topics  

 

ANZ will encourage those who apply to be an official community to come up with a content plan, banner, and icon, and identify community managers. They’ll also monitor activity to ensure there are conversations and engagement within the official communities.  

 

Related Resources: 

 

Thanks for joining us! Stay tuned for more customer conversations in the coming months. 

Posted at https://sl.advdat.com/2WExPh0