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Yammer Innovates Twitter

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Yesterday I logged in to check out Yammer, the Twitter for Business.  What Yammer has created is the innovation that Twitter was not able to:  a way to create social media tool for businesses and come up with a business model to charge for the service.

Yammer is essentially a channel-ized twitter.  But the channel is only other people in your business; they force that by using the domain of your email address to create or add you to a channel.  Now, your status updates are only seen by your co-workers.  And if you start to carry on a conversation in your channel, you can view messages based on threads.

Where I think it gets interesting is their business model.  Offer the service for free, but then charge the company for an Admin privileges on the channel.  An Admin can brand the channel for the company, control members of the channel and even provide security by restricting the channel so you can only log in from the corporate network.

The problem with Yammer?  It’s yet another social communication channel.  The whole social networking services have become way to fractured.  Too many places to network.  Not enough time accomplishing anything.  To use the phrase “social not-working” is getting more an more applicable. (on that point, Yammer was developed by the Geni team…how’s that for not working.)  The advantage of a service like FriendFeed is that it is one place to check all your social networking feeds, even if you can only reply back via FriendFeed.

The openess of the web needs to be extended so that something like Yammer can be a piece of infrastructure that can be plugged into multiple other services.  One think I like about Twitter is that there are 3rd party interfaces.  I have enough web browser windows open on my desktop as it is, I need less not more.  As fredrickvan tweeted today, the key is keeping your social touch points in control.  While Yammer figured out a way to make money off of the status message, it’s just another social touch point that we have to manage.

Business Reading Resource

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Earlier in the week, a old colleague of mine, pointed me to a list of business books that is maintained by Tom Kosnik
Professor in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford. His word document list of best books is constantly updated and contains literally over 100 books in 12 different reading areas:

  1. Branding
  2. Communication
  3. Creativity, Individual Decision Making, & Individual Performance
  4. Designing Systems that Summon the Spirit: (Strategy/Org Theory)
  5. Facilitation, Group Process Management, Interactive Learning
  6. Global Entrepreneurial Leadership
  7. Global Entrepreneurial Marketing
  8. Negotiation
  9. Sales, Account Management, Business Development
  10. Project Management and Leading Teams
  11. Spiritual Practice: Books for Reflection and Self-Renewal
  12. Women’s Issues and Diversity

The great thing about this list is that Kosnik breaks the books down into the best from each category as well as his personal top 25 books of all time (non fiction of course).

My friend also gave me a copy of the book How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less, which is on the top 25 list. Later that same day, my friend was giving an overview of himself to someone else and I timed he…30 seconds exactly. Finally, a Marketing person who understands the sales term “elevator pitch”! (Just kidding Rob!)

Zen, Presentations, and VCs

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One of my personal pet peeves is bad presentation skill. Considering the technology industry is so focused on information and knowledge, it’s amazing how bad we are at communicating it. I see this almost on a daily basis in Sales. It’s either an over loaded presentation on technology from marketing, a badly organized presentation from Sales people, or — worst of all — a presentation that is just a printed record of what the presenter said. Blah!

So I was giddy with excitement (honestly, just ask my wife…she was there) when I came across a wonderful book by Garr Reynolds called presentation zen. I have relying on this book lately as I develop a couple of presentations, specifically funding presentations where it is most important to be able to tell a story about what your working on and why it’s the most important thing since sliced bread (at least to your potential customers). That is one of the key points that presentation zen makes: your presentation should be telling a story, and it shouldn’t be a novel…think more picture story book.  (for a great example, see Larry Lessig’s TED presentation on How creativity is being strangled by the law.)

The best part of presentation zen is that it can be used as a quick reference guide as your working on a presentation. It helps to reinforce the lessons you know. Such as start planning your presentation without your computer. You need to know your story line and flow, and having the computer in front of you when you do this only distracts you into things that don’t matter (like large bullet lists). I forgot this lesson when I started working on my latest presentation and the book, along with some peers with whom I reviewed an early draft, reminded me of my errors.

If you do presentations, do your audience (and yourself) a favor and buy a copy of this book!

I would also check out a Guy Kawasaki’s The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, he brings up a great set of points on creating a presentation as well as a wonderful template to start with if your building a funding presentation (and he happens to have written the forward to presentation zen). A huge thanks goes out to Val for pointing me to this posting!

Since I’m on the topic of funding, if you interested in the world venture capital, I recently came across an interesting opinion piece on the Software VC Outlook for 2008.