5 Power User Tips for Yammer

I’m one of the primary advocates of Yammer within my company, and often find myself sharing basic tips with co-workers to help them improve their productivity. Here are a few tips that I have found useful:

1. Clean up your email posts. If you find yourself posting to Yammer via email on a regular basis, be sure to include “- -“ (two dashes) at the end of your response to remove your signature file and previous threads. In fact, consider adding this double-dash to the top of your signature file itself, so you won’t have to remember at all.
2. Track important conversations with Bookmarks. Having trouble finding important conversations within a group, or within your home feed? Or maybe you’re following a discussion, but because of the volume of responses that keep filling up your inbox, you stopped “following” the conversation – but you still want to track it long-term? Bookmark it. Go to the target conversation, select More, and add the Bookmark. You can then go into your profile (click on your name) and open the Bookmarks tab to find all of your saved conversations – without the home feed overload.
   

3. Coordinating activities using Notes. Organizing an event and need to collaborate with team members on the agenda? Stop pushing email back and forth, and drop it all into a Note, and then invite your team to edit. Yammer keeps track of each iteration, allowing you to see who made the changes, and to go back to a previous version if needed. It’s quick, flexible, and a more organized method for ad hoc collaboration. To create a Note, go into the relevant Group (everything in Yammer is associated with a Group), go to the Notes tab, and select Create a Note. You can then invite different members, and start collaborating.
   

4. Pull people into conversations. If you’re participating in a thread, and think that someone else from your team needs to be a part of it, simply reply to the thread with their name. I’m in the habit of using @ when typing someone’s name, but you don’t have to – it works either way, pulling from the list of members. It’ll pop up in their inbox as an @mention, and they can join in the conversation.
   

5. Help good discussions find their right home. I am often finding a thread in one Group or in the main company stream that really belongs in another, more specific Group. You can post the existing thread over in the right Group, where people who care about that topic may then join into the conversation. Under the main conversation post, click on Share, which opens up a dialog box, allowing you to select a group or send via private message to an individual, and add a quick note as to why you are sharing this.
   

I hope you find these tips useful. Like any application or platform, most of us know how to use the basics, but you begin to see the real potential and unlock productivity when you start dipping down into the power user capabilities.