Pushing Content via the Yammer Share Button
One of the most important aspects of team collaboration is the sharing of information. How many times have you come across an article or blog post, thought “Wow. This is something I need to share with my team!” and then discovered that the site lacked sharing tools. Yes, you can copy and paste a link in a couple steps, but in this day and age, sometimes even a couple extra clicks can discourage sharing. As a content owner, you want to make it as quick and simple as possible for people to share your content through all of their networks, internal or external. Individuals are rarely part of a single social network. For example, when I come across good content, I tend to share on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Xing, and with various internal (my company) and external networks through Yammer. While there are some people, like me, who interact through all of these channels, most gravitate toward one or two of them, which is why I share relevant content across the multiple channels and networks – to maximize the visibility of good content.
Two years ago, following the Yammer acquisition by Microsoft, the Yammer team released a Chrome extension allowing browser users to easily share content to their Yammer networks. As an occasional Chrome user, I found this feature (as my Yammer usage was growing) to be a huge productivity booster, allowing me to not only add content easily to Yammer, but to see where Yammer conversations were happening (more on that in a minute). I had reached out to the product team at Microsoft a couple times asking when this feature would be built for IE and Firefox, and was told that there were no immediate plans to extend it due to changes in priority post-acquisition.
So…..two years later, Microsoft has launched a new Yammer share button, which can be embedded into your sites and online assets. In case you’re keeping score, there are now three ways to push content into your Yammer network:
1) Through most blog and website sharing footer links, such as those available through this blog, available at the bottom of every post on my blog. I may have heard a collective yawn with today’s announcement, but I think it’s a value add to how many of us share information from blogs and articles across the web. Like the content? Share it with your favorite network, including Yammer.
2) Using the Chrome Yammer sharing button. As mentioned above, what’s cool about this Chrome extension is that I can go anywhere on the web and easily share what I am reading with my team via Yammer by simply clicking on the floating Y on the right of my browser window.
A dialog box opens from the right, defaulting to the All Company feed of your home network. But the best part of this tool is that occasionally I am reading up on the latest news on the web, and come across an article that looks relevant to my team, and the Y shows up as a number, meaning people on my network are already talking about the content. By opening up the tab on the right, it now shows me where those conversations are happening, allowing me to jump right in.
3) By embedding the new Yammer Share Button, announced today on the Yammer blog. You can see it in action on the Yammer Success site, which you can see here below my Chrome tab:
Why use this embed code? Because not all of your readers/followers are using Chrome (and far fewer have added the Yammer extension) and not every site where you want your readers to share fits the blog format.
Collaboration works best when its easy for users to share the content within. This is just another tool to enable your users to share their content. Always good to have another tool in the tool belt.
