Official Communities
Yammer’s communities support many scenarios:
Communities which drive employee discussions, connection, and wellbeing.
Communities which drive corporate communications and culture.
Communities which provide key company-wide forums for growth, enrichment, and support.
When a customer buys into Yammer’s mission, they tend to onboard to meet scenarios 1 & 2. These are broad “company-wide” and “company-sponsored” communities. Our customers are pouring resources into these communities to make them successful. Furthermore, there is no structure or hierarchy in Yammer communities making it difficult for end users to find the ones that are most important to the organization which presents challenges to Corp comms and Organizations that want to use communities to meet scenarios 1 & 2. These are the most important communities to our customers and we need to ensure that they are successful.
Network Managers
Org Buy-in: For new networks, its difficult to get the whole company bought in. Official communities allows them to focus on winning during pilot and bring other organizations along.
Differentiate important communities: Everyone else can set an emoji, avatar, cover photo, or naming convention. Official communities gives them the power to bless the important ones.
Community sprawl: For mature networks, there’s too many similar communities. Furthermore, there’s only a small team that’s left to manage the success of 1000s of communities. Official communities allow them to relax on governance. They have the power to distinguish and focus on the important communities. They’re able to monitor and set the engagement bar.
End Users
Trust and legitimacy: For users, they want this sense of trust and legitimacy within communities. Official communities tackle this with a badge that they are familiar with.
Yammer’s Value: For new users, they feel overwhelmed about which community to join. Official communities show users the thriving flagship communities. First impressions matter.
Analysis Paralysis: Users find themselves overwhelmed with what community is “right”. Official communities allows them the peace of mind to visit, join, and engage in a network.
Competitive Insights
A verification badge is something that is common in many consumer social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn.
Consumer social media verification is used mainly to show authenticity for a public figure, company, or brand but is meant to solve similar problems that we may see in Yammer.
Our only direct competitor that has “official” groups is FB Workplace, but the verification is simply a UI lift. The check is added next to a group’s name but it’s unclear if this is even surfaced in search, feed, navigation, etc.
Slack addresses the “channel sprawl” by recommending customers follow a naming convention for their channels
Survey Results
31 responses: 3 M365 Global admins, 22 Yammer Network admins, 6 community admins.
28 of the 31 responses indicated that they had “company-sponsored” communities in their network.
The number of “company-sponsored” communities in their network ranged vastly depending on the size of their network and how they use Yammer.
Smaller networks <5K users, the average number of official communities is ~10 communities
Larger networks +10K users, the average number of official communities is 50 - 120 communities
Customer Quotes
“Official communities – it's not just a check mark it’s … an endorsement, an organizer, chaos containment, an easy way to simplify a complicated network, force multiplier, something for communities and community managers to strive for, something corporate communications can use, a way to amplify the business value of your network.”
- Amy D, EY
“It’s not just a check, it’s a welcome. A welcome to a space where you know your question or comment will be heard, where you can find important information, and where you can be part of a robust network of colleagues.”
- Larry G, Network Manager
“We feel like it helps us relax on governance as well. Who cares if there’s two marketing or five marketing communities, right? We know there’s a way to label the official one!”
“It gives us a phased approach. Let’s try this unofficially first, see how it goes, and then stamp it if it works. If it doesn’t work, no egg on your face.”
- Peter S, Ferguson
“It helps with onboarding! We like that everyone can create a community. What we don’t want is when people first join Yammer, they see a bunch of crappy communities. Communities with two people, ones that aren’t business critical. What we’d rather have them see are popular communities and corporate communities.”
-Kevin C, Juniper
“If we didn’t have official communities, I don’t think Yammer would have taken off the way it did. We have high adoption – around 40% ... Yammer would have become more for novelty, instead of with a purpose because we have these targeted spaces for people to have conversations.”
- Simon D, Network manager
“It's not just a check … it's about hospitality, people know it's a home. It's welcoming and warm. Our members may not really notice it. To them, it's probably just the most popular communities.”
- Emma O, Network Manager
Customer Conversation Takeaways
It’s another tool for the network admins to amplify Yammer’s business value in the organization.
It benefits the Yammer adoption team too – it draws the line between what communities they can support or are supporting vs which ones they can’t
Helps network admins relax on governance – who cares if there’s lots of duplicate communities when you have the power to stamp the “official” one
Need Yammer guidelines for organizations to clearly define what communities are official and which ones aren’t
Users need a way for community managers to submit their communities for approval
This can be done by providing them with a templated Microsoft Form that they can customize to their
organization’s needs
