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Yammer vs. Twitter

by Michelle

In our November Industry Analysis, we wrote about the increasingly popular form of microblogging, Twitter. Twitter.com is a web-based communication tool in which users can describe their current status in short posts, or "tweets," distributed by instant messages, mobile phones, e-mail or the Web. It's geared towards individuals who want to share daily experiences, thoughts, opinions, URLs, etc. with their network. Twitter asks the question "What Are You Doing?" and user responses are sent to their "followers." Privacy settings allow for all updates to remain contained to that network, but only if each user checks that setting.

A newer service, that came on to the microblogging scene just as the piece on Twitter was being published, is Yammer.com, a similar tool marketing itself to businesses as a method of facilitating intra-firm communication.

Yammer has capitalized on Twitter's model, asking "What Are You Working On?" and providing a similarly lean space for users, and now, specifically, colleagues, to keep each other informed. While individuals can register and use the site, it is a for-profit entity, providing the opportunity for or entire companies to join for $1 per user per month. This gives the firm administrative control over security and how employees use the service. A recent New York Times article, "Will Microblogging at Work Make You More Productive?," states "In the first six weeks, 60,000 users have signed on, and 4,000 of them have convinced their companies to pay." Another article, "Twitter and Yammer Test Dot-Com Business Models," discusses Twitter's plans to introduce ways to bring in revenue, one of which is to charge companies who want to use it...as an official channel to talk with their customers and monitor what they are saying."

In making the case for Twitter, we discussed how the need for improved communication and distribution of information, both internally and externally, is an ever-present challenge for many asset managers. Wholesalers are notoriously brief in their messages and microblogging, by nature, allows for nothing but brevity, providing a space of 140 characters maximum for user updates. In that way, it is already present in the space, in the form of short, rapid-fire email messages that go back and forth between various sales groups. What's more, the use of BlackBerries and other smart phones has increased dramatically in the past several years. Be it Twitter or Yammer, microblogging and its potentiality for fast, wide-spread communication is starting to make more and more sense.