Yammer is a powerful link manager
February 22, 2010 by Tim Miner · View Comments
Yammer is one of our most used social tools at Vestor Logic. We use it as an internal Twitter platform to aggregate links, share ideas, and communicate on active client campaigns. It has become indispensable for us and is used by our team every single day. Think of Yammer as a private Twitter platform for your organization.
You can setup your own Yammer network in minutes here.
Integration with Google Reader
We have integrated Yammer with our Google Reader to share interesting blog posts and articles from the numerous feeds that we subscribe to and review each day. Sometimes we find blog posts from our favorite blogs that prompt internal discussion. A member of our team will Yam It! using the bookmarklet and apply a hashtag to make it easy to follow the conversation in the future.
Yammer provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate with Google Reader here.
Yammer as a link manager
Recently, we began using Yammer to manage articles, blog posts, links, and web pages that apply to an active client campaign that we are working on.
For example, we are leading a one-day workshop for a large corporate client in early March and we have begun collecting relevant stories and resources in Yammer to help build the presentation that we will give at the event. We submit the link to the relevant content, hashtag it with the designated client tag, and then discuss it internally using Yammer. We can go back at any point and view all of the submissions we have under that tag to begin crafting the slides for the presentation.
For this project, we now have 30 posts under that client tag and we should have more than 50 posts by the time we begin building the presentation. This is by far the easiest way for us to aggregate all of this information. This is a very powerful way for us to manage all of these links in one place and easily recall them when we are ready to review.
Our take on Yammer
Yammer provides us with an easy way to aggregate information from other sites and blogs in one place. We can discuss each post independent of all the others in our stream. It has become one of our most used social tools and I cannot imagine not having it as part of our arsenal. All of our posts are preserved forever and the platform offers a free account.
How can you go wrong with that! If you are storing links somewhere else, get on the Yammer platform and make your life easier. You will find that it provides more efficiency to your research process and will certainly allow you to perform better for your clients and the projects that you are working on.
For companies that are accustomed to discussing topics regularly with the entire team, Yammer provides a perfect platform to do so. Team members can subscribe to hashtags, discuss the content using comments, and the entire discussion is preserved for future reference.
Yammer’s new release is coming
Today, we discovered that Yammer will be reviewing its newest release on Thursday. It’s certainly worth a listen. You can register for the upcoming event here.
Are you using Yammer?
What are your thoughts? How are you promoting discussions in your organization? Are the discussions taking place on an internal system or out in the open? Tell us how you are doing this? We want to know. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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Product Review – Sliderocket Online Presentation Software
November 3, 2009 by Jessica Ziegler · View Comments
Not to put too fine a point on it, I LOVE Sliderocket. If you have occasion to develop Powerpoint (.ppt) presentations I highly recommend you check out this product. Developed in Adobe’s AIR runtime environment, it feels like a .ppt/flash mashup.
In my daily web and marketing development work I use Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash pretty regularly. Possibly because of this, I found the tools incredibly intuitive. There was zero learning curve. In less than three minutes I was creating. For a new user to instantly feel comfortable with a program, that is just plain fantastic UI design.
I have used .ppt a handful of times and always found it very limiting, especially when you get used to the magic of Flash. Sliderocket feels more like a cousin of Flash than of .ppt. Sliderocket offers an extensive library of cool transitions and effects. Fly-in, materialize, dissolves, shadows, all the eye-candy is built right in. Sliderocket allows you to add and define these features with a click. And it all looks gorgeous: crisp imagery, smooth type, clean transitions and animations.
There is a whole host of things you can do with this product; collaborate, hold meetings, integrate dynamic data, secure access to your presentations, view presentation on or offline, even track analytics of your presentations. Really, what did they NOT think of? You can import your old .ppts and update them if you are so inclined, though once you try Sliderocket you may have to ask yourself, why?? Sliderocket is a Rich Internet Application (RIA) which lives online, so there is nothing to buy to get started. You can upgrade to Sliderocket’s fee-based business and individual accounts to take advantage of their advanced business feature set: meetings, analytics, administration, etc.
I built my first Sliderocket presentation about a month ago and another one this week. They are continually making improvements to the product, which they can do seamlessly because it lives online! I noticed several improvements and new features, clearly based on customer feedback. Did I know they needed them? No. Did they make the product better? Yup.
At Vestor Logic, we currently create presentations for two reasons: for client pitches and for educational presentations about social media and branding. I haven’t yet tried half of what Sliderocket is capable of, but I am looking forward to it. So much so, that I am trying to come up with other things to do with Sliderocket. Good products inspire that kind of creative thinking.
What are you creating presentations for? Have you tried Sliderocket? Are you a .ppt pro unwilling to give it up? We want to hear from you.