Andy Miller, chief executive of Polycom, doesn’t normally spend time answering mundane questions from low-level employees. But when he saw that a sales engineer was looking for the company’s director of charitable giving, Mr Miller promptly replied with the right contact.
Mr Miller saw the engineer’s query on Yammer, a social business tool now used by two-thirds of Polycom’s workforce. Yammer, along with Jive and Chatter, an offering from Salesforce, are infiltrating the enterprise, bringing social networking into the workplace.
“People are already using social networking that’s the way people communicate,” says Heidi Melin, Polycom’s chief marketing officer. “We’re just expanding that to the way we communicate to inside Polycom.”
Polycom is not alone. According to Yammer, 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have Yammer networks, though not all are paying customers. And as a new generation of social-networking savvy employees enter the workforce, companies from the financial services sector to retail are taking note of “enterprise 2.0” and launching internal company-wide social networks.
“We’re trying to take social networking, which is the most important innovation in the web in the last 10 years, and bring it inside the enterprise,” says Yammer chief executive David Sacks. “We want to make employees as connected with each other as they are with their friends in the real world.”
Yammer, Jive and Chatter are all, in a sense, motivated by frustration. While consumer internet tools have grown sleeker and easier to use in the past ten years, business technologies have not kept pace.
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