If you’re a in a hurry to get something proactive done internally about Yammer, skip to the bottom for thoughts on monitoring it…

I’m fairly sure it doesn’t really say much about a startup’s long-term viability to win as the top pitch at Demo or TechCrunch50. On the other hand, winning does mean there’s something immediately gripping to the audience at these events. In the case of Yammer, which won TechCrunch 50 last week, the concept is Twitter, but for the enterprise.

Many people who like using Twitter got kind of excited about it. There was, indeed, much tweeting. I suspect the rest of the world sort of shrugged their shoulders and said “Huh?” I’ve written here before about why I think Twitter is compelling and useful, but that it’s not immediately obvious what it’s good for when you see it the first time around.
Anyway, Jennifer Leggio, who blogs over at ZD Net and who I think could be described as a bit of a compulsive twitterer, pretty well smacked down Yammer in a recent blog post:

What it appears to do:

* Takes control away from the enterprise and put it into the hands of employees
* Creates the need for additional content monitoring and processes
* Creates more work for employees running HR or communications
* Requires that companies invest in order to manage their own employee communications
* Makes itself one public target for hackers who want to get at companies proprietary information or employee lists

Her primary beef has to do with the business model. The way Yammer works (for now) is that anyone can use it if they register with an email at a company domain. Anyone with an address in that domain can join. They can yammer at will. If the enterprise at the eye of this storm of yammering would like to exercise some administrative control, though, they have to pay a buck a head per month.

Leggio sees this as strong-arm tactics. If you want to really get good control over who sees what in a Yammer domain, then you’ve got to pay what could amount to a big stack of dollar bills every month. They’re definitely charging too much in the current model–I’m in complete agreement with that.

But I don’t think enterprises are necessarily worse off than they are with other unmoderated venues. They can turn off Yammer traffic within the corporate network and forbid the transaction of business on Yammer if they don’t want to pay for it. The model of offering something that a company starts to use and like so much that they’re willing to go an extra step with your company and pay for more control doesn’t seem inherently like unfair play to me.

And, frankly, I think some companies may be rather eager to adopt Yammer. An internal microblogging environment seems potentially hugely useful to me. Especially if it’s bolstered with better thread management tools than Twitter has. Or, heck, *any* thread management tools.

On the other hand, though… if an enterprise hasn’t noticed that part of the organization has started to use Yammer and the group that’s using it starts really doing business there–well, then part of your business is being conducted, arguably, right out in the open for anyone who can get access to one of your mail accounts to see. This could be the making of a big security gaffe–Leggio is spot-on about the security implications of unmonitored Yammification.

There’s a pretty easy proactive step, though: register an account from your domain. Thereafter, you’ll get an email message whenever anyone joins from your domain. Just as someone discovers and joins is the perfect opportunity to share whatever policy you’ve developed around microblogging.

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