Praxis Language employees have been using Yammer in the office for the past few months. If you’re not familiar with Yammer, it’s worth taking a look, although it’s not something that’s easy to explore on your own. That’s because Yammer is built to serve small communities (such as all the employees of a relatively small company) in a Twitter-like interface.
Because Yammer is focused on group communication, you can’t participate without being part of a group. While perhaps not the best tool for you loner techies out there, it does provide instant ties between members of one group.
Yammer has raised some questions for us around the office. What can ChinesePod learn from it? The ChinesePod Community section is a fast-changing, chaotic place. We agree that it could be improved, but we’re not convinced that converting it into a standard online forum is the best solution. (If we were just going to do that, why not just use an existing off-the-shelf forum solution?)
What’s great about Yammer is that its small group nature creates virtual intimacy, which in turn leads to greater participation. People are much more comfortable conversing with a small group than shouting into a maelstrom. Would Newbie learners be happier in a small group talking to just other Newbies, and perhaps a mentor? Would Advanced learners talk more among themselves, secure in the knowledge that no one would think they were just trying to show off to the Newbies?
We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’d love to hear what you think. The community is an essential part of the ChinesePod experience, and we are eager to find ways to better facilitate the conversation.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The two things I really like about it are (1) it plugs into communication channels, such as IM, Desktop App., iPhone app which tends to fuel conversation speed and (2) it archives these informal conversations which enables them to be searched in the future. For example, if a new employee joins the company and wants to find the location of company branding guidelines they can first conduct a search to see if anyone has ever asked this before. Should enhance overall productivity.
I’m really in suspense as to how you guys move forward with the forum/social network part of your site. I’m old school, I guess, but I haven’t seen much out there that rivals the age-old model of forums and threads. Certainly that’s worked for some of the biggest sites/communities, like Digital Photography Review (DPReview.com), although their forums are often painfully redundant. You might want to look at Strobist.com to see a different example of how the Blog w/ comments model can be extended to incorporate a ‘community of practice’. (and btw I notice that you at CPod are becoming better lit all the time) Especially I like the way Strobist users sometimes collectively mark up images on flickr–something that CPod could do with Chinese/English translations.
Regardless, I think there needs to be less clicking to join groups, look at threads, leave comments, etc. than there is now. Joining a group just to leave a quick comment seems like a chore… especially when there are just a few members and only one or two threads. So maybe something Yammer-like would be a step forward in that respect.