Disclosure on this post at the bottom.
One of my keynote presentations centers around the challenge/necessity/guidance of building a Global Micro Brand.
After presenting this to one of my newest clients, Alcatel-Lucent, I was invited by one of their leading advocates for Web 2.0/social media/community (whatever we want to call it), Greg Lowe to answer questions on an internal Yammer chat.
Never one to turn down an opportunity to socialize, network, and share ideas, I jumped at it.
Think of Yammer as corporate Twitter. It 
allows people (all within the same domain or enterprise) to have open, free flowing conversations about anything.
From 1-2pm, the topic of Global Micro-Brands was front and center.
Now, I’ve been on Twitter for closing in on 3 years and it’s no secret that I’m a technophile, so I picked up the Yammer UI pretty quickly. What really impressed me was how they took the standard twitter features and extended them.
The conversations get threaded, so if you see someone ask an interesting question, you can then see all of the responses directly beneath it.
Plus, when there is a reply, a hover over the link brings a pop-up window showing the original question.
Very smooth.
While the tool is great and I think the Yammer folks have done a nice job, what I really liked about this was the format.
I liked how I gave the presentation, made my case at it were, and then, we really opened it up to discussion.
But, it wasn’t just a Q&A session with me. It was a Q&A session with everybody.
That’s the power of today’s social software (see Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody”) the fact that everyone can talk to everyone.
Now, with 10,000 participants, it’s out of control, but with the 50 or so we had, it was really exciting to be a part of.
Judging by the feedback, the folks at ALU got a lot of the experience (both the presentation and the Yammer chat, that is :-)
What’s even more exciting is that it shows how large companies are moving in the direction of social software.
The lesson here? You can start the conversation with a good ol’ presentation (hopefully a remarkable one, right?) in a broadcast manner, but then leverage the social software to facilitate the conversation about the topic.
If you do that, you will engage, educate, and extract a lot from your community (whether they are partners, employees, vendors, customers, suppliers, or whatever)
Full disclosure: I was going to blog about my experience with Yammer anyway, but before I did I was contacted by one of their marketing folks. He offered me a t-shirt though no quid pro quo was implied. While I am still writing the same post, I wanted to make that clear.
