At Nationwide, Yammer links rank-and-file with the C-suite

Try these four steps when making micro-blogging part of your internal communications.

Try these four steps when making micro-blogging part of your internal communications

There are limitless options for bringing social media into your company internally.

Tools are available for intranets—commenting, sharing, creating profiles—and there are dozens of third-party options for internal Facebook or Twitter-like applications, or anything in between. Add Yammer to the list.

An internal micro-blogging tool fashioned much like Twitter, Yammer is accessible only by your staff.

Employees at Nationwide Insurance find it so useful that 7,000 of its 36,000 employees have jumped on it in the last year without prompting from internal communicators.

How? The director of social media at Nationwide, Shawn Morton, tried Yammer and initially thought it wouldn’t be useful because it was too similar to Twitter and Facebook. Then, several senior leaders, including the president and chief technology officer tried it, which set off a chain reaction within the company.

“We went quickly from a dozen users to thousands of users over the course of the next few months,” Morton says. “It’s growing all by word of mouth.”

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