17 Hacks and Tricks to Customize Your Yammer Network

Note: This has been updated with new considerations for customizing Yammer in 2020.With the new Yammer interface rolling out to companies across the globe, administrators, community (formerly group) leaders, and users alike have some new options to customize the look of your Yammer network and individual communities. While “deep” customizations are not in the cards (i.e., users cannot use html to update the look of their group), there are some great new options for enhancing the look and branding of your Yammer network to make it feel more like your company brand. And let’s face it, when you deploy a Yammer network, you're receiving the economies of scale of a SaaS solution. This means that your company, alongside thousands of other companies, are getting the exact same product delivered on-demand. This is why Yammer and other SaaS tools are relatively inexpensive compared to truly customizable solutions like Jive or Tibbr. You're paying (or not, depending on your license) for a simple, scalable solution that can be easily updated and maintained by the vendor who is coding, fixing bugs and sending you fresh updates all the time. What you lack in customization, you make up for in quick updates and not having to deal with the overhead of custom code. With Yammer, you're investing in simplicity.MORE: How to make the switch from Jive to YammerWhat you CAN DO is "personalize" your Yammer network. Yammer offers many tools inside the product that give you the ability to make it look and feel like your own company's product. No, it will not be absent of the term "Yammer," but that is just how solutions in the cloud tend to work.

The Technology is NOT the Problem — or the Solution

More importantly, the concern that Yammer networks can't be customized touches on another point regarding enterprise social networks: technology alone will not cause or solve your communication problems. Yammer, as a piece of software, is not the solution to anything. Yammer is a type of technology through which you can create change and and empower employees using the people and their knowledge inside the company. Yammer is a conduit and your people are the creators of change. It's time for companies to stop focusing on technology features (and limitations) and realize that the human component is the most important part of a successful social initiative. What does this mean? It means that to customize the Yammer network experience, you're going to have to work at it and create people-centric approaches to brand your network as the company dialogue hub.

17 Ways To Customize Your Yammer Network: Here's the List, Divided Into 3 Key Sections

Product Customization Capabilities: Shape the look and feel of your network by incorporating corporate visual elements and data

By utilizing the following administrative features to modify the network's appearance, you can make Yammer (nearly) look and feel like your other corporate tools.

1. Add Company Logo to the Yammer Home Page. With the new Yammer interface, you can customize your Yammer network logo so that all employees will see it when they first log in to Yammer. The logo sits on the main Yammer page in the right column, just above the company resources that you choose to list. 
2. Upload Company Logo for Yammer Emails — make sure that your company's logo is on every email notification, invitation and alert that Yammer sends. Even though emails will still reference "Yammer," your logo will indicate official communication to employees.
3. Company Resources and Official Content — add important links and documents to the Company Resources area of Yammer, giving employees a one-stop-shop to find official data (like the 401k plan) or the intranet homepage.
4. Office 365 sign-in for Yammer – allows for users to automatically sign-in to Yammer via their Office 365 log in and seamlessly move between Microsoft applications. Ease of sign-in is often a big plus for users!
5. Custom Usage Policy — Upload your very own social media policy to the network, showing employees that legal and HR are involved in the deployment.
6. Extra Credit: Use the API to Build Custom Mobile Applications — One downside of Yammer, or any cloud-based solution, is that their mobile apps are all branded by the vendor name in the app store. This cannot be changed. For the large enterprise where mobile usage is key, consider building your own mobile application using Yammer's REST API. The result will be a fully customized and company-branded mobile app that reduces the visual and textual references to the vendor.

Learn more about Yammer's administrative features that allow for these customizations in their product guide for administrators here.

Visual and Contextual Hacks: Personalization of Photos and Text to Signal Formality

Community managers can employ these easy-to-accomplish customization hacks by packing as much visual and textual company relevancy into the stream as possible. These combine out of the box Yammer features with some pre-work by community managers.

1. Branded Profile Photos — early adopters, community managers and others who help guide user adoption should upload a profile photo that includes the company's logo in the bottom right corner (use a simple photo editing tool to do this). This brands the network and the leaders as "official" in some capacity, and the company logo signals formality.
2. Add Cover Photos to Individual Yammer Communities (Formerly Called Groups) – With new Yammer, you can now customize communities with a cover photo in addition to a smaller community logo image. Use an inviting image that reflects your community’s purpose, create a cover photo that reflects a specific upcoming event, or build a library of approved branded images for users to pick from. 
3. Official Groups — prior to rollout, community managers should create official groups that are seeded with real company content, official imagery, and dialogue about company issues and plans.
4. Announcements — a high level leader should create one or more announcements that every employee will see when he or she logs in; the availability of leadership messages (especially if the leader has a photo) helps employees visually absorb the presence of key people (thus driving adoption). Announcements can be pinned to the top of the community to help ensure that all members see the content.
5. New member greeters — employ a handful of official greeters to welcome each employee to the community on behalf of the company. Use visuals (like a branded profile photo or a special "welcome to AcmeCorp!" image to again visually create the company's look and feel.

Identity: Create Life and Establish Programming

Effectively customizing your Yammer network requires some creativity, but the tips below are highly effective to create a life and persona for your new community. None of these have anything to do with the Yammer technology itself; rather, the responsibility falls to community managers and marketers to bring the community out of the digital world and into the everyday employee experience.

1. Name It — Don't call it Yammer. Give it a creative name that ties into the overall goal of the community. There are many Sparks, Hubs, Connects, and Jams out there already - which work great. Don't fear more creativity though - give the community a name that will stick and eventually become part of the company language.
2. Create a Mascot — Nationwide (whose Yammer network is called Spot) has a mysterious caped-wearing blue man who dresses up to promote the community. Humana (who uses another product, Socialcast) has Buzz, and community manager Jeff Ross dresses up like a bee. Goofy? Sure. But also highly effective.
3. Create branded marketing items — T-shirts, keychains, and laptop stickers with the network's name and logo make their way into the workplace, branding the network in the physical world. Don't forget marketing posters around the office!
4. Custom URL — your community's URL is going to be something like bigcompany.yammer.com. You can't change that since it's just how multi-tenant SaaS solutions work. What you CAN do is purchase a custom URL, like AcmeHealthBuzz.com and direct users there to log in instead. That URL can redirect to your Yammer or SSO login page. The goal of this tactic is to make it easy for users to find the community, and when they do, their first experience visually is that of your branding, not Yammer's.
5. Intranet banner — make sure your employees can log into Yammer from your intranet or the first page that opens up when they open a web browser. Create a highly visible box, button, or visual where clicking takes them to the community via corporate imagery.
6. Create Dynamic Groups — Groups with dynamic membership can be created based on certain criteria, such as role, department, or geography. These criteria are set through Active Directory, and once established, will thereafter update membership as people join and leave the company. Dynamic groups are a great way to help new hires get up to speed quickly by ensuring that they have access to the right information, or for large departments that have trouble keeping up with additions (and subtractions) to their team.

These are all effective techniques that work well and truly give your community an identity of its own — as much as possible. What are some other ways that you have customized your Yammer network?

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