Uncharted Territory: How to Find Top Yammer Influencers and Champions

As we've discussed in past posts, when it comes to measuring your Yammer community, adoption and engagement is everything. We've explored how to replicate the success of top performing Yammer groups and discover unanswered questions, but what about recognizing the individuals behind your community's success? It's time to answer these two essential questions:

• Who are your top contributors on Yammer?
• Who are the most influential users on Yammer?

This is not an easy task. It's not available in Yammer's internal analytics and you may be lost on how to even run the analysis to identify these users. Even if you vigilantly monitor your network and export the data to process in Excel, it may not even be possible to identify top contributors and influential users if you don't know precisely what to look for. Not to mention the obstacles enterprises face when users number in the tens of thousands.

Even Klout, which monitors social influence, may not be the right choice for this project. While Klout provides great analysis on influence, it is still a black-box. It doesn't provide visibility into scoring algorithms, or the ability to weight them based on what matters most to your company. For large enterprises, Klout also raises security and data privacy concerns.

Given these challenges, is it really worth the effort? Power users are an integral part of growing Yammer adoption and engagement. Yammer admins that can accurately identify these individuals can work closely with them to roll out campaigns, recruit others into the community and organically drive excitement in the organization.

Identifying top contributors and top influencers on Yammer users is also valuable for corporate communications and human resources departments. For example, when corporate communications needs to launch an internal campaign, they can rely on top contributors to quickly disseminate information across the organization help. Conversely, human resources can look at the most influential users on Yammer to spot trends before they become epidemics. Consider if one of the most influential Yammer users is highly critical or negative about the organization, HR can work directly with the individual to problem solve. (Yammer has great advice for dealing with negative users).

So how can you identify Yammer power users without losing your mind?

Yammer admins looking to do this manually can group several characteristics (posts, replies, praises, etc.) and weight them across all users, similar to GoodData Yammer Analytics. By appropriately weighting these categories, you can look across the overall organization and can score each individual.

However, if you'd like a faster path to finding top influencers and top contributors, take the GoodData Yammer Analytics App for a spin with our two-click free trial. As always, we'd love to hear your feedback in the comments or on Twitter at @gooddata.

This is part four of a five part series on how your organization can use Yammer analytics to unlock the full potential of your Yammer investment.

Part 1: There's 365% ROI on the line. How solid is your Yammer investment?

Part 2: Identify Top Performing Groups and Replicate their Success

Part 3: How to Discover Unanswered Questions in Yammer and Increase User Trust

Part 5: How to Use Yammer to Measure Employee Morale and Sentiment