There’s 365% ROI on the line. How solid is your Yammer investment?

Enterprise communication has changed. Employee reliance on phone calls, standing meetings and even email can no longer sustain the pace of business. Employees want and need to share ideas and collaborate in real time, and thanks to the diminishing line between consumer and enterprise technologies, now they can. Large enterprises are increasingly turning to enterprise social networks like Yammer to address the communication gap and accelerate collaboration and productivity.

CIOs, human resources and corporate communications teams are routinely rolling out Yammer enterprise-wide because they recognize the clear value of an enterprise social network, including: cost reduction, elimination of duplicate work, fast access to subject matter experts and a flattened organizational hierarchy.

How much value? An ROI of 365% according to Forrester Consulting1. That’s incredible. But how do you measure employee adoption and engagement? We recommend the following KPIs:

• Number of active employees
• Number of employees that actively start new threads
• Number of employees that actively respond to threads
• Number of employees that are recently inactive
• Number of employees that have never been active

These metrics are essential for Yammer admins who know that their ability to respond to trends with training, campaigns and enforcement of best practices is only as good as the insight they have into the Yammer network's performance. Some organizations even track the number of messages in Yammer and how that number trends over time.

Do you know how your organization stacks up against these basic metrics? Even with a whopping 365% ROI at stake, many organizations are left only with anecdotal evidence of Yammer performance. Yammer provides some analytics, but they are limited to a 30-day window, making it difficult to spot meaningful trends over time.

If you’d like to fully understand your organization’s investment in Yammer, check out GoodData Yammer Analytics. We’ve already seen several customers use the application to manage their Yammer network and increase adoption.

This is part one of a five part series on how your organization can use Yammer analytics to unlock the full potential of 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 4: Uncharted Territory: How to Find Top Yammer Influencers and Champions

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