When Network World selected 9 technologies IT pros should master in 2009, two of them were microblogging platforms: Twitter and Yammer. While most people are familiar with Twitter, relatively few are acquainted with Yammer.

Yammer is an enterprise Twitter that allows co-workers to share what they are working on. Privacy to each company's Yammer network is assured by limiting access to those with a company email address. People at Cisco Systems, Xerox, and Hewlett Packard are using it. Should you make the jump?   

While it isn't as sexy as Twitter, Yammer will fundamentally improve your company in the following 8 ways.   

Enhance your corporate culture   

Forrester Research analyst Bruce Temkin pointed out that companies must invest in their corporate culture as a valuable asset. Nurturing a culture that motivates and empowers employees can greatly improve organizational productivity. The best way to develop such a culture is to encourage open and honest discussions about your company's identity.   

Microblogging's shorthand format forces people to get straight to the point. The usual pretensions and corporate jargons are reduced in favor of quick, honest ideas. People are more likely to share ideas since there's no pressure to be articulate or smart.   

The ease of adding to the conversation lures people into revealing more than they expected to, thus catching them in moments of unguarded vulnerability. While this kind of casual honesty may be a disaster on a public platform like Twitter, such honesty in internal communications can save your company from making terrible mistakes.   

Create user-generated knowledge base and decrease internal emails by 60% 

People are constantly emailing each other questions and solutions. Instead of locking that information in emails where only a few people have access to it, Yammer makes that knowledge available to the whole organization.   

"Yammer has increased my ability to manage email by decreasing inner-office email chatter by at least 60 percent," said Craigh Johnson of Matchstic. "It keeps everyone in the loop and allows them to ask and share questions that benefit the team as a whole."   

A robust user-generated knowledge base built on Yammer allows you to:

• Empower your employees to help each other
• Create documentation written in a language your employees can understand (their own)
• Bypass information bottlenecks
• Quickly identify trends and thought leaders in your company

Increase productivity   

Microblogging what I'm working on is my favorite way to use Yammer. These kinds of posts have many benefits. Writing down what I'm supposed to be doing helps me focus my attention on the task at hand. When I type in "updating analytics data", I feel compelled to finish that task before jumping to something else.   

Sharing what I'm working on Yammer keeps my team informed about my availability and prevents them from duplicating my efforts. I also like to add tags to these update posts. For example, I can tag a post with a client's name. This allows me to quickly generate a report of what I've done for this client at a later time. (I suspect this function is especially useful for lawyers, who bill clients using six-minute increments).     

Yammer as therapy   

Tiny records of productivity can also be very therapeutic, especially for people who work in IT. IT folks often toil in anonymity. They usually don't interact with other employees unless something is wrong, but when things are running smoothly, IT people get little recognition.  

It is very satisfying for the IT team to microblog their daily triumphs. While that "small" but incredibly frustrating bug fix won't impress the folks in sales, it is a reminder that a lot goes on behind the scenes to keep things working smoothly and lets the team celebrate lots of small wins.   

Replace wasted time with team bonding