Bloomfire vs. Microsoft Viva Engage vs. Socialtext (discontinued)

Ad testing:

• PTS: needed to bring a new senior marketing team member up to speed on how we got to our current TV campaign
• Solution: Series featuring consumer insights, why specific spokesperson, agency brief, the entire creative process - scrips, animatics, rough cuts, feedback, and testing at each step. Including the actual creative from each step.
• Total time to build: 1 hour

Concept testing:

• PTS: things get lost, findable but version control
• Solution: everything in one placeConcepts, testing, IHUTs, verbatims, videos with transcripts. Reduces the possibility of missing something, helps with any builds (reuse), but gives us a the chance to dig deeper. Example: search on terms like "indulgent", or "crispy" or "share" much faster
• Total time to build: 1 hour

Incentivized

Yammer is great when you have a company culture that encourages friendly collaboration and communication. It can be a great supplement (but certainly not a substitute) for bonding and sharing ideas and thoughts. Certain channels can be really successful, too, like a channel where people can post dog pictures or something fun like that!

Incentivized

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

• Quickly reach out to whatever employee segment you want to reach by posting a topic and it will send a notification to everyone in that group with a link to the posting.
• Bloomfire saves all of the previous posts so in your free time you can go to the site, and explore the various range of topics others have posted. The information on there will only be as good as the person posting it, but it will be people within your company and industry posting it. So it will always be helpful.
• Bloomfire is a place to be noticed by your peers. Have a great topic you want to express, my company allows all to post there as long as we keep it professional. So you can share your ideas or experiences in a safe and productive manner. But we do have some fun on there too!

Incentivized

• Providing a platform for social news in the company where "bottom up" topics can percolate freely across department
• Social networking across the company where folks can divide their work into topics instead of teams
• Basic collaboration within a group including document sharing with ability to pin documents to a team

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• I would recommend adding a feature to combine different posts/series by job title (so in addition to the Revenue Ops category, there could be a structured walkthrough for Revenue Manager).
• Live Q+A sessions for group onboarding initiatives.
• Ability to label bookmarks by priority/job type.

Incentivized

• Although the social enterprise network works very well, there is room for some slight improvement - such as the ability to attract users. By being part of the Microsoft Office Suite, it is offered as an "add-on" and many overlook it and see it as unnecessary at first. It would be smart for Microsoft to sell it as its own product so it could gather more popularity as a "social network".
• Giving an option to filter results could be better as well as giving an option to turn off the "recent activity" bar on the home page.

Incentivized

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

Most likely we will renew, our team needs a refresher on possible opportunities to advance our usage and learning of opportunities to move this answer to a 10, can't live without it.

Incentivized

Microsoft is dedicated to continual improvement on Yammer. They realize the value that Yammer brings to the table with their clients. In the short time that we have had Yammer implemented, we are just now beginning to see the strong impact it has on becoming more effective and efficient around collaboration.

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

Bloomfire is an easy-to-use platform for posting information and asking questions of my peers. It also has a user-friendly search capability. Yet like any other CMS, the secret to success rests in such items as the ability to use metadata to tag content or posts, and Bloomfire provides a wide range of options to make posting content and subsequently searching for it.

Incentivized

Overall easy to use and intuitive, although limited in the possibility to personalize layout and look & feel of a site. Some functionalities are not easy to use, like document editing, but some others are quick and effective (posts and tagging above all). Performance and responsiveness of the Yammer site is typically acceptable, in my experience.

Very available

It's a simple product but it does provide value.

I have not needed to pose questions to the support team yet, as it is a very simple piece of software to use, however, its help documents and the bot ready to answer questions let me know I am in good hands. The help center could load a little quicker, but that's my only complaint.

Incentivized

We have never had to use the support for Yammer. The tool works well and we have not come across any bugs. User Interface is simple and easy to use, similar to other forum type products, thereby removing the need for any extensive training. Team members are invited in and immediately are able to start using the tool.

Incentivized

The training that Microsoft provides is very generic training for Yammer. I like the fact the training is short and easy to understand

We organically implemented the product

I like Bloomfire because it is more concise with the work I do whereas Google search engine would provide broader information. It has just been so user-friendly, and easier to use [than] I could have imagined. I would use this program over any other that I have tried in the past.

Incentivized

Our team briefly used Salesforce.com's Chatter product before switching over to Yammer in 2012. While Chatter is essentially the same product as Yammer, it left much to be desired. Chatter's design was (and remains) clunky and difficult to navigate. Yammer is a simple, easy-to-use product that offers similar functionality as Salesforce's Chatter.

Incentivized

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

• Feedback from users in being able to perform transactions for members has greatly improved.
• There has been an increase in engagement of material presented in posts by learners in training classes.
• Reps and agents say they feel confident they can easily locate information if ever there is a need on the front line.

Incentivized

• My company is pleased with the positive impact Yammer has created departmentally and on an individual basis with work flow efficiency.
• Adversely, most old and new employees are more familiar with SharePoint, causing the company to pay for training for all current and incoming employees.
• As Yammer becomes more widely used, the need for training may diminish, which is where we will see our return on investment, as the product clearly provides a more effective form of file sharing and communication between employees and their department.

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions