Soapbox Mojo

Posting to Twitter and Yammer

At PointB, where I work, we are experiencing a minor groundswell in the use of Yammer.  This is an awesome occurrence except now I am challenged with posting to Yammer and Twitter.

He is my recipe for posting to both services.

Ingredients

• SnipUrl account and toolbar installed
• TwitterMail account
• Yammer account
• Twitter account

Directions

• Verify your email settings in Yammer.  Uncheck to bottom box unless you want to get an email an confirm every post.

• Browse to some interesting content on the Internet.
• Activate the SnipUrl browser toolbar
• Choose email as the method the share the URL.

• Address the email to yammer@yammer.com
• cc xxxxx99xxxx@twittermail.com (Substitute your TwitterMail address here)
• Review and edit message body as required
• Send

• Wait a few moments for the bits to circulate the net.
• See your post on post Twitter and Yammer

You can email posts without using SnipUrl if you don’t need to refer people to an Internet site.  Just create an email message with the addresses and anything in the body will get posted.  As an added benefit this will work with your company Blackberry or Windows Mobile device.

How I Keep Track of it All

If you’re at all like me you have a few email accounts and belong to various social network sites.  I monitor and maintain the following.

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

GMail

Yahoo Mail

AIM

Yahoo Messenger

GTalk

Yammer

Fortunately I have Digsby to help aggregate all the updates into one client application.  It is the only tool I’ve found that allows me to track and manage all the incoming messages and information in an acceptable way.

Once downloaded and installed setting up the Digsby client is rather straight forward.  It supports all the major IM, email, and Social Networks.  It does not support Yammer directly but here is the trick.  In my Yammer settings I allowed updates from IM (GTalk) which Digsby does support.  Winner!

Here is a view of my client application.

When there is an update a small bubble pops open at the bottom of my screen with the new message.  This can be turned off during presentations or when it becomes annoying.

If I mouse over any of the Social Networks a message drawer (see twitter below) opens allowing me to review and reply to any recent posts.

It is not perfect.  You do lose some of the underlying application capability like attaching a file in Yammer or re-tweet as Twitter post.  Not a big trade off when you’re trying to manage screen real estate.