Last week, at the YamJam12 conference, we gave out several awards to recognize achievements of our customers. While there are many more amazing customers than we could award, these companies and individuals exemplify strategic and innovative use of Yammer that’s truly transformational.
The Yambassador of the Year Award is for an individual who has championed the use of Enterprise Social Networking in their organization, helping executive leaders and co-workers understand and achieve the benefits of working in a more open, transparent and collaborative way. This year’s winner, Scott Kelley is Principal Collaboration Specialist at Disney, and has been the driving force behind the use of Yammer at Disney. Scott has nurtured Disney’s growing network, bringing business strategies and solutions that have energized both end-users and executive leaders.
The Open Leadership Award recognizes a top executive who exhibited an open style of leadership, inspiring others to work in a more open and transparent way. This year’s winner, Chris Laping of Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, has exhibited extraordinary transparency and earned trust within his organization. As the Senior Vice President of Business Transformation and CIO at Red Robin, Chris has driven the company to redefine collaboration by moving away from structured and controlled information flow toward a truly open enterprise. Check out the Chris in Adam Pisoni’s keynote:
We have an active and passionate community of customers here at Yammer, and the community chose Earth Hour as the Customers’ Choice Award. Earth Hour is a global environmental initiative in partnership with WWF. Earth Hour began in one city in 2007 and by 2012 reached over 2 billion people in 152 countries across every continent, receiving reports as ‘the world’s largest campaign for the planet’. Earth Hour uses Yammer as a global organizing platform for staff and volunteers. With a core team of only 8 employees, the Earth Hour network connects volunteers and participants in 135 countries and 54 languages, providing the information and resources they need to start an Earth Hour in their local community. Check out this video:
The Customer of the Year Award recognizes a company that is using Yammer in an exceptionally strategic and innovative way. With high levels of engagement and a strong vision for enterprise social networking, our Customer of the Year has achieved tremendous business value with Yammer. Over the past few years, Tyco has been using Yammer to collaborate among teams and engage its employees. Just this summer, Tyco underwent a transformation from a holding company to an operating company, using Yammer throughout the planning and implementation of the split into 3 distinct companies. With a successful Day One of the new Tyco behind them, the team is incredibly deserving of this award.
Finally, we wanted to recognize the customer who won our customer conference naming contest. When we first conceived of this conference more than a year ago, we knew we wanted to involve our customer community in the naming of it. So we put out a call for ideas in the Yammer Customer Network, and Miguel Zlot of Molson Coors suggested the name YamJam.
