Yammer to help reduce internal emails

I am sure you have seen the problem: someone sends an email to 10 people and asks for their ideas.  6 of them read their emails within 24 hours, think they have good ideas (which of course may be duplicated) and 'reply to all'.  The active 6 (plus the person who started) now all reply (CC all) to each other's emails (6x5) + 6 = 36 more emails to everyone and by then, everyone is so confused as to who is talking to whom about what that it grinds to a halt - apart from the 4 of the original 10 who have now got back and are trying to catch up....

The answer to this (unless a meeting is possible) is some kind of forum so that there is one conversation going on, people can see what has been said already and only add if they have something new to say.

There are many possibilities available to do this cheaply (or free) and I have been looking at Yammer for a sailing club committee of about 10 people.

Why use Yammer?

• Its free
• Threaded conversations
• It allows 'Groups' so that users can opt to be involved in some subject discussions but not others
• Conversations can be tagged, to make it easier for people to find relevant information later
• It's secure - default setting is that only people with www.yourdomain.com email addresses can sign up

What problems are we having?
Because the club email addresses that we use are all aliases, if someone sends an email from Yammer and that person replies by email, Yammer does not recognise the user (because it has come from the real email address me@home.com not the alias me@sailingclub.com).  There may be a way around this using 'communities' which allow users from outside www.yourdomain.com (subject to admin approval).

The other problem is not unique to Yammer - some people are change resistant and not keen to use a new system - especially if it is thought to be anything like Facebook.

What's it good for?
Spreading information where 'one to many', 'one to one, CC many', and 'many to many', emails may have been used in the past.

What's it less good for?
One to one messages - suggest using separate group or sticking to email for this to spare other readers from having to read messages to check that they don't need to read them.