Eight million users strong, Yammer teams up with Klout

Administrators will be able to create a Yammer-specific Klout score for their employees

On June 25th, 2012, Microsoft officially announced that it had bought enterprise social networking company Yammer for $1.2 billion. Now, on the one year anniversary of that deal, Yammer is showing how that partnership has paid off by releasing some updated numbers, as well as announced a big new partnership with social media influence ranking company Klout.

First, the new numbers.

Since being acquired, Yammer's users have grown by 55%, to nearly eight million users, David Sacks, Corporate Vice President of Yammer, revealed in a blog post Tuesday.

User activity, which includes messages, groups and file, has almost doubled year over year, and paid networks have grown over 200% year over year.

"A year ago, Microsoft presented us with an amazing opportunity to accelerate our business in the areas of both product and distribution, and today we are seeing those benefits come to fruition," Sacks wrote. 

Still, while Sacks acknowledges all that benefit that Yammer has reamed from being part of Microsoft, including "the opportunity to integrate social features into the most widely used business software products and platforms in Office, Dynamics and Lync and Skype," the company is also looking to hook up with some partners outside of Microsoft, specifically ones that can help them expand what Yammer can do, including Klout.

"While we continue to create deeper connected experiences across Microsoft products, we are also committed to expanding our partner ecosystem to include all enterprise apps.  In fact, we’ve doubled the number of partner integrations to 60 since we launched the Yammer App Directory in October 2012," Pavan Tapadia, Chief Product Officer at Yammer, wrote in a blog post.

"We’re excited to highlight some of our newest integration partners, including Klout, which we are introducing today."

Klout uses the interactions that people and brands have on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and YouTube to let them know how effective they are in communicating on certain topics and helps brands connect with the best influencers in their vertical. 

By integration of Klout and Yammer will allow Yammer users to publish their public Klout score and expertise directly on their Yammer profile. Since Yammer allows companies to create private social networks that employees can use to collaborate across departments, countries, content and applications, putting a Klout score on their profile will allow those with a high social media influence to display that expertise at work.

Yammer administrators will also be able to produce a Yammer-specific Klout score for their employees, based on their activity within their company’s network, which is, "a great opportunity for organizations to identify top contributors and subject matter experts based on their Yammer participation," Tapadia said.

A partnership between Klout and a Microsoft property is not unheard of: Klout previously partnered with Microsoft search engine Bing in September of 2012 "to strengthen social search and online influence."

(Image source: Yammer.com)