SharePoint Intranet: Choosing the right WebPart for Intranet Updates! Yammer VS Announcements

Question

I'm setting up our intranet with SharePoint and the management wants me to set up a feed similar to Twitter on our homepage. Here are 2 scenarios I've considered, and I'd love to hear your thoughts:

1) setup an announcement webpart on every team subsites (we have 8 teams), then set up our Intranet homepage so that the announcement webpart of the intranet gets a constant feed from those. I could set up a workflow so that everyone receives a weekly email of the new announcement feed just like twitter does.

2) Maybe encourage teams to go on yammer and use specific hashtags, then setup a content rollup to report on those hashtags, then setup a workflow to email everyone with the latest updates.

Any thoughts as to what would be better? Is there a webpart that I forgot that might offer a better solution?

Answer 1

I would go with option 1). The second option is inherently more complex because it requires you to integrate with another tool and to some extent dictate behaviour change.

Maybe encourage teams to go on yammer and use specific hashtags

If you implement the first option and nobody uses the announcements, you won't be blamed for an empty announcement feed. However, the feasibility of the second option depends on your success in coordinating and dictating the behaviour of your colleagues. I would strongly caution you from basing the success of a deliverable on your ability to change the behaviour of your colleagues. Changing behaviour is hard and you shouldn't try doing so unless it is a last resort.