Yammer has been touting its ever growing client list, so V3 thought it would test the enterprise social network for seven days to see how it compares to other collaboration and communication tools.

Day 1
Yammer's sign-up process is straightforward enough, requesting our user name, password, department name and company name. The system alerts us to the fact that other members of Incisive Media are already using Yammer, and we are asked to fill out a list of further people we think should be asked to join.

While filing out the list, Yammer notifies us that 31 people from Incisive Media have in some way shown interest in joining Yammer, but have still not activated their profiles. All we have to do to invite them is click on a button, so we do and invitations are immediately sent out telling them to get onboard.

After completing a good part of the sign-in and set-up process, we have a look at the company feed. Since we've just found out that many staff at Incisive Media already use Yammer, we are expecting to find an active feed, with colleagues broadcasting news to the rest of the company.

However, the feed is dead quiet. It is filled with automatic alerts informing us that different members of staff have joined the network, but no one has made any personal updates, except for one who has linked to a business intelligence story weeks ago, giving no reason why. The link has no responses.

The big question now is what do we say? What can we write in an update that will be of interest to this random selection of people we don't know, but who work in one of our company's many offices around the world?

None of them works in the Business Technology Group to which V3 belongs, so there's not much point in posting one of our breaking news stories. Neither do any of our company Yammer members seem to work in an editorial function, so talking about writing standards or an interesting issue like the phone hacking scandal could also go amiss.

We consider having a look for company information or news stories about Incisive Media to post in the feed, and see how that goes down with the staff on the network. The only problem is that our company is not in the news at the moment.

We decide to leave the updates for the time being, and finish completing our profile. We can choose people in our company we want to follow. We follow all the people whose names we faintly recognise, although a quick look at their profiles shows that none of them has been active on the network for months.

Then the profile page asks for some personal information, like the name of our significant other and whether we have kids. But do we really want all our colleagues knowing such details? Is having kids the best way to get yourself recognised by senior executives? We decide to leave that for the time being.

We go back to the company feed and write: "Anyone have any ideas on how this network can be used internally? It seems a lot of people have joined but no one has made any updates."

Then we decide to sign off, but that is not the end of Yammer's interaction with us for the day. The network sends us an email around 4pm, rounding up all Yammer activity that has taken place during the day. We are told that a number of people have accepted our invitations to join. That is good, we think, as it should mean more interaction tomorrow.

Day 2
In response to our one post yesterday, a marketing executive from somewhere in the company, who had accepted our invitation to join Yammer, had written: "Was talking to my manager about rolling out a Yammer site for Incisive, totally unaware this was already in existence. It has the potential to be a great tool, but without people knowing it exists or it generating content, it's a bit redundant."

True, we think. We decide we need more people on Yammer with whom we can actually benefit from sharing content. We decide to set up a V3 group on Yammer and invite all our editorial team members to join. The team normally uses Google Chat or Skype to discuss breaking news, but we manage to persuade them to use Yammer for the day, for the sake of our review.

We comment in the group on a few news stories that have broken in the past few hours. However, we find that scrolling away from the V3 group page to check the company feed temporarily erases all our updates to the group page. The updates to the group page also take a while to come through to the feed. One member of our team announces that he does not want to use Yammer because it "isn't real time".

We move back to Skype and Google Mail.

Day 7
The past five days were spent just watching more people join the Incisive Media network, but say nothing. Only one member of staff made an update about some mobile application being trialled in one of our company departments. The V3 group never took off.

The company feed remains quiet as the updates made by staff are hardly engaging, and do not encourage responses. It is also daunting knowing that so many of our colleagues are sitting there watching the live feed - or not as the case may be - but are not in any way participating,

We do not doubt that Yammer is of great use to many influential companies, but we have learned that it can take a while to get a business onboard and to realise its benefits. We also found that the free version takes a while to update, which can pose a problem if Yammer is being used by a group that needs an instant method of communication.