Yammer teams with Kanjoya to get inside employees' heads

Yammer is strengthening its analytics toolset thanks to a new partnership with Kanjoya, a company that describes itself as building "products that enable emotion in technology."

More specifically, Kanjoya focuses on solutions that pinpoint sentiment analysis that in turn will offer data about attitudes and perceptions of a given topic.

In Yammer's case, Kanjoya's Crane platform will be integrated into the enterprise social network to analyze employees' sentiments based on the conversations from within a Yammer network.

Put most simply, Yammer chief product officer Jim Patterson described in prepared remarks that "by enabling this integration, Yammer customers will be able to recognize when something has affected employees either positively or negatively -- and take action."

The Crane analytics dashboard will utilize Yammer's open APIs to retrieve data from Yammer groups and the overall company network across departments and geographies.

Some of the examples of how this will be done include basic identifiers like keyword searches and most replies, but also more in-depth approaches that might be harder to do without a computer, such as a sentiment graph that compares the volume of actual emotions ranging from joy to anger.

The integration is available immediately for all Yammer Enterprise users. Administrators can sign up for a free Crane account that is valid for up to 30 days.

Now owned by Microsoft, Yammer also recently announced its first annual conference, YamJam ’12, slotted for late October in San Francisco.