Yammer or SharePoint 2013 or Neudesic Pulse for Social in 2013?

At the SharePoint2012 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft showcased Social Computing in SharePoint 2013 and Yammer, and articulated vociferously their new-found commitment and enthusiasm for social as a central feature of intranets and pretty much everything else going forward.

This love-fest around social computing was dampened by the reality that Microsoft developed a set of Social features in SharePoint 2012 and then subsequently acquired Yammer. While the acquisition of Yammer underscores Microsoft's commitment to social, it muddied the waters leaving us with a distinctly cloudy and complicated message.

 

In a nutshell, that complex message seems to be that Yammer is the premiere social computing product that customers should use if at all possible, the Microsoft-developed social features in SharePoint 2013 are an alternative that may also be useful in certain circumstances, but pick one or the other: don't use both.

My clients are asking me which way to go, and I am working hard to synthesize a decision tree. Most of my clients embrace enterprise social computing and some need the kind of deep integration of Social features into applications that Yammer's Adam Pisoni was talking about at the SharePoint Conference 2012. (By deep integration I mean solutions for scenarios like deriving insight into customer needs or product development.) I don't have that decision tree worked out yet, but it is clear that they must choose one of three directions: 1) yammer if at all possible, the key  problem being if clients require hosting all data on-premesis, because the data in Yammer exists in the cloud. 2) social in SP or 3) a third-party product like Newsgator or Neudesic Pulse, which work fine in 2010.