We are delighted to announce that CCV Publishing, part of the Random House Group has partnered with Webjam to create an online community for book lovers. The 'Vintage Reading Group' will offer a space for readers to comment, review and discuss literature and to create their own reading group.

The Vintage Reading Group community portal will offer new content and a place for discovery and discussions. Readers or reading groups can also create their own private social networks focused on specific topics or a group's physical location.

For more information, please read the Press Release

A new team member joined our office late last year and in all the Christmas & New Year festivities it's taken until now to officially welcome Webjam's new Head of Sales: Denise Turner.   

Denise comes to Webjam with 18 years strategic consultancy experience in digital media, design, branding, PR and marketing. She has worked in digital media for 12 years, latterly as Business Development Director at search specialist CheezeDMG and prior to that, as Commercial Director at Cimex and Client Service Director at Westhill. Denise will be reporting into the Business Development Director and charged with growing UK Sales of our Enterprise and Enterprise Plus products.

A design and business graduate, Denise specialises in business growth and development, client service and mentoring. Over the last few years, she has watched social media become a critical part of any serious marketing campaign; and is thrilled to be joining Webjam, as she believes is "a great service with a bright future."

Denise is currently studying creative writing at the University of Kent, and is trying to turn a field into a garden. 

You can learn more about Denise by visiting her network: www.webjam.com/deniseturner

Social Media is word of mouth on steroids. In my article of the inverted brand I say that it can take years to build a brand, but you can lose your reputation in an instant. Knowing who you are talking to, who is talking about you and what are they saying is key in managing your online reputation. In this blog post I would like to explore the importance of understanding your audiences and the role they play in developing your social media strategy. This is not new in the marketing profession. Each marketing book starts with telling you that you should understand your market. Each sales man will learn that selling successfully is about clearly understanding the needs of your customer. In social media, the same rules apply. If you don't understand the people you want to engage with, how will you know what is relevant to them? How can you respond when you don't know what they are talking about. How can you select a social media network, if you don't know which channels your audiences are using?

In our strategy to manage the inverted brand, we use the following model from Mike Arauz as the basis:

It is a model that puts the different types of friends you can have online in the context of the different phases you go through in developing a relationship. It replaces the "ancient" AICDA formula (Attention, Interest, Conviction, Desire, Action) with SEEC (Search, Exposure, Engagement, Collaboration). Mike's blogpost explains the model in more detail but I would like to look at the model from the "SEEC" perspective.

Search: Search happens before you start befriending people. In your online search you meet people and the connected experiences you have turn your anonymous search in a passive interest.

Exposure: Once the publisher of content has triggered your interest, you will search for more content and read more about his/her ideas. That person is not your friend yet, but there is a basis for developing a friendship. The key trigger is when you start bookmarking the site. You are then close to changing your passive interest into an active interest.

Engagement: The key trigger for active interest is when you start leaving comments or do retweets on posts from your new friends. Then they know that you are interested in friendship. Once you have shown your interest, the relationship starts to develop which will manifest itself by increased engagement through sharing information. You make references to your new friend on your own site, he/she starts responding to your comments in public and later maybe via email or IM.

Collaboration: The relationship is becoming more and more intense. You actually start to promote each others content and the relationship can ultimately lead to a WIN WIN situation where both you and your friend will benefit from working together.

So why is understanding this model so important? It is the core of your engagement strategy. It will help you in listening to your audiences, defining your communities, deciding on the type of content you have to create, the type of social media channels you have to use and finally, the type of data you have to collect and tools to use to measure the success of your social media outreach.

Dear Webjam clients, business partners and friends,

You probably don’t need examples about why 2009 was a rocky year...

Fortunately for Webjam, this is also a year where we grew revenues thanks to the combination of our social publishing platform with our creative and engagement services.

Many thanks to all of you for your renewed trust as we help you make the most of social media tools and solutions to manage web-presence and reputation online, from clients to employees.

We look forward to be working with you in 2010 and define the next wave of interactions between people ... bla, bla... Well, enough of a corporate speech for once... Just sit back, enjoy the (relative) peace of Christmas times wherever you are from, and as importantly:

Happy New Year!

The Webjam team

Now that the new www.webjam.com is fully operational, we are ready to launch Phase 2 of our website upgrade, Today we introduce the beta version of Webjam Connections. An interconnected business community where our customers, prospects, advisors, media representatives and anybody else who has an interest in Webjam and social media can connect, engage, interact, share and learn.

Being a social media solutions provider, we live and breath social media ourselves. Using our own solution to interact with our clients is key in gaining first hand experience in social media engagement. Vital experience that we can pass on to our customers when we advise them on how to develop and implement their own social media strategy. There are public and a members only sections on the web site. The main public areas are Webjam Delight and Webjam Spread, our company blog and company newsletter. As well as a section about where to meet Webjam and conferences and exhbitions. The members only section has information about members only events like the Breakfast with Webjam briefings and also includes an area where members can lead and  engage in discussion forums.

We will formally launch the site in the first few weeks of 2010 by inviting our existing clients to join. But in the meantime, feel free to browse the site by going to www.webjam.com/connections and if you want to become a member, just click the "join network" button or send an email to marketing@webjam.com.

You may have read that we launched a full range of social media enterprise solutions in combination with the launch of our new web site. In today’s blog post I would like to give you some background information on this announcement. Why I talk about this in my marketing 2.0 blog? It shows social media in a different marketing context: How are we as a provider of social media services addressing the social media requirements of our clients? And how have we translated this into our value proposition?

First of all, it is about clearly defining why companies today are using social media and aligning our proposition with these requirements. In our dealings with our clients we have formulated our vision of the inverted brand and the notion that social media enables companies to open up their brand (Social Media update 5: the inverted brand). We see this as a key driver for social media in enterprises. To make this tangible we believe companies today are using social media for managing online reputation, building online communities or enhancing social engagement between employees or members within the company.

Approaching this segmentation from an application perspective brings an additional dimension to developing a social media offering. Our clients are not just buying a platform. For them, the platform is an enabler to help them achieving their social media goals. What they really need is guidance on how to turn the platform features into a successful community engagement experience that is robust, runs smoothly and on top of that is unique, engaging and visually attractive.

We have recognised this and developed the Webjam Social Media Framework. This consists of our social publishing platform to host the social media environment, the managed services to stay in control of the social media deployment and the creative services to translate the client’s requirements into a unique, engaging and visually attractive social media solution. In other words, in developing our business proposition we looked beyond the technology and tried to capture all the elements a client need for a successful social media deployment.

To see this all in action, check out www.webjam.com and if you want a short summary, do play the video on the home page.

Written by: Marc Campman - Webjam Director of Marketing

Tomorrow will be an important day for Webjam with the launch of the brand new website.

The reason behind the changes is to align our website with our new positioning as a social publishing and engagement solutions provider for companies to connect with their customers and employees. The pillars of our solution are the Webjam social publishing and engagement platform, our Managed Services and our Creative Services. The site has been structured in a way that you can easily find everything you need to know about our offering. In the About us section you find the latest news about our company as well as a dedicated Learning page to discover the benefits of social media.

For you, as our current user, there will not be any change to the network(s) you have created and the support you receive. You can continue to use Webjam as you currently do.

To whet your appetite for the gorgeous new pages we are launching, here is a screenshot of the homepage:

Watch this space!

On Wednesday, 18 November, Webjam held the first of our breakfast briefings for people interested in learning how businesses can benefit from social media & how Webjam can help. The theme for this briefing was ‘Social media and the Inverted Brand.'

We were delighted to have guest speaker Euan Semple, former Director of Knowledge Management Solutions at the BBC, speak to the gathering about social media and also touch on the Cluetrain manifesto, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. His presentation got conversations flowing and led into the presentation about the Inverted Brand by Marketing Director, Marc Campman. Further discussions enshewed about how social media is influencing the way companies build their brand and develop their reputation.

Thanks to Euan for presenting and our guests for attending. We look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Webjam is proud to be associated with Make Your Mark, the campaign to increase entrepreneurial behaviour in the UK. Their flagship event, The Global Entrepreneurship Week, running from 16 – 22 November 2009, connects young business brains from countries across the globe, through local, national and global activities designed to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity. Webjam is proud to have designed, built and host their fully interactive online community with over 80 local country community web sites. Using our social publishing platform allows entrepreneurs from around the world to connect, run events, share ideas, collaborate and open up new opportunities for each other. 

Webjam’s platform provides host countries with editable site templates to create their own interactive network within the main site.  Host countries and their representative communities are then able to blog, promote events as well as post comments, pictures and videos creating, for the first time, a high-tech online community for the global event.  

Webjam is thrilled to be involved in such a global initiative. It illustrates how companies use Webjam to roll out multiple community sites while keeping brand consistency and full editorial control. By using the power of our social networking platforms, Make Your Mark is bringing the leaders of tomorrow together in one online community, allowing the finest young minds around the world to interact, engage and share content in relation to their common interests.

Visit Make Your Mark's Global Enterprise Week website

We just launched the social media Initiative for the Event “les Rencontres Annuelles des Décideurs Marketing” organized by the trade magazine “strategies” in France, edited by one of the world leader in the trade Press, Reed Business Information.

The “Strategies” editorial team is conducting with us a very interesting experiment, applying the principles of Social Media to the very people who keep talking about it, Marketing Directors. The basic idea is a free-flowing conversation between speakers and attendees to the conference during the few weeks leading to the conference to start sharing ideas on current marketing issues. A trade conference being mainly a hub for ideas and contacts, we are working on the product it-self, the ideas, and the contacts of course via on-line social networking before and during the conference. Beyond the traditional forums, each speaker gets their personalized blog page to which they can add content and functionalities from their own twitter feed to poll modules. One of the renown speakers for example, Sophie Callies  from SO’xperts is now polling the community about one of the most important issue facing (social) marketing today, which is about how to measure performance.

Generating discussions before and during a conference is not itself a new idea and has been common for a while already at blogging and tech conferences. But speakers and attendees there are usually prolific contributors on the web. Here the community, like the conference, is only accessible to members (speakers and attendees) so I unfortunately can’t show it here; but it will be interesting to see the level of conversations that a few dozen professionals from companies ranging from Orange to Toyota and Innocent are ready to generate about how marketing is likely to evolve, using the very tools they are trying to harness to engage their own clients & consumers.

Moving forward, the relationship we are forging with Reed is typical of a business we see growing fast at Webjam : advising and enabling our clients to foster conversations, often in closed communities, between their own clients, partners or employees. Like we have already done for the agency JWT (part of the WPP agency network) we keep improving on finding the perfect  blend between social media and enterprise social networks and solve an issue that is as important as engaging customers: engaging professionals.

Written by Yann Motte, Webjam CEO