Webjam Company Blog » Working with Reed Business Information on Social Media for Marketing Events

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