I was invited to chat online for my first Microsoft “YamJam”! Don’t know what a YamJam is?
Yammer is the Office 365 chat software used for internal and external groups to share information and chat online. A YamJam is an online chat event that is scheduled at a specific time and open to a quasi-internal Yammer group (in this case, it was Office 365 Partner Yammer Group which lists 1,500+ registered members). The members are invited via Yammer posts (that then get delivered by email) to tune in to watch a “live chat” about a topic. Ours was on success stories and lessons learned building apps for Office 365 and took place two days ago. It lasted about 60 minutes and involved two Microsoft hosts, myself and two other companies that also integrated their solutions with office 365.
The YamJam session had extra adventure for me because I joined the session (with the help of my home office, “thanks guys!”) from an exhibit hall at the National Docketing Association annual conference in South Carolina. The bio I had recorded at the show wouldn’t upload due to bandwidth issues so I went with my back up plan and posted an interview that Kevin O’Keefe recorded last week at the Clio Cloud Conference and published on Facebook (Why O’Keefe thinks more bloggers should publish on Facebook).
There might have been a way to figure out how many Office 365 partners tuned in but I can guess there were a bunch because my “interview/bio” video got a couple hundred views during and shortly following our YamJam.
So here’s how it works. The guests on the session are provided with some topics to be prepared to talk about. The hosts kick things off with guest videos and then starts the interviewing process with the guests on the “show”. Viewers can jump in and comment or ask follow up questions. It’s kind of like a call-in radio show. And like radio stations that replay sound bites, I wonder if Yam Jam hosts parse out Yammer Chats to share with Yammer networks.
I enjoyed my first YamJam and came away with some great ideas from fellow Microsoft partners, got the basics down for Yammer chatting, and am hopeful I will have impressed my kids when they see the link to this blog post that I am getting ready to text them now!
