Mediaboss Marketing

Segment has raised $64 million in Series C funding, with the Y Combinator Continuity Fund and GV leading the round.

The continuity fund is the $700 million fund led by former Twitter COO Ali Rowghani. It selectively writes checks for YC startups as they raise bigger rounds.

As part of the deal, Rowghani will be joining Segments board of directors. In the funding announcement, he said the startup is on a path to be among the most successful Y Combinator companies.

Three of Segments founders, including CEO Peter Reinhardt, dropped out of MIT to participate in YCs summer 2011 program. The companys products allow businesses to send their online data to different analytics and marketing tools, and to combine that data with customer information from services like Stripe, Salesforce, Mailchimp and Zendesk.

Reinhardt argued that the need for this kind of data infrastructure is only growing.

For the last five years, a lot of investors have been saying that at some point, this industry needs to consolidate you cant have more and more email marketing tools, he said. But instead, Companies are piecing together these best-in-class tools rather than these broad suites People like more and more specialized, niche tools for companies of their size or their geography or their industry.

And as companies employ a broader arsenal of marketing and analytics products, Reinhardt wants Segment to serve as their central customer data platform.

The product is already used by more than 15,000 customers, including Intuit, Atlassian and Gap. Reinhardt said that while Segment was initially adopted by startups, theres a big opportunity in selling the technology to large enterprises.

Hes also hoping to see Segment turn into a broader platform, where third parties can build products that tap into its data he said there are already more than 200 tools built on top of Segment, with 30 percent of them created by partners, rather than Segment itself.

The new round brings Segments total funding to $109 million. Previous investors Accel, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, and NEA also participated.

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Marketing data startup Segment raises $64M - TechCrunch

Facebook focuses on idea sharing, Twitter is all about broadcasting your thoughts, Instagram prioritizes the visually interesting, and Pinterest provides storage for the content and products you love. Each social media site is designed to serve a different purpose, so we use it differently. Its no surprise, then, that well watchand expectdifferent types of video on each platform.

In this post, were going to go over how to use video marketing on each individual social media site for best results, including ideal length, file size, and best practices.

Facebook video is more flexible than other types of social media video marketing; there arent time limits that would affect most businesses, and the diverse audience means that multiple types of content will perform well.

Facebook requires that all native videos be under 45 minutes long, and less than 1.75 GB. You should almost never get anywhere close to that 45 minutes. Instead, aiming for video lengths between two and four minutes long is ideal for Facebook. This allows for enough time for you to provide value without risking losing the viewers interest. In my personal experience, Facebook Ads should be kept to a minute and a half or less.

In general, Facebook users are most likely to share content that they find extremely emotionally engagingregardless of the emotion. Whether the video makes us laugh, cry, or both, we like content that makes us feel something.

Tutorials are also extremely effective on the platform, and are frequently saved by users because they provide value. As a result, users save the videos to benefit from the knowledge later.

Other Facebook video best practices to consider include:

Twitter is all about brevity, so it makes sense that the time limit is a heck of a lot shorter than Facebooks 45 minutes. Twitter requires that all videos be under two minutes and twenty seconds (which is up from its previous 30 second maximum). Videos also must be MP4s with AAC audio, and need to be 512MB or under.

Because Twitter is all about trending topics and breaking news, videos that are share brief snippets of valuable information can flourish on this platform. This includes videos of announcements about your business or product.

Videos about (or of) your event also perform well on Twitter. Encourage attendees to create their own videos and share them with the events hashtag.

Some Twitter video best practices to keep in mind include:

You can use Instagram videos in two places: in stories, and in the apps feed. Your video must be between 3 and 60 seconds long, though I highly recommend that stories are kept to 10 seconds or lessusers want to scroll through these quickly, like Snapchat-styled content. The file size for Instagram videos must be kept under 1 GB.

A wide variety of video types work well on Instagram. This includes tutorials, emotion-evoking content, breaking news, and more. Videos that center user-generated content (UGC) also perform exceedingly well on this platform, and should be used whenever possible.

Sharing brief snippets of a live event or information on upcoming news works incredibly well in the Story Format. Even boomerang videos (an example of which is pictured below) can be exceptionally efficient in stories.

Webcast, July 19th: The Blueprint to Build Trust in a Digital World

Instagram video best practices to keep in mind include:

The last time you were on Pinterest, did you see any videos? If your feed looked anything like mine, you didnt see many. This is good news: Pinterest has a native video player, meaning that users can watch the video from the pins close-up, but not a lot of businesses are using it yet. If you do, it can be easier to stand out.

To create a video pin, youll need to have the video uploaded somewhere else online. Then, pin that page, and choose the video as the pins feature image.

Given Pinterests audience and core usage, its no surprise that DIY content and tutorials will be the highest performing content on the site. Make sure to mention what the tutorial is in the videos description, and choose a video thumbnail that will represent it well. Pinterests video best practices include:

Each social media platform offers a different user experience, so it only makes sense that users will have different responses to different kinds of videos on each. By understanding these differencesboth in terms of platform requirements and user preferenceyoull be able to more successfully adapt your videos and your marketing campaigns to each site, increasing your results along the way.

What do you think? How do you adapt your videos for each platform? Which platform do you prefer most? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think!

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How to Use Video Marketing on Each Social Media Platform - Business 2 Community

Owned media and paid media are merging enter rented media.

What was once taken for granted as free access and unfettered distribution to brands audiences is now increasingly being charged for. For all the discussion of martech and ad tech colliding, whats been overlooked is that these technologies are simply following the media they power. Social, email, and now even web presence channels are increasingly not pure free media, but the media equivalent of freemium heading to premium only.

When Facebook and Twitter first exploded onto the digital media scene, brands couldnt get enough of it. These platforms encouraged brands to build out their pages, acquire followers and invest in regular publishing on social. The tech companies promised brands a way to engage with their audiences and told investors not to fret monetizing because the key was building a vibrant community first.

After significant investment by the brands, and huge growth by the platforms, we now live in a world where brands can organically reach only a small percentage of all those audiences they built, and they have to pay to actually reach the most and get noticed.

What was supposed to be a replacement to email for communicating more engagingly with audiences has become a much more expensive, but now necessary, way to do it. The marketing tech that supported social marketing has now evolved to support social advertising. Owned social media has become paid social media.

Email, a cornerstone of digital marketing, has for the longest time remained solely the province of marketing technology. Two developments have pushed the channel into advertising.

First, web email providers like Google have introduced paid email delivery where brands can now bid to place their emails at the top of the inbox, especially now that promotional emails may be hidden behind tabs that users dont bother to check regularly. So brands now once again have to pay to reach the same consumer or pay to reach new consumers in a channel previously free.

Second, the social platforms have evolved to more one-to-one communication messaging, like email, and have introduced paid formats around messaging. For example, LinkedIn now allows brands to send LinkedIn mail to target audiences on a cost-per-delivery model.

If beginning to pay for email and social werent worrisome enough, brands increasingly need to worry about their own web presence. While theyve been paying for search traffic to their websites for a long time, they are now beginning to have to pay for App Store traffic to their apps as the platforms continue to further monetize even free apps. Ad tech now supports mobile app installs and discovery.

Most worrisome in the future is the increasing power of telecom powerhouses that are entering advertising and media while controlling the actual pipes for digital bytes. Some have already begun to strike deals to not count traffic for consumers for certain brands, which, in effect, disadvantages those who dont pay up similarly.

The next step simply would be to charge brands for making websites load faster. Your own digital channel will no longer be owned, but rented you pay to stay.

Earned media will always have its place, but expect owned media and paid media to increasingly look alike. When they are identical, martech and ad tech will be one, and the brands will all be tenants of their tech landlords, not digital owners.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.

Originally posted here:
Rented media: When paid and owned media combine - MarTech Today

[Corrected, 2:25pm. See below] Tis the season for Boston tech startups founded in 2010and their productsto get acquired. Kinvey and Intrepid were bought last month, and now its SocMetrics turn. The Cambridge, MA-based social marketing companys original productcalled SocMetrics Influencer Platformhas been snapped up by Grapevine, a Boston marketing tech firm. Terms of the deal werent disclosed. [A previous version of this paragraph said SocMetrics the company was acquired. Wording was corrected to say its product has been acquiredEds.]

The acquisition seems to make sense for both companies. SocMetrics identifies social media influencers in specific categories for advertising and marketing purposes, and helps agencies engage with them. Grapevine works to connect brands and advertisers with these popular influencers to drive business.

SocMetrics raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2012 from Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, CommonAngels, Boston Seed Capital, 500 Startups, and angel investors.

Grapevine is led by CEO and co-founder Grant Deken. The company previously went through the Techstars Boston and MassChallenge accelerator programs. (SocMetrics is also a MassChallenge alum.) Earlier this year, Grapevine sold a majority stake to Sun Seven Stars, a Chinese media and investment group led by Bruno Wu.

In an e-mail, Deken says the SocMetrics platform acquisition will expand our strategic footprint and diversify our revenue and customer mix. He adds that SocMetrics software will be rebranded as Scout, and that Grapevine is on track to double its core business this year with half the staff size, as compared to last year.

SocMetrics was co-founded by Roy Rodenstein and Rebecca Xiong. They wont be joining Grapevine, but are advising the company during the transition, Deken says. Rodenstein says in a Twitter message that SocMetrics the company continues with our other marketing apps. [Comment from Rodenstein addedEds.]

Rodenstein and Xiong have a history of startup exits: a previous company of theirs, Going, was acquired by AOL in 2009. Xiong says on her LinkedIn page that she is currently CEO of GrowEpic. Rodenstein and Xiong are both involved with a service called MyTwitterManager, as well.

Marketing tech is as strong as ever in the Boston area. In addition to big players like HubSpot and Constant Contact (now owned by Endurance International Group Holdings), newer companies like ThriveHive, Crayon, Mautic, and Zaius have made recent progress in the field.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com.

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SocMetrics Scooped Up by Grapevine in Social Marketing Deal ... - Xconomy

Head of digital and social marketing shares how she's working to blur the line between marketing and sales

Sales and marketing are supposed to work in harmony, with one supporting the other to achieve the organisations revenue goals. In reality, the two functions often are at war. But a new social media strategy, coupled with some good old fashioned sales experience is helping Lenovo to finally bridge the gap.

Lenovos head of digital and social marketing for Asia Pacific, Danielle Uskovic, attributes her success in working effectively with her companys sales team partly due to her own sales background in the communications technology sector.

I actually sold the Internet to businesses I used to go in and try and convince businesses they needed to be connected to the Internet, and sell them 56K modems, Uskovic says. I literally had to cold call.

In her now role heading up social and digital at Lenovo, Uskovic has responsibility for setting strategy and rolling out projects and programmes throughout the region. But it is the work she is doing internally through the deployment of LinkedIns social selling tool Sales Navigator that is having immediate benefit for her companys sales team.

It is about how they use the knowledge they have in the offline world and transfer it into an online world, Uskovic says. It is a lot faster and more efficient to do it online, versus the old traditional way of cold calling. But they need to understand the nuances and how to use the tools that are available to them to actually make those connections.

Sales Navigator provides the opportunity for Lenovos sales team to utilise their relationships and knowledge about trends and customer behaviour to raise their visibility within key clients.

If you look at IT decision makers, they need to know what solution they want before they reach out, Uskovic says. But they all say they dont have time for reps to be trying to contact them. And when you ask where do they get their content, they get it from LinkedIn.

Once they have made up their mind, they will then reach out to three vendors. We need to be on that shortlist, and this is whats guaranteeing us to be on that shortlist.

Implementing Sales Navigator has required some behavioural changes within the sales teams themselves however, not the least of which has been for them to become more digitally-social.

There is so much that surrounds the tool that they need to understand, Uskovic says. Content is front and centre, and I have asked them to be producing one piece of longform content every month.

Lenovo has also created the TechRevolution.asia website as a thought leadership hub that the sales team can call on for content and ideas.

It is not heavily branded Lenovo, and looks very much like a tech publication, Uskovic says. But all of the articles on there have been written by our executive or marketing team, or even some of our sales leaders.

Despite her sales background, Uskovic says it still took approximately 12 months of internally championing the program before receiving consent from the senior executives.

That was really just trying to get senior executives to understand that traditional sales no longer exists, and that you actually have to think about how sales people can form and build relationships and position themselves differently in this digital world, she says.

It really that came back to the fact that I have done a sales role and lived and breathed it.

Those teams now using Sales Navigator are generating four times the engagement of non-users, and are nine times more connected to key decision makers, leading to improved lead generation and attendance at events. These boosted metrics are also leading to an increase in the one metric that ultimately matters revenue.

They are seeing an increase in their pipeline, Uskovic says. They are seeing a shorter sales cycle, because they can get real information in real time. It is helping them find the right people, get more engagement, and be more seen as a thought leader.

Ultimately, Uskovic sees programs such this as an inevitable step in the blurring of the sales and marketing functions

Salespeople need to be more like marketers in this new digital world, and marketers need to be more like sales people, she says.

More and more of the sales cycle is becoming the marketing responsibility. But then for a sales person it is becoming more and more a part of their responsibility to position themselves as thought leaders and market themselves as such. There is definitely a blurring happening.

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How Lenovo's social strategy is helping bridge the marketing/sales divide - CMO