Mediaboss Marketing

HootSuite announced today that it has acquired Seesmic, a competitor in the social marketing management software space. Both companies develop platforms that allow people and businesses to coordinate and monitor their marketing across multiple social network platforms.

Weve always been big fans of Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team, since the days we were all pioneering the social media landscape. said Seesmic CEO Loc Le Meur. Were thrilled today to announce that Seesmic is joining HootSuite, and were excited for our users: they are becoming part of the HootSuite family, and they will be able to continue to build their brand and social business.

HootSuite and Seesmic were founded around the same time in 2008, though it took a year for Seesmic to move into its social network marketing platform development. HootSuite focuses heavily on marketing its services to its business clients, which it says includes 79 of the Fortune 100 companies. Over the past year, HootSuite has added support for many niche and business social platforms.

I have always had a lot of respect for Seesmics CEO, Loc Le Meur, and the role Seesmic has played in advancing social business. said HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes. We are thrilled to welcome Seesmics users into the HootSuite family.

Details of the acquisition, including how much HootSuite paid for Seesmic, have not been disclosed. In addition, HootSuite was vague on what the future holds for the Seesmic client. HootSuite did, however, invite Seesmic business customers to subscribe to HootSuite Pro, suggesting that Seesmic may be shut down or rolled into HootSuite in some way. Whatever the case, its clear that HootSuite acquired Seesmic for its talent and clients, not its platform.

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HootSuite Acquires Social Management Startup Seesmic

STAMFORD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

PQ Media, a leader in emerging media research and analytics, and uberVU, a leading social marketing platform for real-time end-to-end social media audience measurement, have collaborated to release the first uberVU Leading Social Brand Report, the first industry report to provide monthly tracking of social media conversations for leading brands by product category. The report created and developed by PQ Media uses real-time uberVU data for the month of July to rank the Top 100 social brands and Top 10 product categories by social media impressions. According to uberVU data, 10.6 billion total social media brand impressions were generated by the Top 100 brands in July, with global media mentions split 44% U.S. and 56% Rest-of-World.

Top Ten Brands Dominate the Top 100 Leading Social Brands by a Wide Margin in July

In a global blow out, Coke was the #1 social media brand with 1.4 billion impressions outperforming #2 Apple by 719 million impressions. Coke social media mentions split 13% U.S. and 87% Rest-of-World, while Apple mentions split 28% U.S. and 72% RoW. Rounding out the remaining uberVU Top 10 Social Media Brands for July were one beverage (Sprite), one retailer (Amazon), three consumer technology brands (Google, Microsoft, Samsung), and three restaurants (Burger King, McDonalds, Starbucks).

July 2012

IMPs (000)

Source: PQ Media, uberVU

Three Product Categories Near Tied in July with Impressions Topping Two Billion

The Consumer Technology category edged out 1st place with 2.6 billion social media impressions, followed closely by Beverages with 2.5 billion, and Restaurants with 2.4 billion. Automakers, with more than 1 billion fewer impressions, took 4th place. Global media mentions varied for each of the Top 4 social media product categories, i.e. Consumer Technology U.S. 50%, RoW 50%; Beverages U.S. 34%, RoW 66%; Restaurants U.S. 45%, RoW 55%; Automakers U.S. 39%, RoW 61%.

July 2012

Read the original here:
Top Ten Consumer Brands Dominate 10.6 Billion Social Media Impressions in First Syndicated Audience Measurement Report ...

MADISON, WI--(Marketwire -08/30/12)- Shoutlet, the leading cloud-based self-serve social marketing platform, today announced integration and support of foursquare for the Shoutlet 5.0 platform. Beyond tracking check-ins, mayorship, photos, and tips, marketers will have access to multi-level reports for their locations to keep a pulse on venue activity and visitor demographics. As a result, marketers will be able to plan better location-based specials as part of their social campaign strategy.

"As a Shoutlet customer, we're very excited about the recent foursquare integration, as it will allow us to more effectively manage our 500+ foursquare brand and hotel-level venues worldwide," said Tiffany Strobel, Social Media & Community Manager, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International. "It's nice to be able to do all of this from one dashboard, instead of logging-in to multiple sites."

Do-it-yourself marketers will be able to do the following activities for foursquare on the Shoutlet platform:

These features are currently available for beta customers, and will be open to all Shoutlet customers in the near future.

"It's great to see Shoutlet making these features available to their customers in a unified social marketing platform, and we're excited to watch the functionality expand as more features are enabled in the foursquare Merchant API," Eric Friedman, Director of Sales Operations, foursquare.

"We set out to create a meaningful service for do-it-yourself marketers with features that our customers crave and will ultimately help them do their job better," said Shoutlet CEO Jason Weaver. "With the addition of foursquare, we feel confident that marketers will gain a new level of insight into potential customers. In addition, the integration will help them create impactful specials to drive traffic into retail locations."

About Shoutlet

Shoutlet is a leading cloud-based enterprise social marketing platform that enables marketers to publish, engage, and measure social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, foursquare, Twitter, and YouTube. Its industry leading functionality includes a Social CRM for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube management; Social Canvas for Facebook tabs, HTML5 pages, and custom contest and web app design; Social Switchboard for trigger-based campaign publishing; Social Profiles for data acquisition and interest segmentation; Social Enterprise for corporate-level control of multiple brands, franchises, and agents; and Social Analytics for metric tracking and custom reporting. For more information, please visit http://www.shoutlet.com.

About foursquare

Foursquare makes the real world easier to use by providing tools that help you keep up with friends, discover what's nearby, save money, and unlock deals. Whether you're setting off on a trip around the world, coordinating a night out with friends, or trying to pick out the best dish at your local restaurant, foursquare is the perfect companion. For more information, check out https://foursquare.com.

See the article here:
Shoutlet Announces Foursquare Integration to Help Marketers Deploy and Manage Powerful Location-Based Programs

At a time when the still-nascent social marketing niche is still in search of leaders, the Social Media Advertising Consortium (SMAC)today is doubling in size with the addition of 10 new members.

Among them areSabrina Calouri, HBOs vp of social media and performance marketing, whosaid that the growing number of social platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr makes best-practice sharing increasingly important.

In the last quarter or so, newer platforms have hit critical mass, she said. You are going to see more activity on those platforms from HBO. We are now thinking about many platforms, rather than focusing on one or two.

Another new SMAC member is Karen Spiegel, an svp and managing director for R/GA. Its an interesting group of people from agencies, brandsome are clientsand other industry players," she said. "The organization is on the smaller side. So you really have an opportunity to hear what they are doing, hear about their challenges and hear about the ideas they are testing out. Theres so much unknown today in terms of where things are going.

Here's a list of SMAC's other new members:

Alan Osetek, president of Resolution Media, an Omnicom Media Group Company Rikard Steiber, global marketing director, mobile and social advertising, Google/Google+ Karen Robinovitz, cofounder, Digital Brand Architects Avi Savar, founder, Big Fuel Joe Burton, president, SocialChorus Reggie Bradford, CEO, Vitrue Mike Edelhart, CEO, Pivotcon Sharon Feder, COO, Mashable

Originally posted here:
HBO, R/GA, Omnicom Join Social Ads Consortium

Kristina: What does Zuberance do for brands?

Rob Fuggetta, CEO, Zuberance: Zuberance is the leading Brand Advocate Platform company. We provide a unique Brand Advocate Platform that makes it easy for retailers and online brands to systematically and continually identify and energize their authentic Brand Advocates. This is enabling retailers and online brands to increase conversion rates and sales, generate referral traffic, and slash customer acquisition costs. For example, Ancestry.com - a Zuberance customer - generated over 8,000 highly positive recommendations from its Advocates in only about three months. Ancestry.com Advocates shared these recommendations with their Facebook friends and Twitter followers, enabling Ancestry.com to reach millions of prospects with trusted, relevant advice.

Kristina: Social media has exploded over the past 18 months; how important is the social space for retailers and online brands?

Rob: Social media is incredibly important for retailers and online brands. As everyone knows, social media has empowered and amplified consumers. A single post by a consumer can reach 10,000 people if it's passed along only three times, according to Facebook. Ninety-four percent of consumers trust peer recommendations but only 24 percent trust ads, Nielsen says. That's why it's critically important that brands to find their highly-satisfied customers (which we call "Brand Advocates") and empower them to tell your brand story and help sell your products.

Kristina: How can a brand tell the difference between a sometime-shopper and a true brand advocate?

Rob: At Zuberance, we help companies identify their Brand Advocates by asking the "Ultimate Question" for customer loyalty: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this brand or product to a friend?" Customers who answer 9 or 10 are considered Brand Advocates. We then give Brand Advocates online applications that make it easy for them to recommend the brand or product plus share promotional offers and content with their friends. Via Zuberance's Advocate Analytics, we can determine whether Advocates are actually recommending the brand, how often, and what the results of these recommendations are (in-bound clicks, referrals, sales, etc.)

More from Rob and Zuberance tomorrow - including his advice for engaging brand advocates.

Tags: WOM advertising, Zuberance, social ads, social marketing, social marketing tips, social presence

See the rest here:
How Zuberance is helping social brands