Mediaboss Marketing

Social media is taking over as the recognized way to spread the word about your brand and its products. Today it is essential to have an online component to your marketing efforts and sites like Facebook and Twitter are some the hottest spaces available. The wine industry has been one of the fields to take the most advantage of the new platforms. In fact, wineries have an online presence rivaling anything they have ever tried before.

A slide show available from Slideshare.net, featuring research by ABLE social media marketing has provided us with some interesting details about how prominent social marketing has become in the wine industry and the amazing results the efforts have yielded.

To get things rolling take a look a this chart revealing how many wineries are on Twitter and Facebook. The study focused on France and the United States, but I am limiting my discussion to the United States only for now.

Heres the same information for Fickr and YouTube:

Half of the wineries form the survey have more than 500 fans on Facebook and well over a third have at least 500 followers on Twitter. The survey creators wondered what contributed to wineries having many fans. The answer? Almost half of them have dedicated marketing managers that create and promote advertising on social media platforms.

About 30% are using Facebook ads for promotion and 47% of them say the ads actually do attract business. 28% of the wineries report that Twitter helped draw in some new business. Both platforms scored in the mid 60% range for engaging customers in a winery brand. Facebook ads resulted in people visiting the winery in 58% of cases and Twitter did the same in 45% of the cases.

So we can see that social media is having a dramatic impact on wine drinkers. Almost three quarters of wineries say they plan to have more activity on social media platforms and the half that currently has no presence on Facebook says they do plan on breaking into social media in 2012.

See the original post:
How Social Media Revolutionized Wine Marketing & Sales

Oracle announced an agreement to acquire cloud-based social marketing platform Virtue.

Virtue is designed to let marketers manages social marketing campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ from one place.

Oracle wrote in a blog post:

The proliferation of social media has changed the way that organizations and consumers interact. Vitrues social marketing platform helps organizations enhance their social marketing efforts to the next level of social engagement by giving brands the ability to scale across multiple social networks, target messages from global to local, create unique and consistent brand experiences, and publish content that engages fans and drives leads.

Together, Oracle and Vitrue plan to enable a unified social experience across customer interactions, resulting in meaningful customer engagements with consistent brand experiences across all channels and media; improved return on investment for social sales and marketing campaigns across paid, owned and social media; and enhanced customer service through real-time responsiveness and high touch engagement.

The worlds greatest brands have been built by creating meaningful relationships between organizations and their customers, said Virtue CEO Reggie Bradford. As a part of Oracle, we can help our customers ensure that consistent high-touch social engagement is delivered across marketing, sales and service interactions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though TechCrunch indicates the price is $300 million. The deal is expected to close this summer. In the meantime, the two companies will continue to operate independently.

Here is the original post:
Oracle Acquires Virtue, A Social Marketing Platform

21-05-2012 08:15 Hager Sharp's Lynne Doner Lotenberg and Darcy Sawatzki co-authored an article (along with Ann Abercrombie) entitled Building Partnerships to Build the Best Bones Forever!: Applying the 4Ps to Partnership Development in the March 2012 issue of Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ).

Excerpt from:
Using Social Marketing to Build Partnerships - Video

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

FANCRU, the leading sports fan engagement and loyalty marketing platform, today announced it is the solution of choice for Blackbear Saloon to power its online and mobile social marketing campaigns for its sixteen bars in the tri-state area. With this partnership, Blackbear Saloon has access to a range of data analytics tools to engage, retain and reward their customers and sports fans. Across its properties, Blackbear Saloon can now create custom campaigns, measure fan engagement levels, and leverage location and fan data for targeted offers.

We utilize a range of social marketing tools, including Twitter and Facebook, but what we like best about FANCRU is that it is a sports app at its core. It allows us to not only reach fans with custom campaigns specific to their team loyalty, but also to utilize FANCRUs data analysis tools to further engage and reward our fans, said Todd Kosakowski, CEO, Blackbear Saloon. With the app we now know what sports teams a fan is coming to watch, for which games, and how often. While we used to base this knowledge, to some extent, on what jerseys people are wearing, now we can not only create rewards for these particular fans but also better understand the breakdown of our customer base.

Were thrilled to be working with a leading establishment like Blackbear Saloon as we focus not only on our mobile application for sports fans, but also on our backend platform and the value it brings to our venue, brand and sports team partners, said Bill Diamond, CEO of FANCRU. Were happy that Blackbear Saloon recognizes that value and will be taking advantage of our platform to grow its business by providing a more complete experience to customers and sports fans.

To kick off this partnership, Blackbear Saloon establishments will reward customers a free draft beer when a certain number of fans show up to watch a game at one of the sixteen locations. For example, for University of Michigan night, when twenty fans check-in via the app at the bar, FANCRUs system automatically sends each fan a coupon to their phone to be immediately redeemed by their server. At the end of the night, the platform sends a batch report to the bar manager for management ease.

About FANCRU

FANCRU is the sports fan engagement and loyalty marketing platform powering passionate sports fans. FANCRUs platform enables sports fans to represent their team loyalty, show allegiance during the game, receive real-time score updates, chat, cheer and vent with other fans through the apps Game Feed, and locate where to watch games with other similarly-minded fans nearby. Sports fans are the most fiercely loyal brand advocates and FANCRU is the glue to game day and beyond allowing brands, teams and leagues to engage with their loyal constituents whether they can get to the stadium or not.

Go here to see the original:
Blackbear Saloon Chooses FANCRU’s Sports Fan Engagement and Loyalty Marketing Platform for Campaigns Across its 16 Tri ...

SALT LAKE CITY, May 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --GroSocial today announced the close of a $1,000,000 Series A funding round led by Kickstart Seed Fund, with additional contributions from Monarch Ventures, Rock & Hammer Ventures, and several other angel investors.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120522/LA09731LOGO)

GroSocial's flagship product, Customizer, is a drag-and-drop app builder thathelps businesses acquire new customers by creating their own contests, sweepstakes, and other promotional offers that can be published directly onto their business Facebook Pages. While GroSocial's platform is primarily geared toward helping small businesses, the company's client roster includes larger businesses including eBay and Skullcandy.

"We're thrilled to have the continued support of such a solid group of investors. Having helped tens of thousands of businesses realize a meaningful ROI in their social media marketing efforts, we're excited to increase our outreach and make social media marketing simple and affordable for a greater number of small businesses," said Zach Mangum, CEO of GroSocial.

"Small businesses are starting to understand that they need a social media strategy and are looking to service providers for help. GroSocial, through its white label product, allows these large service providers to offer the best product on the market to their customers without the unnecessary delays associated with developing a product in-house," said Gavin Christensen, Managing Director of Kickstart Seed Fund.

GroSocial's white labeling capabilities have allowed the company to scale tremendously over the last nine months by adding several large partners that now resell the company's offering to their respective customer bases. Additional co-branded integrations with strategic partners such as HubSpot, SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, and others have also contributed significantly to the company's accelerated growth.

The new funding will be used to double the company's headcount and will enable the company to enhance its platform with social marketing campaign automation features and integrations with additional social networking sites. "Our goal is to make the cooler, more productive social media marketing campaign options accessible to the small guy via an affordable, centralized, easily managed all-in-one platform," said Mangum.

About GroSocial

GroSocial (www.grosocial.com), headquartered in Orem, Utah, is a creator of social media marketing software for small and medium-sized businesses. The company's core product, Customizer, is a drag-and-drop app builder for business Facebook Pages that helps thousands of businesses worldwide affordable increase their social media presence and influence through effective, targeted branding, community creation, social contests and promotions, and public relations. GroSocial can be found on Facebook at http://facebook.com/grosocial and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/grosocial.

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Social Media Marketing Shop GroSocial Raises Another $1 Million