Mediaboss Marketing

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.

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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

CHICAGO, May 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --MapsNshop.com (http://www.mapsnshop.com), the first geo-social product marketing platform for businesses, has fully revamped and relaunched its site to now include Facebook and Twitter applications for business and consumer accounts so that users can streamline social media marketing campaigns and outreach. The geo-social media platform merges social media and location advertising to provide businesses with an innovative channel for quickly and easily promoting products and services to local consumers.

"Our new features connect to Facebook and Twitter effortlessly, so it takes a business less than 10 seconds to introduce all the products that it's featured on MapsNshop to Facebook followers, for example," said MapsNshop CEO Dare (pronounced "Derry") Ajala.

MapsNshop accounts now feature Facebook and Twitter icons that send users to their respective social media sites. The Facebook tool provides businesses with a menu of product photos from their MapsNshop page so that users can simply select which products they want to display and then press the "Post to Facebook" button. Their Facebook Page will immediately display the selected product photos along with the product names and descriptions. Consumers can use MapsNshop's Facebook application to recommend a particular product to their friends.

MapsNshop's Twitter application lets businesses click on a product in their account and automatically send a promotional tweet to that business' Twitter followers. The tweet identifies the selected product by name and includes a link to the item at the MapsNshop account page.

"As of now, no other product out there has these features," stated Dare. "We are leveling the playing field for small businesses by enabling them to put their products in front of their consumers without having to worry about the typical costs that go along with it. Instead of a 'mom and pop shop' that's making quality products getting shut out of the market because no one knows about them, MapsNshop enables customers to find you no matter where you are. At the same time, we are providing large retail stores with a channel through which they can coordinate the merging of product display and social media on a large scale."

The geo-social platform has been steadily adding tools that make businesses known to customers in their area. For example, MapsNshop.com's Product page includes a "Search by Product" dialog box that displays a map of relevant, local businesses within a 10-mile radius of the user's location. Consumers can find basic information such as business name, address and ranking from the map or click through to that business' MapsNshop account where they can see a slideshow of products.

"Consumers are looking for ways to answer the questions of where and how to buy what they need easily, quickly and locally while businesses are looking for the most direct options of putting their products in front of the ideal consumer," said Dare. "MapsNshop helps both parties answer their questions."

Contact:

Dare Ajala info@mapsnshop.com 888-556-2744 http://www.mapsnshop.com/

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Geo-Social Marketing Platform MapsNshop Adds Facebook and Twitter Integration to Further Level the Online Marketing ...

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Indaba Music, the leading online community of musicians and marketplace for music opportunities, today launched its Social Contest Suite, an end-to-end music marketing platform that connects its more than 700,000 independent musicians with fans via a socially integrated music discovery product. Aimed at brands and record labels alike, the Social Contest Suite syndicates musician actions including recording and fan actions such as voting through Facebook and other web properties to amplify authentic user-generated conversations. The toolset has been optimized with the help of user and client feedback to simplify the experience.

A common challenge that our music industry and brand clients face is how to connect with a larger audience via digital marketing campaigns. Indaba Musics Social Contest Suite provides marketers with a scalable solution by leveraging social networks and the traffic of their own, branded properties, said J.J. Rosen, Chief Executive Officer, Indaba Music. With this launch were uniquely positioned to painlessly connect brands and record labels with musical talent to create custom, unique content thats then amplified by millions of socially connected fans.

Indaba Music began developing its Social Contest Suite in late 2011 in response to the success of its Opportunity Marketplace programs and the growing consumption of music across social networks. Successful previous campaigns include Red Bull, Kate Spade NY, Alicia Keys and Staind. Designed to convert social actions into earned media, those campaigns averaged 27 minutes of listening per fan and a 500% increase in social actions per campaign that in turn earned each program over 20M digital impressions.

Providing new music to my fans on Facebook is exciting to take part in. It's fun to post photos and video clips, but it's a totally different proposition to bring fans into my creative process and invite them to collaborate through my music, said Matisyahu. With Indaba Music's Social Contest Suite I'm able to hear the collaborations from musicians all around the world and watch that creativity explode across a variety of social networks. I enjoy watching my fans share and interact with my music, something Indaba Music truly helps enable.

The Social Contest Suite includes the following product features:

About Indaba Music

Indaba Music first pioneered the online music collaboration space in 2007, enabling anyone with Internet access to connect with musicians from around the world to create, edit and mix studio-quality music online. Indaba Music now provides musicians with opportunities and reasons to make music including remix contests, sync and licensing opportunities, and branded marketing programs. Indaba Music currently boasts members from over 200 countries around the world.

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Indaba Music Launches Social Contest Suite Amplifying Music Marketing for Brands and Record Labels

Facebook loses GM's advertising business - does this have larger implications on the state of social media and e-ads?

Talk about poor timing: the same day that Bloomberg reported that Facebooks IPO is falling short of investors expectations, GM announces it has decided to pull all of its Facebook advertising. And thats no small account Facebook has lost it was a $10 million account.

According to the Wall Street Journal, GM decided to nix its Facebook campaign efforts after concluding the paid ads didnt significantly impact buyers. While the company says its business page is still a product it intends to invest in, it will no longer use the Facebook paid advertisement system.

This is bad news for Facebook for a few reasons. Losing an account especially a big one hurts, especially when its been made this public. But the larger impact is that this fuels the overvalued fire that just wont be extinguished. The skeptics have been crying foul since whispers of the word billions starting being thrown around: Facebook is big, sure, but its unproven. And a big part of all this caution has been uncertainly about the companys ad platform.

Facebook is trying to better corner mobile, where ads have been noticeably absent until recently. In fact Facebook recently edited its S-1 filing in order to reflect this change. Based upon our experience in the second quarter of 2012 to date, the trend we saw in the first quarter of DAUs increasing more rapidly than the increase in number of ads delivered has continued, an added section of the document reads. We believe this trend is driven in part by increased usage of Facebook on mobile devices where we have only recently begun showering an immaterial number of sponsored stories in News Feed, and in part due to certain pages having fewer ads per page as a result of product decisions.

Basically, Facebook user numbers are increasing but ads arent part of this is because of mobile growth, but youre certainly welcome to wonder if it also means the ratio of users to ad buyers is increasingly at odds.

Facebook isnt the only social site to raise eyebrows over ad monetization platforms. The stories of Twitters revenue struggles are almost as old as the site. Even after launching its self-serve ad platform, not everyone is convinced of its effectiveness as a marketing medium.

But theres a conflict here: Facebook and Twitter have the users these numbers are climbing, no doubt about it. And pundits continue to predict that social media ad spending will only increase. At the same time, there seems to be general confusion on making certain these campaigns are working. It doesnt help that while marketers are trying to adapt to this system, the likes of Facebook and Twitter are reinventing it. Everyones moving at different paces with different agendas, and considering the fact its not surprise that e-advertising has yet to hit its stride with even our most popular social networks.

So will this hurt the Facebook IPO? Dont get too caught up in the pre-May 18 (probably?) hype. Whether or not Facebook worked for GM, advertisers simply cannot and will not ignore it, but they might have to struggle with it. And because Facebook is Facebook, they will.

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GM pulls Facebook advertising amid growing concerns over social media marketing