#buddymedia

[socialstudiocrm-blog]

Old School Radian6 users - wondering what is so awesome about the new Social Studio from Salesforce Marketing Cloud?  Login and see the new face of listening with Social Studio Analyze, with either existing or new Topic Profiles. 

[shiftsummit-blog]

Twitter Allows Alcohol

While Twitter may not be providing the alcohol, they may soon be allowing alcohol marketers to jump on board the 140-character highway.

Due to age-verification rules, Twitter has always fallen behind Facebook when it came to being a means for alcohol marketers to, well, market. With Facebook, users must enter their age while signing up for an account, so alcohol marketers already know who they can and cannot market to.

Since there is not a great deal of information needed about a person in order to join Twitter, the social network doesn’t have the same type of advantage. Even to be absolutely sure, some alcohol-related Facebook pages would ask the user to verify their age before giving them access to the page. This seemed impossible on Twitter…until now.

Right now, a new tool is being tested that will allow alcohol marketers on Twitter to check ages. Twitter has recently partnered with BuddyMedia, a social media management company, who is creating a new tool to help bring age verification to Twitter. As of now, the tool is already created but is being tested on a few small groups in order to work out any kinks. The launch date of the tool depends heavily on the testing reviews.

How is the new tool going to work?

The concept is pretty simple. Any user who clicks on a brand because they want to follow it will be sent a direct message telling the user that their age needs to be verified first. In the direct message, users will find a link to a website that requests the user to enter their date of birth. The site even gives users 24 hours to fill it out (even though they don’t need that much time). And the best part is that once a user has verified their age for one alcohol-related brand, they don’t have to do it again in order to follow other alcohol brands... Read the complete and original post at www.dreamgrow.com

[soszial]

A New Beginning - Is Fear Holding You Back?

[jdecide-blog]

Is fear hold you back? Watch this inspirational video from the Founder of BuddyMedia, which just sold to Salesforce for $745m.

JustDecide. Decisions Gone Social.

[ericnovik]

I met Mike Lazarow in 2010 at an NYCSeed Start event.  He just sold his fourth company, Buddy Media, for $651MM to Salesforce.com.  This is his story.

[razorfishbuzzcut-blog]

Buzzing about Buddy

The digital marketing industry is buzzing the last few days about the pending acquisition of Buddy Media by Salesforce, a leading CRM technology company.   This follows last week’s news that Oracle acquired Vitrue, one of Buddy Media’s competitors. 

What’s going on here?  Well, first, Oracle’s purchase can be seen as an example of an enterprise technology company buying its way into the growing social media space.  It’s fairly easy to see how the pieces fit together:  the reporting and analytics components of Vitrue’s solution can be integrated into Oracle’s product suite and this data can be leveraged for better targeting and data mining to drive engagement and sales. 

The Salesforce combination with Buddy Media looks to be an even better fit.  Salesforce already has integrated Radian6, a major listening platform, into its robust CRM feature set.  With Buddy Media, Salesforce will have the ability to activate and publish out to any customer or group, going beyond the data mining and listening capabilities that Salesforce/Radian has now. 

What doesn’t make sense – at least from my point of view – is the eye-popping sales price of the Buddy Media purchase, reportedly at $800 Million. 

Why? Well, all of these social publishing platforms still have a long way to go and some more than others.  Here at Razorfish, we have pretty much worked with all of them, including Buddy Media and Vitrue.  And if you talk with our social media teams across our network, they will tell you that the reality of what these solutions provide is less than what they promise.

What you need to know is that there are at least four major areas where these solutions must continue to evolve in order to meet their potential. 

1.      Reliability – These platforms are notoriously buggy, with code issues and server failures that affect the performance of publishing tools and applications.  Some teams working on large Facebook pages find it more reliable to manually build and post, than to use a social content management system (CMS).    Until these platforms can demonstrate full reliability, it’s difficult for marketers to pay attention to some of the newer and sexier bells and whistles that are being promised.

2.     Customization – As social experience development continues to evolve, marketers need more robust tools that can be completely customized.  The social CMS platforms either constrain the developer into standard solutions, ie Facebook applications, or require the developer to learn new code to build a completely custom experience.  The platforms will continue to be pressured to provide quickly deployable, but rich social experiences.

3.      Actionable targeting – Whether through organic or paid media, the opportunity to deliver customized content based on what people are liking/sharing/tweeting/pinning is yet to be fully realized.  Yes, this data is being captured, but the promise of fully leveraging this data into actionable content publishing is still in its infancy.

4.      End-to-end publishing – While the social CMS platforms are focused on publishing to social networks, marketers are looking to distribute and engage customers across channel, including their website, display media, search, email and mobile.  Buddy Media already has an offering to start to do this with ReachBuddy, but this omni-channel capability is where these platforms really need to get to.  This is one of the goals of Razorfish’s Fluent platform, which provides an infrastructure to distribute content across channels and devices.

What do you think of the Buddy Media acquisition?  How do you think the social CMS platforms need to evolve?  The comment section awaits.

As VP Social Media, Chris Bowler leads the Razorfish social media practice and can be found waiting at the gate for his next flight somewhere.  Ping him at @chrisrbowler

[michaelbatistich]

Facebook Page Trends by @lazerow @buddymedia #LeWeb

via slideshare.net

[ftvweb11]

3 questions à Michael Lazerow, BuddyMedia L'interview de Michael Lazerow, BuddyMedia, sur le stand de France Télévisions.