Social media the new marketing frontier

Startups & Venture Capital

Awareness Inc. puts focus on social marketing

Getting the message out 

 

Boston Business Journal by Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal

Friday, November 23, 2012

Courtesy

Brian Zanghi, CEO of Burlington-based Awareness Inc., says there is a huge “appetite in learning about social marketing.”

Social media is a marketer’s dream.
Instead of merely presenting an ad with the hopes that someone will see it and act on it — a TV commercial, a promotion in print, a link scrolling along a Web page — social media enables businesses to target, interact with, and essentially court, current and prospective customers.
Facebook, Twitter and other growing platforms present an enormous and budding opportunity for marketing, but also unique challenges, according to Brian Zanghi, CEO of Burlington-based Awareness Inc., which provides a platform for companies to manage their social media presence.
Founded as iUpload, the seven-year-old company recognized the shifting marketing landscape in 2009, and re-launched itself to focus on social marketing software. Since that time, it’s grown from a customer base of 25 brands to more than 500 — including such giants as Major League Baseball and Sony Pictures — and has been backed by nearly $22 million in several funding rounds from Greylock Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.
“There’s such an interest and appetite in learning about social marketing,” said Zanghi.
An understandably so, as Facebook has recently swelled to 1 billion users and Twitter to more than 500 million. Through its “Social Marketing Hub,” Awareness helps businesses reach its customers in that vast audience by allowing them to publish, manage, and measure their social media activities on various sites while prospecting for, and directly interacting with, users. Its platform and “Social Analytics” module allows marketers to publish to several sites with one click, collect and store social data, analyze for trends, and identify, store and rank prospects based on parameters they define.
In addition to its portfolio of brands, the company also licenses its product to other companies.
“It really is about acquiring customers socially by collecting data, scoring that data, and then acting on it,” Zanghi explained.
For example, Major League Baseball uses its software to collect profiles and target offers to those most likely to take advantage of them; meanwhile, Fox Broadcasting Company tracks profiles of its viewers that actively discuss its shows, identifies its most “influential” viewers, and targets ads to both them and its competitors.
“This is really new stuff for advertisers and marketers,” said Rebecca Lieb, an analyst with The Altimeter Group.
Most notably, she pointed out the difference between traditional “interruptive” advertising and social media’s “participatory” advertising.
“There are all kinds of opportunities when you actually talk to your customers and listen to them, rather than just interrupt them with your messages,” she said.
Beyond marketing, those include the ability to provide a customer service channel, she said, as well as public relations and reputation management. For example, she said, a company like American Express will directly answer questions and complaints via Twitter, while automotive companies have even added features based on what people have discussed on social media.
“This isn’t just marketing,” she said, “it’s R&D.”

Original story link here.