At Buddy Media we like to move fast. We like to innovate and we like to have fun.
We acquired social commerce and analytics company Spinback this past May and fully integrated it into our social marketing suite as ConversionBuddy in September. Earlier this month, we were one of only four charter members named to LinkedIn’s certified developer program.
Most importantly to us, users rank us best. Buddy Media was the only vendor out of 41 to be named a “BEST” solution vendor in a recent survey of 389 brands by analyst firm Gleanster. This was the highest ranking, which users voted us across all four categories: ease of deployment, ease of use, features and functionality and overall value.
Today is another very big day at Buddy Media, and a big day for all of our customers and partners. Today we announced the launch of several new products and features. Perhaps most exciting though is ReachBuddy™. A new product in our social marketing suite, ReachBuddy gives brands, retailers, publishers and their agencies powerful tools to create, manage and track social content anywhere on the web.
We are constantly listening to our customers and it’s clear that today’s solutions for building social content are not fast enough to keep up with the changing world. Everyday the landscape changes and brand marketers need a fast way to build and maintain content in this new social landscape. We are especially pleased with this release, as now our customers can use Buddy Media technology not only on social networks but also on any web property.
Our customers already use more than 50 social applications, aka “Sapplets” in our ProfileBuddy product to build out their Facebook Pages. Now, via ReachBuddy, they can also embed customized social content and applications onto any website.
We’re excited that the ReachBuddy Beta partners are some of the largest brands in the world, including PepsiCo, the National Football League, Hearst Magazines Digital Media, Carnival Cruise Lines and Refinery29.
Specifically, PepsiCo utilized ReachBuddy to distribute video on the website developed for sponsorship of the hit TV show, The X Factor. The video on the bottom left (shown below) is powered by ReachBuddy, and shows fans how to use the “Snap It, Send It” technology found on PepsiCo packaging in stores to acquire exclusive content from The X Factor.
And here’s what the backend, or dashboard looks like. Creating new open web applications is incredibly simple, and they can be added to any website, blog or microsite via a simple embed code.
Here are some additional ReachBuddy dashboard screenshots. The first shows how easy it is to select a standard size for your content, so it will fit nicely into your website or blog. The second shows the ability to schedule this content.
ReachBuddy is a major step forward for brands and agencies, but it’s only one part of today’s release.
So what else is new? You can read through our news release, which outlines everything in great detail, but I’ll get into some of the highlights here as well.
C-Rank™
C-Rank™ is our new proprietary index that benchmarks Buddy Media clients and their use of the Buddy Media social marketing suite, compared to others in their industry vertical.
The Buddy Media C-Rank™ tool tracks Twitter and Facebook engagement (e.g. Comments, ‘likes’, ‘shares’, retweets), link engagement and sapplet (social application) engagement across multiple social networks. It then evaluates content effectiveness, assigning a numerical score from 0-100. The index is called C-Rank™ as it focuses on the four C’s of social marketing: communication, community, content and creative.
Custom User Dashboards
We want to give you the most control possible over your data and how it is displayed. Our new dashboards help meet the various social analytics needs of different types of users. Most companies offer a single, rigid dashboard for all users – from the CMO to the community manager – even though users have different goals in social media, from sales and conversions to engagement.
Brands can set up different dashboards for different social accounts, team members or product. Agencies can create multiple dashboards for all clients or social accounts, for example, a Facebook Page or Twitter account. You can literally build out these dashboards in minutes for every client or brand you manage.
Seeding Content and Enhanced Granular Rights Provisioning
While some may not consider this part of the release as “sexy” as the others, it is a crucial enhancement for our clients. We added robust content seeding and granular rights provisioning features that enable users to establish publishing hierarchies to seed approved content to specific users or teams, automate content approval workflows and ensure regulatory compliance via archiving.
One user can create content and seed it out to different users, for example, one user can now create content and seed it out to different users, say a local brand manager or franchise. Users can either suggest a specific date for the content to publish, or to set a time range during which a user may post the content.
In addition to ReachBuddy, C-Rank, custom dashboards and other innovations, Buddy Media clients can now choose the Buddy Media products they want to purchase based on their needs. This opens up the following use cases for Buddy Media clients:
- ECOMMERCE/RETAIL: Retailers are now using ReachBuddy and ConversionBuddy, powered by Buddy Media, to track social content and sharing on their ecommerce stores to turn social activity from current customers into new customers and incremental revenue.
- ONLINE PUBLISHING: Publishers can use ReachBuddy and ConversationBuddy, powered by Buddy Media, to turn visitors into viral referral engines, increasing advertising inventory, signups and subscriptions.
- BRANDS: Social experiences powered by Buddy Media no longer need to live within Facebook tabs and Walls. ReachBuddy, powered by Buddy Media, makes all content, anywhere on the web, through its 50+ sapplets that can be deployed web-wide.
I speak for the entire Buddy Media team when I say that this is only the beginning. We have an aggressive product release schedule for year end and in to 2012.
This is in addition to all of the regular product updates we make in our weekly releases and updates. For those looking to learn more, I suggest signing up for our ReachBuddy webinars, on Tuesday, October 25th at 9am and 2pm ET and Wednesday, October 26th at 9am and 2pm ET. We’ll go over every aspect of ReachBuddy, as well as answer all of your questions.
