Social Intelligence
Buddy Media and the Socialization of the Enterprise
If you didn’t think that social was king already, then consider the case of Buddy Media. They’ve revolutionized social on the enterprise level, and they did it right in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis.
When the world still thought that Facebook was just a silly website that only college students and those with too much time on their hands used, founder Mike Lazerow saw the potential for the social network to become a multi-million dollar company and was laughed off the stage at CNN for it, as related by James Altucher (Managing Director of Formula Capital) in a guest post over on TechCrunch several weeks ago.
Now there’s no question that social networks are vital and necessary in order to truly leverage the power of your brand and your customers. To help you do that, Buddy Media’s suite of social media marketing tools not only helps you build a more powerful presence online, but it also delivers data-driven insights into your customers, following the leads process from the first point of contact all the way through closing the deal. It’s not just about making it easier to reach customers by creating Facebook ad campaigns–it’s about creating a stronger brand online as well.
The value in what Buddy Media does was made supremely clear just last month when Salesforce.com acquired Buddy Media for a reported $800 million, which is pretty incredible given that Oracle paid only $300 million for Vitrue in May. Granted, Buddy Media is more of a technology platform than Vitrue, which is more of an ad server; plus, Buddy Media makes a point of noting that “eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers” use their software, so they came with a pretty massive client list that Salesforce no doubt will leverage to full effect.
It’s definitely not easy for companies large and small to manage their social networking profiles and take full advantage of the ease of access to their customers, which is why platforms like Buddy Media are so important. It’s not enough to tweet and post links constantly in the hopes that potential customers will click and find their way into your sales pipeline–you need tools to effectively monitor and drive that behavior in a smart way, not a hands-off-and-hope-for-best kind of way (which is unfortunately what most companies end up doing).
Buddy Media goes one step further from marketing and sales automation by also including tools that help their users build a more interesting and interactive social profile. When Lazerow was first developing Buddy Media in the early years, it was called AceBucks and it was vying for the same space as Zynga in the social gaming niche of Facebook. Though it lost out to Zynga in the long run, Buddy Media still recognizes the power of creating a more interactive experience on Facebook, which their product ProfileBuddy helps you do.
Though it seems that they’re trying to coin the term “sapplets” (social applications) in conjunction with ProfileBuddy’s tools, it only detracts slightly from the impact of what this product can help brands achieve in terms of promoting more interaction on the part of their followers. Personally, I don’t think that enough companies are truly taking advantage of the social gaming functionality that Facebook apps can deliver to users, and I have a feeling that Buddy Media is going to be the one that helps propel brands into being more adventurous when it comes to their social networking content delivery.
To find out more about Buddy Media and their social media marketing tools, you can check out their website here.
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Amanda Andonian
Expert in Mobile, CMS, and Social Media
