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Posts Tagged Spredfast

We’d Like To See You at SXSWi, But…

Aug 26

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | No Comments

The SXSW Interactive Festival is just amazing. There are too many ways to describe it to make any rise above the rest. It’s just an amazing time to network and share ideas. We love it, so we need your help to make it a reality. Now, you don’t have to do much, really.

Here are things that you don’t have to do to get us to SXSWi:

  • Pay us $1.6 Million (some VCs already did that)
  • Bribe the SXSWi panel of advisors (no comment)
  • Sue anybody whose name even remotely ends in a word like “fast” (other companies are doing that, so it’s passe now)
  • Wear red pants (our founder does that once a week)
  • Buy our product (although we wish you would)

Nope, you don’t have to do any of that. All we need you to do is VOTE for us.

Easy, right? Click just two little thumbs up icons. Even certain presidents could do that.

Here are the two sessions we’d like you to vote for. We appreciate your help and thank you in advance for your vote.

That Tweet Equalled How Much In Sales!? Ken Cho, co-founder of Spredfast, will walk through how integration with the traditional marketing and sales tools with social media tools can help hone in on what’s actually making and impact, what those reliable metrics are and how this can improve the company’s bottom line.

You Can Do that?! – Managing/Analyzing Social Media As people are drowning in a sea of social media tools, the first step in staying above water is picking the right tool with the options and features you need without being overwhelming – this makes it quite the challenge to know which one(s) to use. This panel will help you sort through all of the choices.

 

 

 

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Introducing the Social Inbox

Aug 10

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

I don’t know about you, but as a marketer who engages with my social media audience daily, the Social Streams and the Inbox in Spredfast are the places where I spend most of my time. I love how I can listen, learn, and converse with clients and social media thinkers, all from one place.

Let’s be honest, though, navigating the Social Streams took some patience. Well, no more. Introducing the Social Inbox.

 

We’ve taken out all of the hassle of navigating the social streams, but left all of the goodness of being able to browse the persistent searches you need to:

  • Listen in on the conversation about your brand, mission, company or organization
  • Learn from the conversation so that you can write more engaging content
  • Engage with the people you meet in the social online world

With a simple to use left navigation that includes all of your Social Streams as well as the full Inbox feature set, you can quickly move from one stream to the next and the expanded viewing pane lets you see more of the content you want to read.

If you are a current Spredfast client, we hope you enjoy the new interface and find it makes your listening easier. If you aren’t a client of Spredfast, what are you waiting for? The Social Inbox is just one of many features that let you make the most of your social media presence. Check out our feature set or start a free trial. We’d love to talk.

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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3 Reasons Facebook Is Bad For Business

Jul 29

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

I only half mean it. Facebook isn’t all bad for business. Mark Zuckerberg and Co. do provide a platform to engage with 500 million people in a targeted way. Oh, and it’s free. Those are all good things.

But the devil is in the details, no? Why is it that Facebook can have such a robust platform in 2010 and still screw up so badly when it comes to providing the kinds of things that organizations and business need to reach people?

The reality is that organizations and business don’t have the time or the inclination to do all of their engagement directly in Facebook. There are other social networks out there that also matter. Hello, Twitter! So, organizations and business turn to social media management systems like Spredfast to make their engagement more efficient. This is where it breaks down for Facebook. Here are a few examples:

Posts via 3rd party applications do not have a share link

That’s right! Posts that come from 3rd party applications can not be shared in Facebook like posts that are made directly in Facebook. Not even the mighty Causes, which has more insider opportunities with Facebook than Martha Stewart had at ImClone, has managed to get a Share link to appear on posts made through their system. 

But why? The ability to share content within Facebook is one of the core tenants of the community, and there is no difference between the content being created directly in Facebook and that being created in a 3rd party application. It’s not like the companies have an opportunity to abuse anything by having a share link. It’s the person who reads the content  that decides to share it.

Updates from Pages made via 3rd Party applications cannot be targeted

Seems silly, right? The Facebook API provides a way to create and send the update, but it doesn’t provide a way to target the update. Why would you release an API method that only covers half of the functionality necessary to be useful? Unless Facebook wants companies to spam portions of a Page’s fan base with a message that doesn’t apply to them.

The ability to target the updates from Pages is extremely useful for anyone who administers a Page, because you can customize content for the specific segments of your audience, providing only valuable information.  Facebook would only be doing their members a service by allowing companies and organizations (which are allowed to have Pages, of course) to target updates.

Not all of the Insights for Pages data can be pulled through 3rd party applications

What Page administrator doesn’t want to know what is going on with their Page? The Insights feature is very cool and provides a ton of great data, but administrators using a 3rd party application to create content for their Page can not pull all of the Insights data out with that same 3rd party application because of the way Facebook has structured the Insights API. Forcing Page administrators to log into Facebook for certain activities while others to be done outside just seems inefficient. Provide a full service via the API or none at all.

Some may say that Facebook should make it easy for companies and organizations to engage with people inside the community because Facebook is a social network for people. To that I say, “That boat has already sailed!” Facebook opened the door to companies and non-profits when they created the Page. They’re in now, so Facebook should be doing everything it can to make it possible for companies and non-profits to interact in the same way that everybody else does. 

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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25 Things to Do and Not Do to Have a Stronger Facebook Presence

Jul 27

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

The Altimter Group and Jeremiah Owyang published a great report on how to market using a Facebook Page. Spredfast was honored to be among the resources Jeremiah tapped to research that report. The link to the Altimeter presentation on Slideshare is provided at the bottom of this post. We hope you take time to read through the 25 Do’s and Dont’s that Spredfast preaches with our clients.

The Do’s:

On a Page

  1. Take advantage of the ability to create custom content on a tab using the static FBML application, and make this tab the default landing page to new visitors.
  2. On the Wall tab, make sure you show content from the Page and from Fans, and auto-expand comments, so it is clear to visitors that there is a level of engagement happening on the Page.
  3. Be very involved in the conversation happening on your Page.
  4. Update the content on the Page regularly with a mixture of original wall post content, wall post referrals to other pertinent content, video and photos. Try not to post to the wall more than 3 time per day.
  5. Allow fans to post video and photos to the Page. Reach out to those that do and thank them.
  6. Use Facebook Events to promote your real events, even if they require registration. Simply provide a link in the Facebook Event description to the event registration page and ask people to both register and “attend” in Facebook.
  7. If you have events where you can get Facebook fans to attend in person, get photos and videos, post them to Facebook and tag those Fans in the content.
  8. Find other, relevant Pages and add them to your Favorites. Usually, that Page will return the favor and hopefully drive more people to your Page.
  9. Advertise your Page on your other web properties and content streams, including the ability to become a fan and subscribe to updates via Text.
  10. Be sure to adopt o personal tone with your communications on the Page, even going so far as to identify the author in posts. Couple this with photos of the authors, so people can put a face with a name.
  11. Target Page Updates and Posts using the built in targeting functionality.
  12. Ask your Fans to suggest the Page to other people periodically.
  13. Frequently make the content about the Fans themselves by asking questions, posting Fan stories, and commenting on their activities.
  14. Find existing Pages centered on your brand and engage with them. Support them with content and information.
  15. Offer insider information that only Fans have access to.

On Profiles

  1. Be sure employees who are engaging in Facebook activities on behalf of the company have good, consistent company information, and that your social media policy is well understood by these folks.
  2. Prominently promote the company Page.
  3. Add contest and promotional applications to these profile for greater spread across Facebook. Be sure to include an invitation component to the app, but never require invitations to be sent in order to progress in the app.
  4. Offer insider information that only Friends have access to.

The Do Not’s:

  1. Don’t make the content on your Page or Profiles all about the company. Fans don’t want just another version of the website.
  2. Don’t disappear on your community. Engage daily.
  3. Don’t overpost so that your Page becomes a nuisance. 2 or 3 times per day maximum.
  4. Don’t overdo it with contest application. Be selective, and make the app a high quality experience.
  5. Don’t try to own all of your brand presence. Collaborate with those people who have started Pages and Groups around your brand.
  6. Don’t take it for granted. Monitor what is happening on your Pages and Profiles by using the data provided by Facebook or other sources (like Spredfast).

You can check out Jeremiah’s report here:

The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Or read the Atimeter Group report in Slideshare. It is very good.

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Austin’s Hyper-growth Social Media Company Spredfast is hiring Sales Directors

Jul 14

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Location: Austin, TX
Job Type: Full-Time, Salaried with Benefits and Incentive Compensation and Stock Options
Total Compensation: Based on experience & market conditions
Reports to: Sales Director

About this Position
Social Agency is looking for an extraordinarily talented individual(s) to join our sales team. You have to be the type of person that craves a challenge and is passionate about Social Media.  Social Agency is still a venture-backed startup so as a Sales Director you’ll play an incredibly important role in the growth of our company, with an opportunity to determine our future. The best people in early-stage companies usually end up serving in multiple roles over a brief period of time.

To be successful you’ll need to be passionate about our business, thrive in a flexible environment, and be very self-driven. This doesn’t mean we won’t be helping you sell – we will- but we believe strongly in hiring quality and talent, someone with confidence and the intelligence to execute like a business owner.

Skills and Qualifications
1. Build strong relationships with senior executives, including e-commerce and marketing executives
2. Demonstrate the value propositions of our product and services in onsite meetings, web demos and through written and oral communications
3. Manage a sales cycle from the initial meeting all the way through contracts, legal review and driving the signature process.
4. Be confident in selling a high value service of $60,000 plus

Job Requirements

  • Bachelors degree or Equivalent
  • 2+ years work experience minimum, preferably within Internet/e-commerce/Saas industries
  • Proficient in selling an early-stage product in a new industry (with a proven need) is a plus
  • 2+ years experience in business development and/or sales as a top-10% performer
  • Excellent communications and problem solving skills. Ability to make decisions in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.
  • Expert user of current web/online communication technologies, including browsers, search, email, instant messaging, and forums/message boards
  • Strong analytical and negotiation skills regarding technical and contractual aspects of partner relationships
  • Highly organized and detail oriented
  • Desire to constantly learn and process new information about our industry, solution, partners, and competitors
  • Extremely proactive with a strong bias for action.
  • A strong work ethic and desire to work in a fast-paced, fun, demanding environment.
  • Proficient with Salesforce and MS Office, MAC, PowerPoint and Excel
  • Open to 20% travel, fluctuating based on need Selling eCommerce-focused solutions

Company Overview

Social Agency’s Spredfast is a social media campaign management platform that allows organizations to manage, monitor, and measure their messages across multiple social media channels. Social media engagement offers opportunity to shape conversation, increase traffic, create relationships, and ultimately build sales.

To apply, submit your cover letter and resume to careers@socialagency.com.

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Announcing Spredfast 1.5 – Like Spain, one of the best in the world

Jul 9

Posted by spredfast in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

It has been a busy few weeks for us here at Social Agency, building another crop of powerful new features designed to make you more effective at managing the social media presence of your company or organization. Once again, for those of you who don’t want to read all of the details, here are the highlights. Detailed descriptions follow.

Highlighted Features

  • Social profiles of people interacting with your communications
  • Ability to mark influential people
  • Integration with Gowalla
  • Categorize all of your communications with Content Labels
  • Set your personal Default Home Page
  • Audit trail extends beyond Inbox to Social Streams
  • Crimson Hexagon Integration

Improvements to Listening and Communicating

  • Broader ability to respond to people from the Social Streams and Inbox
  • Translate items in the Social Streams
  • See which responses you made were public and which were private
  • Create custom footers for blog posts

Improvements to Managing & Streamlining

  • Schedule and Assign responses from the Inbox and Social Streams

Improvements to Measuring & Reporting

  • Increased frequency of Conversation History updates
  • Add Facebook Page views to metrics

 

Social Profiles

Admit it. You want to know more about that person who retweeted your tweet and left a comment on your Facbook Page wall post. You want to know how many followers they have and how many friends. You want to know where they’re from and how they describe themselves. You want to know how engaged they are with your brand.

Now you can. Simply hover over or click the username of the person in the Inbox or in the Social Streams, and we’ll show you what is available to know about that person. We’ll show you their network size, their biography, location and count of engagement with your communications.

Mark Influencers

Along with social profile information, you can decide for yourself if the person interacting with your communications is an influencer. When you decide yes, you can mark that username and all engagement by that influential person will be easily identifiable. You can also export a data file on all of your influencers for inclusion in other systems like Salesforce.

Of course, you probably already have some influential people identified. You can import a list of usernames and we’ll automatically mark those people as influencers.

Like they say, it is about who you know. With Spredfast, it’s a lot easier to know who you should get to know.

Gowalla Integration

Location, location, location, right? You probably have locations that you would like to know more about. With our integration, you can see who is checking in and how often.

Content Labels

Would you like to be able to categorize your communications? Perhaps you want to separate your responses from your scheduled outbound communications. Or you want to group up all of your contest related content. Now you can with Content Labels. Each and every communication you create in Spredfast can be labeled, with as many labels as you like.

Soon, you’ll be able to filter all of the great metrics Spredfast captures by these Content Labels as well.

Default Home Page

Do you have a page in Spredfast that you always start with each and every time you log in? Would you like to land there upon log in automatically? Done. Just click the Default Home Page box on your favorite page and we’ll bring you there every time you log in.

Don’t worry, you can change it whenever you like. We’re flexible like that.

Expanded Audit Trail

We’ve always thought the audit trail in the Inbox was a great feature. You know, the one that lets you know when someone on your team has responded to an item, so you don’t mistakenly respond twice? Well, we’ve made it better. Now, the audit trail not only lets you know when someone has responded, but also when someone has been assigned to respond, or a response has been scheduled.

Oh, and we’ve extended the audit trail to the Social Streams as well, so now you can see which items are covered no matter where you come across them.

Crimson Hexagon Integration

Understanding the sentiment of the conversation about your company, organization, brand or mission is important. To that end, we’ve integrated Crimson Hexagon, one of the leading sentiment analysis systems, into Spredfast. Simply enter your Crimson Hexagon account credentials and you’ll be able to set up Crimson Hexagon Social Streams.

 

Like the Spanish National Soccer team, Spredfast 1.5has even more magic to offer. We’ve added more great improvements to the 3 main functions of our platform: Listening & Communicating, Measuring & Reporting, and Managing & Streamlining.

First up in the Listening & Engagement arena, we’ve made it easier to respond to engagement from your friends, followers, and fans by making sure the right response actions are available everywhere you want them to be.  We’ve also added a nifty translate feature so you can read those tweets from your rabid fan from China. In the Inbox and Conversation History, you can now see which communications were made publicly and which were made privately. Finally, you can now create your own custom footers for your blog posts. We know, you really love including branding for Spredfast at the bottom of each blog post, but we can’t ask you to do that every time. We appreciate what you’ve done so far.

In Managing & Streamlining, we’ve given you the ability to schedule and assign responses directly from the Social Stream. No more clicking 2 times to get there.

In Measuring & Reporting, we’ve reduced the time it takes for Spredfast to update the Conversation History. Now, you can respond to a mention you’ve come across in your Inbox, click the username of the person who mentioned you and see your entire conversation history with that person in just a matter of a few minutes. We’ve also added Facebook Page views to the Detailed Metrics table. As Facebook exposes more and more data from Page Insights, we’ll continue to pull it into Spredfast.

We hope you like what you’ve read about here and you jump in and try out the new features. We’re working hard on the next release, dreaming up cool ways for you the be a social media hero at your office.

We recognize that not everyone knows Spredfast as well as we do, so if any of the descriptions above don’t make sense to you, please feel free to reach out to use. We love our product and we love talking with people, so we’ll be happy to answer any questions or explain any feature in more detail. Here’s how you can reach us:

Twitter: @spredfast or @socialagency

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-TX/Social-Agency-Inc

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/306252/

Email: ken@socialagency.com , scott@socialagency.com , or james@socialagency.com

Web: http://www.spredfast.com

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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Announcing Spredfast 1.4 – Not Your Mom’s Social Media Management System

May 25

Posted by James Young in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Here at Social Agency, we’ve been hard at work building out great new Spredfast functionality that will not only help you engage your customers, supporters, members and advocates in the social sites they frequent, but will also empower you to prove to your boss and your boss’ boss that social media pays off. For those of you who don’t like to read, here is a bulleted list of the new features and improvements we’ve made in Spredfast 1.4. To read witty descriptions of these items, please keep scrolling.

Highlighted Features

  • Integrated Sentiment Analysis with Social Mention
  • White Label Option
  • Slideshare Integration
  • Chart and Report Builder

Improvements to Listening and Engagement

  • Twitter Direct Message Support
  • Email notification to users if event sending fails

Improvements to Managing & Streamlining

  • Initiative Tabs
  • Importing link tag templates between Initiatives
  • Improved invitations handling
  • Prevented duplicate streams

Improvements to Measuring & Reporting

  • Decreased metrics processing time

Integrated Sentiment Analysis

We already had an awesome platform for listening to the social conversation about your brand, products, and services or your organization, programs, and campaigns. With Spredfast 1.4, you can now quickly get a bead on the sentiment of that conversation by using our sentiment streams. Simply create a sentiment stream, plug in your keywords, and let our Social Mention integration do the rest. Each item Social Mention finds will have a sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) and a sentiment score (e.g. +3, O, or -1).

You’ll be able to see charts showing the sentiment your overall positive to negative sentiment ratio, and the positive, neutral and negative trend for each sentiment stream you’ve created on the new Sentiment tab in the Metrics section. You’ll also be able to see granular sentiment data and trends on the Detailed Metrics tab (formerly known as the Activity Trend tab), with counts of positive, neutral and negative items as well as an overall sentiment score for each day for each sentiment stream. Finally, you’ll be able to click on an individual data point and see which content pieces drove the sentiment data for that day.

White Label Option

Want the items you publish into Twitter or Facebook to say “via {Your Company Name Here}” and the experience for your clients or staff to be branded to your company? Now you can, with the White Label option available with Spredfast 1.4. This new functionality is perfect for agencies that provide social media strategy and campaign management services. It also works pretty darn well for anybody else who just wants their brand to be front and center on their social media outreach as well. With the white label option, the sign in/sign up page and the entire administrative interface is branded to your specifications. The email sent from the system comes from your accounts. Best of all, the content published in the social sites comes from your company. Contact Spredfast to learn more about the white label option, pricing and how you can upgrade.

Slideshare Integration

Got content? Presentation content, that is. Do you use Slideshare to post and share your presentations, hoping to impress prospective customers, supporters and members with your brilliance? With Spredfast 1.4 you can easily publish presentations into Slideshare and measure the engagement with that content, without ever leaving your Spredfast dashboard. We track views and downloads, comments and favorites and bring the data to you in our wonder wall Detailed Metrics table.

Chart and Report Builder

Admit it, you like working with the numbers but you love making pretty charts and putting them into reports. With Spredfast 1.4, you can take the rich engagement, reach and activity data we capture, calculate the ROI on your social media efforts, and create exciting charts and reports that make it easy for everyone else to see how your social media efforts are paying off handsomely. Easy to use and powerful, with built in date range, voice, social media channel and account filters and the ability export to PDF, you’ll be able to showing the engagement trends by social media channel and highlighting strategic decision points before you know it.

We’re not finished yet, though. Spredfast 1.4 also has some added more great improvements to the 3 main functions of our platform: Listening & Engaging, Measuring & Reporting, and Managing & Streamlining.

First up in the Listening & Engagement arena, we’ve improved our Twitter capabilities with direct message (DM) support. Now, you can send a respond to a tweet with a DM. Next, we’ve added email notifications to assigned content creators if their content piece failed to publish for any reason.

In Measuring & Reporting, we’ve reduced the time it takes for Spredfast to acquire new data from the social sites, process the data and expose it the metrics section.

In Managing & Streamlining, we’ve done a lot to make Spredfast easier to use. First, for those clients managing a lot of social media initiatives, either within one or across several companies or organizations, we’ve added the capability to organize Initiatives onto tabs. For example, an agency might want to keep all Initiatives for one client on one tab, and another client’s initiatives on a second tab. Next, we’ve improved our invitation system so that people who are invited to join an Initiative, but lose the invitation email, will find their way to the right place every time. Third, clients who use our powerful link tagging and have integrated it to an external analytics package to measure activity all the way from clicking a link in a tweet to completing a purchase will find the new capability to import the link tag templates from one Initiative to another very useful and efficient. Finally, we’ve built a nifty feature that will automatically recognize a new Social Stream being created as a duplicate of an existing stream and prevent the duplication.

That’s it for now. We’re already working hard on the next release, adding some great new social sites to the mix and integrating some powerful enterprise systems that a lot of marketing departments are already using.

We recognize that not everyone knows Spredfast as well as we do, so if any of the descriptions above don’t make sense to you, please feel free to reach out to use. We love our product and we love talking with people, so we’ll be happy to answer any questions or explain any feature in more detail. Here’s how you can reach us:

Twitter: @spredfast or @socialagency

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Austin-TX/Social-Agency-Inc

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/306252/

Email: ken@socialagency.com , scott@socialagency.com , or james@socialagency.com

Web: http://www.spredfast.com

Phone: 512-542-9900

Social Media Initiative managed by Spredfast

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