Mediaboss Marketing

[Corrected, 2:25pm. See below] Tis the season for Boston tech startups founded in 2010and their productsto get acquired. Kinvey and Intrepid were bought last month, and now its SocMetrics turn. The Cambridge, MA-based social marketing companys original productcalled SocMetrics Influencer Platformhas been snapped up by Grapevine, a Boston marketing tech firm. Terms of the deal werent disclosed. [A previous version of this paragraph said SocMetrics the company was acquired. Wording was corrected to say its product has been acquiredEds.]

The acquisition seems to make sense for both companies. SocMetrics identifies social media influencers in specific categories for advertising and marketing purposes, and helps agencies engage with them. Grapevine works to connect brands and advertisers with these popular influencers to drive business.

SocMetrics raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2012 from Google Ventures, Charles River Ventures, CommonAngels, Boston Seed Capital, 500 Startups, and angel investors.

Grapevine is led by CEO and co-founder Grant Deken. The company previously went through the Techstars Boston and MassChallenge accelerator programs. (SocMetrics is also a MassChallenge alum.) Earlier this year, Grapevine sold a majority stake to Sun Seven Stars, a Chinese media and investment group led by Bruno Wu.

In an e-mail, Deken says the SocMetrics platform acquisition will expand our strategic footprint and diversify our revenue and customer mix. He adds that SocMetrics software will be rebranded as Scout, and that Grapevine is on track to double its core business this year with half the staff size, as compared to last year.

SocMetrics was co-founded by Roy Rodenstein and Rebecca Xiong. They wont be joining Grapevine, but are advising the company during the transition, Deken says. Rodenstein says in a Twitter message that SocMetrics the company continues with our other marketing apps. [Comment from Rodenstein addedEds.]

Rodenstein and Xiong have a history of startup exits: a previous company of theirs, Going, was acquired by AOL in 2009. Xiong says on her LinkedIn page that she is currently CEO of GrowEpic. Rodenstein and Xiong are both involved with a service called MyTwitterManager, as well.

Marketing tech is as strong as ever in the Boston area. In addition to big players like HubSpot and Constant Contact (now owned by Endurance International Group Holdings), newer companies like ThriveHive, Crayon, Mautic, and Zaius have made recent progress in the field.

Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com.

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SocMetrics Scooped Up by Grapevine in Social Marketing Deal ... - Xconomy

Head of digital and social marketing shares how she's working to blur the line between marketing and sales

Sales and marketing are supposed to work in harmony, with one supporting the other to achieve the organisations revenue goals. In reality, the two functions often are at war. But a new social media strategy, coupled with some good old fashioned sales experience is helping Lenovo to finally bridge the gap.

Lenovos head of digital and social marketing for Asia Pacific, Danielle Uskovic, attributes her success in working effectively with her companys sales team partly due to her own sales background in the communications technology sector.

I actually sold the Internet to businesses I used to go in and try and convince businesses they needed to be connected to the Internet, and sell them 56K modems, Uskovic says. I literally had to cold call.

In her now role heading up social and digital at Lenovo, Uskovic has responsibility for setting strategy and rolling out projects and programmes throughout the region. But it is the work she is doing internally through the deployment of LinkedIns social selling tool Sales Navigator that is having immediate benefit for her companys sales team.

It is about how they use the knowledge they have in the offline world and transfer it into an online world, Uskovic says. It is a lot faster and more efficient to do it online, versus the old traditional way of cold calling. But they need to understand the nuances and how to use the tools that are available to them to actually make those connections.

Sales Navigator provides the opportunity for Lenovos sales team to utilise their relationships and knowledge about trends and customer behaviour to raise their visibility within key clients.

If you look at IT decision makers, they need to know what solution they want before they reach out, Uskovic says. But they all say they dont have time for reps to be trying to contact them. And when you ask where do they get their content, they get it from LinkedIn.

Once they have made up their mind, they will then reach out to three vendors. We need to be on that shortlist, and this is whats guaranteeing us to be on that shortlist.

Implementing Sales Navigator has required some behavioural changes within the sales teams themselves however, not the least of which has been for them to become more digitally-social.

There is so much that surrounds the tool that they need to understand, Uskovic says. Content is front and centre, and I have asked them to be producing one piece of longform content every month.

Lenovo has also created the TechRevolution.asia website as a thought leadership hub that the sales team can call on for content and ideas.

It is not heavily branded Lenovo, and looks very much like a tech publication, Uskovic says. But all of the articles on there have been written by our executive or marketing team, or even some of our sales leaders.

Despite her sales background, Uskovic says it still took approximately 12 months of internally championing the program before receiving consent from the senior executives.

That was really just trying to get senior executives to understand that traditional sales no longer exists, and that you actually have to think about how sales people can form and build relationships and position themselves differently in this digital world, she says.

It really that came back to the fact that I have done a sales role and lived and breathed it.

Those teams now using Sales Navigator are generating four times the engagement of non-users, and are nine times more connected to key decision makers, leading to improved lead generation and attendance at events. These boosted metrics are also leading to an increase in the one metric that ultimately matters revenue.

They are seeing an increase in their pipeline, Uskovic says. They are seeing a shorter sales cycle, because they can get real information in real time. It is helping them find the right people, get more engagement, and be more seen as a thought leader.

Ultimately, Uskovic sees programs such this as an inevitable step in the blurring of the sales and marketing functions

Salespeople need to be more like marketers in this new digital world, and marketers need to be more like sales people, she says.

More and more of the sales cycle is becoming the marketing responsibility. But then for a sales person it is becoming more and more a part of their responsibility to position themselves as thought leaders and market themselves as such. There is definitely a blurring happening.

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How Lenovo's social strategy is helping bridge the marketing/sales divide - CMO

Dive Brief:

Even as much of brands' marketing budgets are being put toward purely digital experiences, out-of-home activations remain a fun, memorable way to connect with consumers and generate buzz for a new product launch. These efforts can further be bolstered by digital tie-ins, however, and Perrier is putting a strong emphasis on social media for the Flavor Studio through the influencer component, the Twitter vending machine and what the press release described as an "Insta-worthy" bubble ball pit.

By making the NYC pop-up experience highly shareable, the brand might achieve reach and awareness that extends far outside of the SoHo neighborhood. It's also an opportunity for Perrier to get hands-on with consumers during a highly relevant time of year for sparkling water and other beverage brands the peak of summer.

While the soda category has long been seeing a dip in sales amid consumer desire for less sugary options, sparkling and flavored water brands like Perrier and La Croix have been getting a boost over the past several years as healthier alternatives.

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Perrier's social-focused NYC pop-up stokes the 5 senses - Marketing Dive

Social media marketing veteran Kate Jhaveri has joined Amazons Twitchas senior vice president of marketing, the company announced today.

In her new role, Jhaveri will be tasked with growing the Twitch brand and highlighting new ways that the community canexperience content, Twitch said. She will report to CEO Emmett Shear.

Prior to Twitch, Jhaveri was head of global consumer marketing at Twitterbeginning in 2013 through last August, where she was responsible for brand and product marketing. Jhaveri also previously served as mobile marketing lead at Facebook, where she helped launch and grow various products and services. Additionally, Jhaveri isaMicrosoftalum, where she led marketing and communications efforts for popular products including Windows and Office.

Twitchs primary strength has been looking to its community to help shape the direction of the brand, said Jhaveri, who also serves as secretary of the national board for Planned Parenthood. This has led to a lot of compelling emerging content beyond gaming. Given this constant evolution, my goal is to ensure we shine a light on all of the incredible content that continues to redefine the Twitch experience, as well as our extensive roadmap of products.

Jhaveri replaces Matthew DiPietro, according to Variety, who is taking on another as-yet-unknown role at the company. Last March, Twitch also appointed gaming media veteran Michael Aragon as its new SVP of content.

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Twitch Names Twitter And Facebook Veteran Kate Jhaveri SVP Of Marketing - Tubefilter

A A

George F. Will is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group. Email: georgewill@washpost.com.

The Bronx, the only one of New York Citys five boroughs that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as geographical distinction. In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, the city without a slum. It was the one place in the whole of the nation where commercial housing was built during the Great Depression. In the third quarter of the 20th century, however, there came, particularly in the South Bronx, social regression that Moynihan described as an Armageddonic collapse that I do not believe has its equal in the history of urbanization.

Of the several causes of descent, there and elsewhere, into the intergenerational transmission of poverty, one was paramount: family disintegration. Some causes of this remain unclear, but something now seems indisputable: Among todays young adults, the success sequence is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in The Millennial Success Sequence published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI.

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nations largest generation, have found that only 3 percent who follow this sequence are poor.

A comparably stunning 55 percent of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25 percent of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox millennials who put marriage before the baby carriage have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third.

One problem today, Wilcox says, is the soul-mate model of marriage, a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a family. Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms. And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice, preferring ecumenical niceness to being judgmental.

But what if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral bad choices and the cultures that produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social salvation through economic abundance.

Reversing social regression using public policies to create a healthy culture is akin to nation-building abroad, an American undertaking not recently crowned with success. Wang and Wilcox recommend education focused on high-level occupational skills, subsidizing low-paying jobs, and public and private social marketing campaigns, from public schools to popular media, promoting marriage toward the end of the success sequence.

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Will: The success sequence way out of poverty - The Columbian