Mediaboss Marketing

Oracle announced an agreement to acquire cloud-based social marketing platform Virtue.

Virtue is designed to let marketers manages social marketing campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ from one place.

Oracle wrote in a blog post:

The proliferation of social media has changed the way that organizations and consumers interact. Vitrues social marketing platform helps organizations enhance their social marketing efforts to the next level of social engagement by giving brands the ability to scale across multiple social networks, target messages from global to local, create unique and consistent brand experiences, and publish content that engages fans and drives leads.

Together, Oracle and Vitrue plan to enable a unified social experience across customer interactions, resulting in meaningful customer engagements with consistent brand experiences across all channels and media; improved return on investment for social sales and marketing campaigns across paid, owned and social media; and enhanced customer service through real-time responsiveness and high touch engagement.

The worlds greatest brands have been built by creating meaningful relationships between organizations and their customers, said Virtue CEO Reggie Bradford. As a part of Oracle, we can help our customers ensure that consistent high-touch social engagement is delivered across marketing, sales and service interactions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though TechCrunch indicates the price is $300 million. The deal is expected to close this summer. In the meantime, the two companies will continue to operate independently.

Here is the original post:
Oracle Acquires Virtue, A Social Marketing Platform

21-05-2012 08:15 Hager Sharp's Lynne Doner Lotenberg and Darcy Sawatzki co-authored an article (along with Ann Abercrombie) entitled Building Partnerships to Build the Best Bones Forever!: Applying the 4Ps to Partnership Development in the March 2012 issue of Social Marketing Quarterly (SMQ).

Excerpt from:
Using Social Marketing to Build Partnerships - Video

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

FANCRU, the leading sports fan engagement and loyalty marketing platform, today announced it is the solution of choice for Blackbear Saloon to power its online and mobile social marketing campaigns for its sixteen bars in the tri-state area. With this partnership, Blackbear Saloon has access to a range of data analytics tools to engage, retain and reward their customers and sports fans. Across its properties, Blackbear Saloon can now create custom campaigns, measure fan engagement levels, and leverage location and fan data for targeted offers.

We utilize a range of social marketing tools, including Twitter and Facebook, but what we like best about FANCRU is that it is a sports app at its core. It allows us to not only reach fans with custom campaigns specific to their team loyalty, but also to utilize FANCRUs data analysis tools to further engage and reward our fans, said Todd Kosakowski, CEO, Blackbear Saloon. With the app we now know what sports teams a fan is coming to watch, for which games, and how often. While we used to base this knowledge, to some extent, on what jerseys people are wearing, now we can not only create rewards for these particular fans but also better understand the breakdown of our customer base.

Were thrilled to be working with a leading establishment like Blackbear Saloon as we focus not only on our mobile application for sports fans, but also on our backend platform and the value it brings to our venue, brand and sports team partners, said Bill Diamond, CEO of FANCRU. Were happy that Blackbear Saloon recognizes that value and will be taking advantage of our platform to grow its business by providing a more complete experience to customers and sports fans.

To kick off this partnership, Blackbear Saloon establishments will reward customers a free draft beer when a certain number of fans show up to watch a game at one of the sixteen locations. For example, for University of Michigan night, when twenty fans check-in via the app at the bar, FANCRUs system automatically sends each fan a coupon to their phone to be immediately redeemed by their server. At the end of the night, the platform sends a batch report to the bar manager for management ease.

About FANCRU

FANCRU is the sports fan engagement and loyalty marketing platform powering passionate sports fans. FANCRUs platform enables sports fans to represent their team loyalty, show allegiance during the game, receive real-time score updates, chat, cheer and vent with other fans through the apps Game Feed, and locate where to watch games with other similarly-minded fans nearby. Sports fans are the most fiercely loyal brand advocates and FANCRU is the glue to game day and beyond allowing brands, teams and leagues to engage with their loyal constituents whether they can get to the stadium or not.

Go here to see the original:
Blackbear Saloon Chooses FANCRU’s Sports Fan Engagement and Loyalty Marketing Platform for Campaigns Across its 16 Tri ...

SALT LAKE CITY, May 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --GroSocial today announced the close of a $1,000,000 Series A funding round led by Kickstart Seed Fund, with additional contributions from Monarch Ventures, Rock & Hammer Ventures, and several other angel investors.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120522/LA09731LOGO)

GroSocial's flagship product, Customizer, is a drag-and-drop app builder thathelps businesses acquire new customers by creating their own contests, sweepstakes, and other promotional offers that can be published directly onto their business Facebook Pages. While GroSocial's platform is primarily geared toward helping small businesses, the company's client roster includes larger businesses including eBay and Skullcandy.

"We're thrilled to have the continued support of such a solid group of investors. Having helped tens of thousands of businesses realize a meaningful ROI in their social media marketing efforts, we're excited to increase our outreach and make social media marketing simple and affordable for a greater number of small businesses," said Zach Mangum, CEO of GroSocial.

"Small businesses are starting to understand that they need a social media strategy and are looking to service providers for help. GroSocial, through its white label product, allows these large service providers to offer the best product on the market to their customers without the unnecessary delays associated with developing a product in-house," said Gavin Christensen, Managing Director of Kickstart Seed Fund.

GroSocial's white labeling capabilities have allowed the company to scale tremendously over the last nine months by adding several large partners that now resell the company's offering to their respective customer bases. Additional co-branded integrations with strategic partners such as HubSpot, SurveyMonkey, Wufoo, and others have also contributed significantly to the company's accelerated growth.

The new funding will be used to double the company's headcount and will enable the company to enhance its platform with social marketing campaign automation features and integrations with additional social networking sites. "Our goal is to make the cooler, more productive social media marketing campaign options accessible to the small guy via an affordable, centralized, easily managed all-in-one platform," said Mangum.

About GroSocial

GroSocial (www.grosocial.com), headquartered in Orem, Utah, is a creator of social media marketing software for small and medium-sized businesses. The company's core product, Customizer, is a drag-and-drop app builder for business Facebook Pages that helps thousands of businesses worldwide affordable increase their social media presence and influence through effective, targeted branding, community creation, social contests and promotions, and public relations. GroSocial can be found on Facebook at http://facebook.com/grosocial and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/grosocial.

Read the original post:
Social Media Marketing Shop GroSocial Raises Another $1 Million

CHICAGO, May 21, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --MapsNshop.com (http://www.mapsnshop.com), the first geo-social product marketing platform for businesses, has fully revamped and relaunched its site to now include Facebook and Twitter applications for business and consumer accounts so that users can streamline social media marketing campaigns and outreach. The geo-social media platform merges social media and location advertising to provide businesses with an innovative channel for quickly and easily promoting products and services to local consumers.

"Our new features connect to Facebook and Twitter effortlessly, so it takes a business less than 10 seconds to introduce all the products that it's featured on MapsNshop to Facebook followers, for example," said MapsNshop CEO Dare (pronounced "Derry") Ajala.

MapsNshop accounts now feature Facebook and Twitter icons that send users to their respective social media sites. The Facebook tool provides businesses with a menu of product photos from their MapsNshop page so that users can simply select which products they want to display and then press the "Post to Facebook" button. Their Facebook Page will immediately display the selected product photos along with the product names and descriptions. Consumers can use MapsNshop's Facebook application to recommend a particular product to their friends.

MapsNshop's Twitter application lets businesses click on a product in their account and automatically send a promotional tweet to that business' Twitter followers. The tweet identifies the selected product by name and includes a link to the item at the MapsNshop account page.

"As of now, no other product out there has these features," stated Dare. "We are leveling the playing field for small businesses by enabling them to put their products in front of their consumers without having to worry about the typical costs that go along with it. Instead of a 'mom and pop shop' that's making quality products getting shut out of the market because no one knows about them, MapsNshop enables customers to find you no matter where you are. At the same time, we are providing large retail stores with a channel through which they can coordinate the merging of product display and social media on a large scale."

The geo-social platform has been steadily adding tools that make businesses known to customers in their area. For example, MapsNshop.com's Product page includes a "Search by Product" dialog box that displays a map of relevant, local businesses within a 10-mile radius of the user's location. Consumers can find basic information such as business name, address and ranking from the map or click through to that business' MapsNshop account where they can see a slideshow of products.

"Consumers are looking for ways to answer the questions of where and how to buy what they need easily, quickly and locally while businesses are looking for the most direct options of putting their products in front of the ideal consumer," said Dare. "MapsNshop helps both parties answer their questions."

Contact:

Dare Ajala info@mapsnshop.com 888-556-2744 http://www.mapsnshop.com/

Here is the original post:
Geo-Social Marketing Platform MapsNshop Adds Facebook and Twitter Integration to Further Level the Online Marketing ...