PromoJam, a social marketing platform for the enterprise that allows businesses to create campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Myspace, has raised $1.2 million in Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by NYC-based Golden Seeds, and included participation from Band of Angels.
The L.A.-based company, which was started in 2008 by brother and sister team Matt MacNaughton (CEO) Amanda MacNaughton (Chief Marketing Officer), has grown over the years, now having served its social promotions to over 10 million users. Some of the company’s clients include NBC Universal, Clear Channel Radio, Hearst Publications, HitFix, Rock The Vote, Expedia, Avon, Warner Brothers Music Group, BlackBerry, Paramount Pictures, The North Face, and Rihanna.
According to co-founder Amanda MacNaughton, the platform stands out from the rest because of its cross-platform capability that lets clients run promotions both online and on mobile across the various networks it supports.
“We have been building the business and our exciting client list relatively quietly,” says Amanda. And it’s true – you often hear of PromoJam in the greater context of the promotion being run, not the news about the company itself. For example, when we covered news of drummer Travis Barker and turntablist DJ-AM (Adam Goldstein), who, back in 2009, were offering their then just-released second mixtape, “Fix Your Face Vol. 2 – Coachella ’09″, for free in exchange for a tweet, that came from PromoJam.
And when we covered Pearl Jam’s use of Twitter to promote their new song “Just Breathe” back in early 2010, that, too, was PromoJam’s work.
More recently, the company teamed with Junk Food Clothing and Saks Fifth Avenue on a social QR code campaign, where QR code images were used as part of a charity fundraising effort for St. Vincent Meals on Wheels Foundation.
Some ongoing promotions now include those for NBA’s Dwight Howard (Facebook and Twitter), Rock the Vote (mobile), E! Entertainment, and L.A.’s FOX 11 News.
With the platform, which is available both as a DIY solution or one that can be customized by PromoJam according to a business’s needs, PromoJam clients can create campaigns including sweepstakes, Facebook “Like” campaigns, coupon giveaways, flash sales, download promotions and more, while running those efforts simultaneously across social networks, blogs, mobile phones, via QR codes, and via SMS text messages. If the content really goes viral, PromoJam’s scalable technology can handle the heavy load, while also helping its businesses collect customers’ information, like email addresses, for example, and track related analytics.
On the back-end, the company provides real-time reporting in a dashboard that shows the number of posts, increased fans and followers, clicks, shares, emails collected and other data, including the geographic locations of the program’s participants to help businesses’ target key influencers and outreach efforts.
Amanda tells us the new investment will help the company expand the marketing software itself – specifically, PromoJam will be adding support for more social network integrations in 2012, and the company plans to grow its sales and marketing departments, too.