The market for social marketing startups is getting some natural uplift as advertising money continues to shift online and marketers experiment with alternatives to traditional ad formats that don’t make enough of a mark in the digital space. One such startup, Collective Bias, has just closed a $10.5m Series A to expand its blogger-powered social marketing model internationally. → Read More
One of Facebook’s bigger hurdles in advertising has been to figure out ways of either applying traditional metrics, or coming up with new ones, to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns on the social network. Today, we got wind of one of its latest efforts to connect the dots a bit better. Publishing Garage is a new program — and platform — that the social network has… → Read More
Just in time for the holiday shopping blitz, it looks like Amazon is opening a new chapter in its role as an online marketplace for third-parties to sell their goods. The company is quietly pushing a service called Amazon Pages, which lets companies set up their own pages on Amazon.com as “custom destinations,” complete with http://www.amazon.com/brandname URLs and dynamic designs with… → Read More
As Facebook continues to mature as a platform, the companies working on it are scaling up to meet the challenge of catching attention on a social network now pushing 1 billion users. In the latest development, the UK-based Facebook app developer iPlatform has been acquired by Betapond, as the Ireland-based Facebook marketer looks to beef up its engineering muscle and extend further into the… → Read More
On the heels of Google buying Wildfire and Salesforce nabbing Buddy Media, we have heard from two very reliable sources, plus a third anonymous source, that Gannett Co., the media giant that owns USA Today and other properties, is buying BLiNQ Media. The price for the Facebook advertising software and service is up to $92 million over a period of three to four years, with a quarter of that… → Read More
After buying social marketer Wildfire for $350 million, Google wants to ensure it keeps earning money and the employees don’t bail. That’s why Google set up $100 million in earn-outs and retention bonuses, multiple sources confirm. One, an investor I spoke to directly, verified the $350 million price tag we published last week and that the golden handcuffs amount to $100 million, twice the $50… → Read More
Groupon is gearing up to report quarterly earnings later this month, but in the meantime the daily deals giant has another issue on its hands: it’s been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit by Blue Calypso, a digital marketing firm that claims Groupon is infringing two of its patents, 7,664,516 and 8,155,679, focused on peer-to-peer marketing technology. What’s more, from the sounds of it, Blue… → Read More
Old world online marketers must build, buy, or die, and Oracle has made its choice. Oracle just agreed to acquire Involver, only a month after the giant bought its competing social marketing platform Vitrue. Involver will be rolled into Oracle Cloud marketing suite, and the deal is expected to close over the summer (Update: though the purchase price may have been quite low).
Oracle has been on… → Read More
Yes, it’s another startup that wants to help businesses manage their presence on Facebook. Social Candy CEO Darin Kotalik admits that the’res no shortage of competition, but he’s hoping to differentiate his company by combining ease-of-use and breadth of features.
The company just announced that it’s expanding those features with by allowing businesses to offer coupons through their Social… → Read More
This year, instead of spending $20 million on SuperBowl ads, Pepsi decided to put the money into Pepsi Refresh, a social marketing campaign which solicits the best ideas from consumers and plans to dole out $20 million in grants to good causes and “great ideas” throughout the year. The site opened up about 10 hours ago to take ideas from people applying for grants. On February 1, voting will… → Read More
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