You’d be excused for not paying much attention to Thismoment or Position2. They do the dirty work a lot of entrepreneurs don’t want to do, namely run marketing promotions and, in their wake, figuring out how many people actually paid attention to those things. In a world of “organic eyeballs” and viral va-va-voom, there’s little place for Mad Men style commercial promotion… or is there?
Thismoment just paid an undisclosed sum for Position2 and will begin folding Position2’s technology into its offerings. Thismoment began life as a photo-sharing site (“It was Facebook Timeline before Facebook timeline,” said founder Vince Broady) and pivoted do supply content management tools for major brands.
“With our Distributed Engagement Channel (DEC) platform, we’ve focused on social content management, and the creative layer – the app, promotion or campaign – through which the content is delivered,” said Broady. “With the Brand Monitor acquisition, we complete the picture by adding conversation monitoring and advanced analytics – including sentiment analysis – both of which provide real-time feedback on the success of social content and creative initiatives. So now, you cannot only execute a program, but actually see if it’s working and react in real-time.”
By connecting content delivery – essentially sites dedicated, say, to a specific promotion – and Position2’s brand awareness tools, users can create a branded page and then watch as users respond through multiple channels including Facebook, Twitter, and on the web.
If there’s anything we can learn from this acquisition it’s that brands are looking more closely to social media and following the feedback loop from eyeball to Tweet to Facebook rant with an intensity heretofore unrivaled. We can scoff all we want about ham-handed attempts at social media interaction, but Thismoment works with over a hundred Fortune 500 companies and those guys, as they say, aren’t fooling around.