Buddy Media Introduces Enterprise Facebook Management Tool to Unify Global Brand Pages, Significantly Reduce Costs

NEW YORK, June 22 /PRNewswire/ -- Buddy Media, the leading Facebook Management System for the world's largest brands and agencies, today introduced Buddy Media Platform +GLOBAL, a new add-on to the Buddy Media Platform. +GLOBAL is the first geo-targeted Facebook page management system that empowers global marketers to maintain a single, unified Facebook presence across multiple countries and languages.

Of the nearly 500 million consumers that log on to Facebook each month, only 25 percent live in the United States, making Facebook the largest and fastest-growing two-way communication platform in the world.  This means that brands that don't offer a global solution on Facebook are ignoring up to 75 percent of their customers.

According to a new study commissioned by Buddy Media, brand managers (51%) say it's very important to manage local, customized content so it is consistent and organized and nearly all respondents said it can be challenging to reach customers in local markets (93%).  Among the most prominent issues are cost (88%), tracking ROI, finding the appropriate channels and leveraging social media. (1)

"By serving everyone who 'likes' a brand across the globe using a single customizable platform, our +GLOBAL add-on gets everyone on the same page – literally," said Michael Lazerow, CEO and Founder of Buddy Media. "This solves many of the local branding dilemmas companies encounter with social marketing – cost, scale, disjointed pages, segmented audiences, inconsistent design and incomplete analytics."

Before Buddy Media Platform +GLOBAL, brands that maintained a Facebook presence across multiple countries had been challenged with trying to manage a loose network of fragmented and disjointed brand pages that looked different and had segmented audiences. This fragmentation made it expensive and impossible to aggregate and analyze engagement activity, all of which was pulled from multiple, 'siloed' sources.  

Now, Buddy Media has introduced a timely, cost effective and simple management tool that offers several distinctive benefits to global brands:

• Significant Cost savings: +GLOBAL streamlines the development of multiple pages and reduces the need for one-off, custom development projects. Initial Buddy Media clients report that +GLOBAL eliminates 80 percent of the costs of deploying global Facebook presences.

• Geo-Targeting: +GLOBAL serves Facebook content based on user country and language settings.

• Unified Branding: +GLOBAL lets global marketing lock down unified brand assets, while providing local market representatives the ability to customize content, promotions and social applets.

• Reduced Time to Market: +GLOBAL licensees can launch a global Facebook presence in less than four weeks, a fraction of the time it currently takes for a global brand to launch even one page.

• Improved Security: +GLOBAL empowers global brands to deploy and manage hundreds of Pages globally through a secure system without granting high-level Facebook Page admin rights to any one team or individual

• Increased Control: +GLOBAL's detailed permission provisioning allows global brands to empower local markets with the ability to customize and publish to Facebook Pages without ceding complete control to each market team

• Powerful Business Insights: +GLOBAL's unified CMO dashboard provides the marketing team with a full view into global Facebook activity - all accessible through a single comprehensive data package

• More Effective Facebook Advertising: +GLOBAL provides a powerful enterprise Facebook management system that serves as the foundation for successful global Facebook advertising programs.

Starwood Hotels & Resorts is one of the first companies to implement +GLOBAL, serving customized language and content on its Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Facebook page (www.facebook.com/SPG) to guests from Spain, Germany and China.  

"For the first time, we're able to deliver meaningful and targeted localized content across the globe at scale without any potential sacrifice to our global brand equity," said David Godsman, VP, Global Web, Starwood Hotels and Resorts.

Following last year's successful launch of Buddy Media Platform +AGENCY, which is now licensed by over 60 advertising, marketing and public relations agencies, Buddy Media has signed additional +GLOBAL licenses for client programs that will be launching in the weeks ahead.  For more information about the Buddy Media Platform +GLOBAL, please visit http://pitch.pe/71656 or www.buddymedia.com.

About Buddy Media

The Buddy Media Platform is the leading Facebook management system for the world's largest brands and agencies.  With its scalable, secure architecture and straightforward administrative tools, the Buddy Media Platform revolutionizes the way brands connect with their current and future customers using the power of Facebook's social connections.  The Buddy Media Platform offers the only solution that allows brands to launch, maintain and measure their Facebook presence in any country and in any language. The Buddy Media Platform is the enterprise Facebook management system of choice for the largest brands in the world, including Anheuser Busch, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, Starwood, Delta, Southwest Airlines, Samsung, L'Oreal, the National Hockey League and others. Based in New York, Buddy Media shares four investors with Facebook and was one of the first companies selected by Facebook as a preferred developer partner. The company is backed by Softbank Capital, European Founders Fund, Greycroft Partners, Facebook investor Ron Conway, Facebook board member Peter Thiel, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Roger Ehrenberg, Howard Lindzon and others. For more information, visit www.buddymedia.com.

(1) Harris Interactive, June 2010.

SOURCE Buddy Media