Buddy Media Leads Industry Standards Forward With Unmatched Enterprise Social Marketing Suite Enhancements

NEW YORK, May 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Buddy Media, the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world's top ten global advertisers, today announced many industry firsts as part of major enhancements to its social marketing suite. The enhancements -- including a unified social data API, conversion, campaign and goal tracking across paid, owned and earned social media efforts, and a new mobile content development platform – enable brands to unify their social media programs with one enterprise social marketing suite.

"Social media marketing is anarchy right now within brands and agencies. Buddy Media is the only company to provide a unified solution that helps our customers to organize their teams, optimize their social programs to deliver real business results, and repeat," said Buddy Media Founder and CEO Michael Lazerow. "Buddy Media continues to lead the way in social marketing software, and our new product enhancements demonstrate why we are trusted by the largest brands, agencies, publishers, and retailers in the world."

Buddy Media is the only company to be named a charter Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, LinkedIn Certified Developer and Google Engagement Solutions partner. The company's new industry-leading enhancements include:

Unified Social Data API

Buddy Media is the only company to allow brands to break down siloes with a unified social data API for their social media presences, conversations and ads. Brands can now:

• Use holistic social media data to better inform global interactive marketing strategy.
• Integrate with existing CRM and email systems to better understand and communicate with customers.
• Apply social insights to sales, strategy and product development.

"It is essential for brands to be able to easily export all of their social data programmatically, and integrate it with existing CRM, email or other business process software, so social can be truly integrated into greater business decisions," said Lazerow. "It's another first for Buddy Media to be able to give brands all of their social data, across paid, owned and earned media in one API and one software solution."

Universal Comprehensive Conversion/ROI Tracking

Buddy Media is the first social marketing software company to launch universal conversion tracking across its entire social marketing suite. Brands can now see in real time which content is performing best, and specifically which social posts, applications and sharing activity drive the most conversions. For example, if a user posts several updates to a social stream that link to a Buddy Media social application, the user can track the conversions driven by each specific update, such as a form submission or a video view.

"It's not enough for brands and agencies to only know qualitative data such as shares and comments. They also need to know specifically which content is driving the most actions," said Lazerow. "With Buddy Media, you can now optimize content specifically for actions, not just engagement."

Mobile application platform

While other solutions on the market merely syndicate desktop experiences to mobile devices, Buddy Media is first to launch a native mobile social application platform. On mobile devices, there is limited amount of space, and no amount of "translating" will suffice. Brands can now launch mobile social applications such as polls, product galleries, photo galleries, form builders, and video players via the Buddy Media social marketing suite. They can also toggle between mobile and desktop options within the suite to compare applications.

"Social networking is the number one mobile internet activity, according to Kantar Media Compete/GroundTruth," said Lazerow. "Our customers need the best mobile experience possible for their fans. They can't just replicate what they're already doing for a desktop experience. Our true mobile social applications give brands another powerful weapon to use in the Buddy Media social marketing suite."

Campaign and goal tracking

Buddy Media is first to allow brands to create logical groupings of social content that all relate to a company-wide marketing effort, and assign the content to a specific named campaign with a date range and goals. Goals can be set using a number of KPIs (key performance indicators) measuring performance of the elements within the campaign. These could include contest submissions, video views, sign-ups and revenue generation.

"Brands can no longer afford to have a social program that is not unified," said Buddy Media founder and CEO Michael Lazerow. "With our campaign and goals tracking solution, brands can see how all of their social content, from experiences to conversations to ads, are working together to achieve success, and organize internal teams around specific goals."

Pinterest Integration

Buddy Media now has a social application for Pinterest as part of its library of more than 50 social applications ("sapplets"). Brands can now build unique experiences around their content on Pinterest and deploy those experiences anywhere, from Facebook Pages to blogs to microsites.

"We've had great success integrating our Pinterest board with our Facebook Page using the Buddy Media social marketing suite," said Robert Freeman, Director, Digital & Social Marketing, Michaels Stores, Inc. "The ability to bring the engaging functionality and content from Pinterest to other destinations seamlessly is a major win for us."

Quotes:

"These new enhancements from Buddy Media will allow the National Football League to be more efficient and generate much higher user engagement from our social media programs," said George Scott, General Manager, Digital Media (Club Sites) at National Football League. "The unified social media API will allow us to collect social data across the league and use it to better inform all of our social marketing decisions, and the mobile application platform allows us to quickly deliver mobile optimized social content to our fans, who are already engaging with us more than ever via mobile devices."

"One of the priorities for the Lenovo worldwide Social team in driving global consistency across our social platforms was finding the right technology partners. We looked at a number of companies providing similar services but after reviewing the various offerings we felt that Buddy Media was the best match for our needs," said Rod Strother, Director, Digital & Social Centre of Excellence at Lenovo. "We're excited for the latest enhancements to the Buddy Media social marketing suite to help us further our partnership."

For more information, please visit: buddymedia.com/products

Availability: All of the Buddy Media social marketing suite enhancements will be rolled out over the coming weeks.

About Buddy Media

Buddy Media is the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world's top ten global advertisers, empowering them to build and maintain relationships with their consumers in a connections-based world.  The Buddy Media social marketing suite helps brands build powerful connections globally with its scalable, secure architecture and data-driven customer insights from initial point of contact through point of purchase. Buddy Media is the most award winning social enterprise software company, winning the prestigious TechCrunch "Crunchie" Award for Best Enterprise application, named to the Advertising Age 2011 "Digital A-list," and CEO and Founder Michael Lazerow was selected as 2011 New York Entrepreneur of the Year® by Ernst and Young. For more information, visit http://www.buddymedia.com. 

SOURCE Buddy Media