Mass Relevance

Social curation and engagement platform Mass Relevance and marketing communications organization VivaKi announced a strategic partnership on Monday. The partnership will give all agencies with Publicis Groupe, which founded VivaKi in 2008, access to the Mass Relevance platform. The Mass Relevance platform can aggregate, filter and display posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube in real time. Publicis Groupe is currently one of the third largest buyers in the world for social advertising. The organization’s adoption of the Mass Relevance platform will give it a significant boost. The Mass Relevance platform has already powered social experiences for the the 2012 elections with CNN and Facebook; the Olympic Games with NBC and Twitter; as well as campaigns for brands like Pepsi and Doritos.

Unified

Enterprise marketing technology company Unified has announced the quarterly release of its cloud-based Social Operating Platform. In its spring 2013 release, the company has added more data-driven applications for more thorough insights. These applications include an insights application for tracking audience and engagement analytics as well as a content application for real-time feed optimization and monitoring. The company has also added an advertising application for cross-channel planning and buying. With these new applications, Unified adds to its existing capabilities such as automated ad creation, targeting, optimization, and programmatic bid management for native, mobile and premium Facebook ads.

Ampush

Ampush, a Preferred Marketing Developer for the Facebook platform, has recently hired Andrew Hersam as its new Director of Sales. Formerly at Facebook as a Global Marketing Solutions, Client Partner, Hersam’s migrates from Facebook to a Preferred Marketing Developer. CEO Jesse Pujji adds, “Andrew brings invaluable experience to Ampush during a time of continued growth and sales expansion.”

AdParlor

AdParlor introduced two new tools last week, the Social Ad Mockup Generator and Competitive Benchmark Analysis. The new tool helps advertisers quickly create mocks of Facebook ad units that can be used in presentations and examples. This could be helpful to marketers interested in comparing how a post looks before they upload it into their campaigns. Competitive Benchmark Analysis provides real-time data to better understand both page and industry performance. It measures high-level engagement rates and other metrics to help determine page strategies. Both tools are now live.

Adobe

Adobe, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, revealed Facebook Exchange results from its cross-channel ad platform, the Adobe Media Optimizer. It shared that its average CPC is up to 40 percent below the average of all real-time bidded ad supply sources supported by Adobe. One customer reported 50 percent lower cost per registration driven by Facebook Exchange, but cost and reached only a tenth of the of the size a concurrently running search campaign. Adobe’s closed with the indication that its FBX ads can help to convert on search ads at a later time.

Wildfire

Google has announced plans to integrate Wildfire into the DoubleClick platform. The DoubleClick platform is a unified platform put in place to help advertisers and agencies manage the entire breadth of their digital marketing efforts. It provides ad management and ad serving tools. its intention is to help marketers better understand how ad spend is being used. Because, currently, the tool does not have access to Facebook or other social platforms, reporting will be displayed on an aggregated basis. This means that marketers won’t be able to tie a Facebook post’s impression to a display ad click, but will need to correlate the compiled results. With Google’s acquisition of Wildfire, it is continuously looking for solutions to provide a seamless package for managing all online advertising.

Adobe

Adobe, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, today announced that it has hired the team behind creative design firm Ideacodes. The San Francisco-based startup had specialized in design and user experience for websites, web apps and blog networks. The Ideacodes cofounders will join as creative directors of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, which includes apps like Photoshop, Illustrator and Indesign. Last week Adobe made another acqui-hire: mobile app development team Thumb Labs.

Adotomi

Social advertising technology company Adotomi today announced its Universal Mobile App Tracking Program to give app developers a way to track the actions users take within their mobile apps after being exposed to Facebook install ads. Developers can track multiple actions to better understand users’ progress through the conversion funnel and their lifetime value. This allows developers to more accurately gauge the ROI of their Facebook campaigns and optimize them accordingly. Mobile app tracking providers HasOffers, Ad-X and AppsFlyer have integrated with Adotomi to offer this feature, and Adotomi says more partners are coming soon.

Adotomi is a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer and CEO Joe McCormack will be participating in a panel and vendor workshop at our Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco next week.

DataXu

Facebook Exchange Certified DSP DataXu introduced an Algorithm Marketplace to its enterprise programmatic marketing platform last week. The Algorithm Marketplace is a library of algorithms for programmatic buying, which also taps into attribution and validation models from Adometry and Nielsen, as well as data from eXelate. The marketplace gives brands and agencies new ways to customize the DataXu Platform and better engage consumer across channels, including FBX, display, video and mobile.

Retargeting platform AdRoll announced today that it has added the option for advertisers to run self-serve Facebook Exchange retargeting ads in the News Feed. Facebook made this inventory available to Qualified DSPs, including AdRoll, earlier this month. Previously, AdRoll and other companies could only run FBX ads in the right hand sidebar of Facebook.com, but now they can bid on desktop News Feed placement. AdRoll says early tests show clickthrough rates in the single-digit percentages for News Feed, as opposed to fractions of percent in the sidebar. Unlike other retargeting ads, retargeted News Feed ads incorporate Facebook’s share, comment, and like functionalities, which leads to additional engagement and viral potential. An example of a News Feed FBX ad is below. AdRoll is actually running FBX ads retargeting visitors to its own site.

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Compass Labs/ShopIgniter

Social marketing platform Compass Labs today announced its partnership with ShopIgniter, a platform for creating rich media social posts. Through this partnership, brands can now develop rich media campaigns through ShopIgniter and promote them with paid media through Compass Labs’ CLIQ Ads Manager and with the insights gained from the CLIQ Social Intelligence platform.

With Facebook putting new demands on Preferred Marketing Developers to offer or influence all components of Facebook marketing, particularly paid media, many PMDs are forming business alliances like this one to better serve marketers throughout all stages of a campaign.

Marin Software

Advertising management platform Marin Software today announced new features for Facebook advertisers, making it easier to create different campaigns and optimize them, through automatic algorithms or enhanced reporting. Marin identified the following four key updates to its platform:

• Facebook Campaign Wizard – Quickly and easily create Facebook campaigns at scale by entering just a few variables such as headline text, images and audience targets.

• Creative Rotation Optimization and Reporting – Rotate creative within a single ad type or even rotate ads across different ad types after identifying the highest performing ads within a campaign.

• Bidding Enhancements for Facebook – Decrease costs and increase performance by optimizing for any objective across the purchase funnel.

• Single Interface View of Facebook Results – See all results in a single interface, including attribution and any financial or social objectives.

Syncapse

Social marketing platform Syncapse today announced that Maarten L. Albarda will serve on its industry advisory board. Albarda was previously Vice President, Global Connections for Anheuser Busch InBev, and before then Global Director, Media & Communication Innovation for The Coca-Cola Company.

Salesforce brands paid media offering as Social.com
Salesforce.com today introduced Social.com, a social advertising application to create and optimize social ad campaigns at scale. Salesforce has Facebook and Twitter Ads API access through its acquisition of Buddy Media, which had previously acquired ad platform Brighter Option. The new Social.com brand is the advertising arm of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which includes page management and app platform Buddy Media and listening tool Radian6. Salesforce is one of Facebook’s 12 Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers.

Nanigans closes $5.8M Series A.1
Facebook ads company Nanigans this week announced that it has secured $5.8 million in funding from a Series A.1 round led by Avalon Ventures. The company, one of Facebook’s sPMDs, focuses on optimizing campaigns for lifetime value through its Ad Engine product. Its largest clients are in the gaming and e-commerce space, which are also among the highest spending verticals on the social network. Previously, Nanigans raised $3.1 million from Avalon in 2011. The latest funding deal closed last week, but the Boston-based company held off on announcing the news after bombings in the city. Some of Nanigans’ own employees participated in the Boston Marathon, but were not hurt by the attacks.
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Wildfire, the social media marketing platform owned by Google, announced Tuesday that it is shutting down its self-serve Promotion Builder product.

The company will instead offer promotions solely as part of its Social Marketing Suite for enterprise clients. Basic, Standard and Premium promotions will be retired June 30. Promotions data will be available for export up until July 31.

The Social Marketing Suite covers ad buying, page management, conversation monitoring and analytics, in addition to promotion development. Previously, anyone could visit Wildfire’s site, sign up for an account and start creating and running social promotions, such as sweepstakes, coupon offers or user-generated content contests. Now, Wildfire doesn’t offer any pricing information on its site and asks potential customers to contact the company directly.

Smaller brands and businesses could look to alternatives like Offerpop, North Social or Heyo, which give marketers a range of tools for running social promotions and creating other custom experiences across social, mobile and web properties, but without the cost and commitment of an enterprise contract.

Forrester assesses social relationship platforms

Forrester Research released a report Tuesday evaluating eight top social relationship platforms in terms of their current offering, strategy and market presence. Shoutlet received the highest score for current offering and Spredfast had the top score for strategy. Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media led in market presence.

Forrester looked at Adobe, Hearsay Social, Salesforce.com’s Buddy Media, Shoutlet, Socialwave, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Syncapse, rating each on 49 criteria. Overall, the study found no clear leaders in the space, but most were “strong performers.” Socialware and Syncapse were in the lower tier of “contenders.”

Shoutlet led the current offering category largely because of its comprehensive feature set and easy onboarding. Spredfast excelled in strategy because of its highly satisfied customer base, which found its measurement and reporting capabilities to be the strongest of all platforms.

The full report, “The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013,” is available for purchase here.

ShopIgniter updates rich media advertising platform

Social marketing and commerce company ShopIgniter this week announced an update to its Igniter platform, which helps companies create rich media posts on Facebook, as well as its entry into the paid media management space.

The combination gives brands an end-to-end solution for running interactive advertisements in the Facebook News Feed. For instance, a company could show off a new product line with a video and image gallery that link to the retailer’s website or includes an entry form for a related sweepstakes. ShopIgniter provides templates, but experiences and design are fully customizable.

Instead of hosting these experiences in page tab applications that users hardly visit, ShopIgniter presents them in-stream so users can interact with and share the posts directly from News Feed. ShopIgniter says rich media posts generate more engagement and less negative feedback than traditional posts.

ShopIgniter now has a small media buying team to manage campaigns for clients. Sr. Director of Strategy Justin Kistner, who recently joined the company after leading product at Spruce Media, says he’s bringing on more media buyers and a product team is in the works but for now the company is mostly advising clients on how to apply paid media to their rich media posts created with ShopIgniter.

Facebook is today launching cost-per-action ads for certain actions through the Ads API, a company spokesperson tells us.

This pricing model lets advertisers define the action that is most important to them and set a maximum price they’re willing to spend for each action of that type. For example, instead of paying for every click — whether it came from a user who simply viewed a photo larger, left a comment or visited the advertiser’s fan page instead of actually Liking the page — a company could now say it only wants to pay for page Likes. Any other clicks or engagement won’t take away from the advertisers’s budget.

This option gives advertisers more control over their spends. Previously, a company would have to run ads on a cost-per-click or optimized cost-per-impression basis, and then constantly monitor their ads to understand the actual amount they were spending per action. Because Facebook ads include so many potential actions for users to take — photo views, Timeline visits, page Likes, post Likes, comments, shares, link clicks, etc. — it can be frustrating for advertisers to be paying for clicks that don’t accomplish their primary marketing objective. This is why cost-per-action ads are something many advertisers have asked for from Facebook, and many third-party providers were selling ads this way, even if Facebook’s API didn’t officially support it.
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Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer SHIFT today announced the SHIFT Open Marketing Cloud, a suite of applications from partners covering media buying, community management, social promotions, analytics and more.

The collaboration platform brings together apps from 11 other companies: Aggregate Knowledge, Convertro, Curalate, Expion, Fan Appz, Kenshoo, Moontoast, Offerpop, Optimal Analytics, SocialFlow and The Trade Desk. SHIFT’s own social advertising tool, GraphEffect is also available through the stack.

SHIFT, which rebranded from its former company name GraphEffect in October 2012, offers open APIs for developers to make their software more collaborative — essentially creating a version of Open Graph for the enterprise so that actions within work-related applications can be shared with internal and cross-organizational teams. The company is positioning itself as an emerging alternative to marketing clouds like Salesforce and Adobe, which own all the applications they offer. SHIFT aims to be open and bring together tools from a number of different developers, taking a percentage of revenue that is generated from developers who sign up new users through the platform.

Adknowledge to buy SocialWeekend

Adknowledge announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire SocialWeekend Labs, which offers tools for app developers to acquire and retain users. Adknowledge also owns AdParlor, a Facebook ads and insights sPMD, which runs paid media campaigns several large app developers as well as brands. San Francisco-based SocialWeekend has also built its own Facebook applications in the past, such as Birthdays+ and Wisdom of the Buddha.

Tigerlily brings post insights to platform

Facebook pages and apps PMD Tigerlily last week introduced post-level analytics to its Insights platform. The product helps page owners understand the performance of their posts, letting them set goals, compare results and get actionable information to improve their metrics.

Moontoast hires

Facebook PMD Moontoast announced the following hires this week:

• Ramzi Saba, VP of Engineering – former director of technology at Sapient
• Kevin Metz, Sales Director for NYC – former national sales manager, east at Ampush