TEL AVIV, May 30, 2012 — BlogWorld New York is less than a week away. Rick Calvert, CEO and co-founder of BlogWorld & New Media Expo told PRNewswire last week that “attendees reach and influence over 250 million people and generate 400 million impressions over the course of the event.”
Commun.it, based in Israel, is set to publicly launch there next week. After a year of work in closed beta, it has the potential to change the way people build relationships and generate business on Twitter. Combine that with the platform at BlogWorld and next week has the potential to be a game-changer.
CEO Sharel Omer is relaxed. He has spent over 10 years in the startup industry. Omer said with a smile, “Even small companies can make big changes. I’m 32, married with a 2 year-old baby girl. She was born when we started the company, so we have two startups.”
Omer is right. Instagram and SocialCam have recently proven that small companies can make big changes. It will be interesting to see what the next week, month, year yields for the company.
It’s hard not to root for them. Everyone loves an underdog. Well, except for Miami Heat fans. That and he is giving early access to anyone who reads this article.
Omer said, “Although the service is launching publicly in a week, we will be metering access for the first month or so. Your readers can get in now, however, using this unique invite link (first 500 only). Pro tier - only $4.99 a month - will continue to apply to any user who registers and upgrades to Pro before the public launch at BlogWorld & New Media Expo NYC.”
Follow BlogWorld: June 5-7 (#BWENY)
1. What is the future of social media? What will we be talking about 12 months from now?
ROI driven social media - Social Media is maturing in terms of its business value. We’re seeing many businesses investing more and more time, money & effort into social media, yet it’s very hard for them to find the ROI and justify more investment.
The problem becomes harder when a community manager of an SMB wants to have more budget to run social campaigns or add another community manager to manage the load of incoming engagements and can’t justify it in measurable business value.
I believe that more and more services and marketing professionals will take this challenge, and mature social media into a measurable Social Media ROI metric. It’s the next step in its evolution.
In attempts to measure the ROI and better manage relationships over social media, it’s expected to have more rating services, tools that give you social CRM insights, discover leads.
2. What are the important features of Commun.it?
Commun.it turns the stream-oriented world of Twitter in to a relationship-oriented dashboard, yielding significant benefits.
Focus on Your High-Value Members: Top influencers that drive awareness, top supporters that spread your word, most engaged members & potential leads.
Actionable Insights to Build Meaningful Relationships: Full engagement history with each member, members’ most-used hashtags, who to follow / who to re-engage.
Stress-Free Social Productivity: Not another Twitter client with an endless stream of messages - Commun.it analyzes relationships and helps you focus on relevant people, not on statuses.
3. What need did you recognize in social media? What makes you different from similar services?
Managing and maintaining relationships on Twitter is difficult for businesses. Twitter is inherently message-oriented and real-time, always bringing focus to the latest tweet or mention, it’s part of it’s magic.
But the problem is that on Twitter all statuses are treated as equals - meaning that engagement from influencers has the same visibility for you as a random mention, and this makes it difficult to prioritize your efforts.
In addition, tweets lack relationship context. How many times you engaged with this person in the past? What did you talk about a month ago? Questions that businesses struggle with every day.
Commun.it solves these pain points by bringing priority and context, inherent to real-world relationships, to Twitter. It does so by analyzing all your engagements, deducing relationship status and significance, prioritizing those that matter and providing rich context for each one.
We believe that a solution such as Commun.it is absolutely necessary for businesses that grow and rely on building & maintaining relationships with their customers, prospects, partners and others.
Our ROI isn’t found in graphs or simple social media stats (e.g. # of followers or retweets). It’s is in the improved ability to build and maintain business relationships which drive the business: Sales leads, potential customers, supporters and influencers who spread your word.
Commun.it is powered by Relationship Graph - continuously updating graph of relationships between people. While social network graphs are mostly about “who you follow/friends with”, Relationship Graph encodes information such as “who you talk with the most”, “who influences you”, “who is a potential lead for you”, etc.
4. We keep adding social channels that we check, update. Will it eventually condense or continue to grow larger?
We believe that while new Social Media channels appear constantly, our basic need to connect with people, and develop connection to relationship doesn’t change. In a way, under the hood of every new channel is the same underlying challenge - how to hear and be heard in a world of attention deficit.
Traditional mass marketing is not really working. People now have many ways to filter the marketing broadcast noise (e.g: TV ad, web-site ad, spam filter on mail,…) in addition now any person can send a tweet to his favorite brand/company/person.
This creates many engagements whether the brand likes it or not and this causes disruption. At some point it should be united in a way that make business sense. A person who engaged with you on Twitter, then you talk to on Facebook, then buys your product is a real scenario that happens every day.
The trick is to streamline all of the relationships and align the business processes to make it all work. The technology for such a unified flow is not yet available but I think that it will be at some point, and it will make a difference.
5. What do you find interesting about interactions on social media?
Social media changes the way people interact, the social effect is working over time in our subconscious. Researchers show that e-commerce sites with more social icons convert more.
It seems that just the social icon makes you feel like you’re a part of something bigger and that people may be watching.
Jeff Barrett is a recognized leader in public relations, experiential marketing and social media. Co-Founder of Status Creative, 2011 PRNewswire Award Winner for “Best Use of Video In Social Media” and record holder for Most Strikeouts in Tee-Ball.
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