Socialbakers Brings Its...

With more companies vying for the attention of customers on social media channels, content producers, marketers and more are always looking for ways to better track the engagement and reach of their social media footprints — across the globe. Socialbakers , a young startup founded in 2009 has emerged as one of the leading social analytics platforms in Europe. Since raising $2 million in September from Earlybird Capital Ventures and breaking into the black, the startup has turned its sights to the U.S., becoming the exclusive analytics partner with Facebook and others to provide social media analytics throughout the presidential campaign. The company is now officially getting serious about securing a foothold in the states, as it today announced the launch of its U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. To support its arrival on American soil, Socialbakers is also announced a new U.S. leadership team to be based in the Bay Area, which includes veteran technology executive Martin Huml as President and COO and Katrina Wong as VP of Marketing. Huml, who will lead U.S. operations, has previously served as the company’s chairman, and founded a company which became an exclusive distributor for Apple in central and eastern Europe. He also formerly worked at Credit Suisse before founding San Francisco-based investment consulting firm, Runway Capital. Katrina Wong, who will lead the company’s go-to-market strategy, previously led corporate marketing at Zuora, and worked in marketing at both SAP and Salesforce.com. The team plans to build on the traction of its social monitoring platform in Europe, which includes a roster of more than 750 customers and 275,000 registered marketing users (with companies like Danone, Vodafone, Samsung, Lufthansa And Peugoet licensing the premium version of its service), on top of the 60 U.S. brands already using its technology. So what does the company do, exactly? Socialbakers’ analytics platform measures the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns across the major social networks, like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ through its two flagship products. The first, called “Engagement Analytics,” enables statistical analysis of Facebook worldwide, including Facebook Pages, Places, Facebook apps, developers on Facebook, as well as advertising prices. “Engagement Builder,” by contrast offers benchmarking, competitive reporting, and integrated workflow functionality to enable businesses to track a variety of social media metrics. Jan Rezab, Socialbakers CEO, tells us that he’s seen a surprising amount of SMBs failing to integrate competitive benchmarking and intelligence into their social media strategies, opting to simply tap into certain streams to monitor keywords. While it’s easy for companies today to hook into a search stream and look at individual profiles themselves, the key is obviously to build a robust set of metrics around those profiles and streams. Volume matters, as he says that companies can no longer assume that their users will engage with their Twitter or Facebook content. By showing companies what works through an “Engagement Rate,” which not only tracks the low-hanging fruit like the number of fans and likes, but the number of comments, the type of engagement, how many people are picking up particular posts, how they’re sharing it, which pieces of content are going viral — and perhaps most importantly — how these engagement metrics compare to that of their competitors. Much of the data on the platform Socialbakers offers for free (as most of it is public data that is openly available, just poorly aggregated), a resource used increasingly by marketers. Of course, the company also offers a set of “pro” SaaS tools, for which companies pay between $100 and $1,000 per month depending on the number of fans their pages have attracted. The team believes that the U.S. is home to a fragmented analytics market, and by quickly scaling its platform over the course of the next year, it can become a player in the space. The CEO said that it plans to double the size of its U.S.-based team over the next two months, in addition to growing the international team to more than 100 employees. “We want to help all the companies using Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and YouTube, get out of the dark,” the CEO said. While that’s no easy feat, we could definitely use a bigger lightbulb. For more, check out the company at home here .

Meundies Wants To Send ...

In the same space as other “get random stuff sent to you” startups (but especially Manpacks ) Meundies launches today to bring users high quality underwear choices in a month to month subscription model. The Meundies onboarding process basically functions like that of Stylemint , where users select the styles and colors they like and the startup provides them with personalized choices, for $16 a month per item in addition to free shipping and returns. Members have the option of skipping a month or putting their membership on pause during the first five days of each month. Members can also cancel their membership at any time without penalty. Yay! Meundies co-founders Barak Diskin and Jonathan Shokrian view Meundies as a true eCommerce service — cutting out retail middlemen and brand licensing fees in order to save their customers money on basics. According to Diskin, Meundies are 30% cheaper than comparable brands, starting at $16 for a Meundies-branded pair of underwear versus $26 for brands like Calvin Klein or Cosabella. As part of the Meundies schtick, the company guarantees that their product is the “most comfortable underwear ever”, and it takes great lengths to personally gauge quality control in the American and Turkish factories where it manufactures its product, establish relationships with manufacturers and communicate with customers directly through Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest in order to pinpoint exactly what they want. “It’s a headache to shop in stores for items you aren’t allowed to try on or don’t need to try on because you already know your size,” says Diskin, “We’ve created a membership program for replenishment items like underwear and socks so that you can have them delivered to your door monthly, quarterly, or whenever you want rather than having to run to the store once there are holes in them.” The founders view their market as $5 billion in universal underwear spend for men and $15 billion for women and only see those numbers as increasing as their scope expands. Diskin tells me that the  eventual goal is to make the highest quality products, producing premium undergarments for people who want easy access to top quality apparel. Eventually the company wants to go long into all sorts of basic clothing items, from leggings to sweats to shirts, etc. TechCrunch readers can try out Meundies with the code “TECHCRUNCH” in order to get half off their first purchase. Don’tcha wish your tech blog was hot like mine?

Pharma Dives Deeper Int...

YouTube videos to counteract fake Viagra, and a pharma Facebook game.

What Does a ‘Like’ Get ...

We often talk about how much a “like” is worth in terms of marketing. But what is a “like” worth to the consumer? Take a look at this chart from eMarketer. The results clearly show that consumers expect to get something in return for their click. But when the CMO Council asked marketers what they thought, they said that consumers clicked out of loyalty or love for their product. It is true that clicking the like button does imply a certain fondness for a brand, but love will only get you so far. Once the bloom is off the rose, consumers want to be rewarded for their loyalty. You could go to Jared, or you could offer coupons, discounts, and freebies, They’re the best way to get me to like your Facebook page. The second most popular choice is an interesting one. At first, I was surprised that 60% of people wanted to interact with others. That’s because my initial concept of a branded Facebook page is one devoted to a product, restaurant or store. Then I thought of the official pages for TV shows, movies, bands, charity organizations, sports teams. . . all of these are the perfects places for sharing thoughts, photos and links. Marketing Pilgrim’s Social Channel is proudly sponsored by Full Sail University, where you can earn your Masters of Science Degree in Internet Marketing in less than 2 years. Visit FullSail.edu for more information. Now drop down four spaces to “Find service and support.” Half of the respondents chose this answer and it’s a big one. More and more, I see consumers using Facebook pages to register a complaint. I did it myself, a couple of days ago. And you know what? The company didn’t reply. Even after I left a follow up comment and three other people left complaints, the company still hasn’t replied. That’s a company that won’t be getting anymore of my money and all they had to do to keep me was answer. Facebook pages are an excellent way of encouraging commerce with coupons, perks and games. But you have to monitor your pages. You have to respond to the comments, good and bad (especially the bad) and you have to keep the conversation going. If you plan to build a page and forget it, then don’t build it in the first place. What’s happening when you’re not there could do you more harm than good.

Addressgate: After The ...

Editor’s note : Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me . He was a co-founder of TechCrunch.  Just.me is a stealth company in the mobile space and as such Keith’s opinions on this issue are likely to reflect his product focus. Addressgate seems like an appropriate name for what is dominating Silicon Valley headlines : Path’s mobile app uploading all of your contacts. Today Michael Arrington suggested that Path delete the data gathered and start over, and now Path CEO and founder Dave Morin has decided to do just that , and apologized. The past 24 hours of discussion has mainly been characterized by shock, horror or forgiveness. Although all well-intentioned none of these get to the heart of a very significant issue that will only get more important as the mobile and cloud architecture of consumer apps replaces the desktop and cloud combination that has characterized the past 10 years of web services. Beneath the drama there are some big issues. Here I want to try and surface them. Background to address book issues It helps to understand what is happening at a macro level in order to grasp why Path was hammered while Google Plus and Facebook largely get a free pass when it comes to the question – “who owns the address book?” The past 10 years of web apps and services created a set of assumptions about where one’s address book should sit. In the early days of Web 2.0, when Plaxo built an early cloud-based synchronization platform, it was full of controversy. In January 2006 our own Michael Arrington, writing on Crunchnotes , entitled his piece “The Plaxo Virus”, and asked: “Plaxo, can you please find a way to run your business but never, ever email me again?.” Subsequent TechCrunch pieces were notably reluctant to endorse the service to say the least. This was the dawn of cloud-based address book management. The rise of Web 2.0 and the normalization of the cloud based address book. Since then Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others have normalized the notion that the right place for your contact list, or “friends,” is in the cloud. Indeed, given the cloud-centric architecture of web 2.0, that is the only place they can be. Almost all of the functionality of these services derives from being able to host the address book and to make comparisons between the address book of person ‘A’ and other people. Facebook even goes so far as to restrict an individual’s access to the records in the address book. It considers that details like a friend’s phone number or email address are private to the friend, and thus blocks the ability of the address book owner to download the address book from Facebook to their mobile phone or other device. A user has to log into Facebook and look up those details on its web service if he or she wants to check on an email address or phone number. In this scenario Facebook is not hosting your address book, it owns it and merely gives you permission to look it up. From Web Services to Mobile Apps Now that we are moving out of the era of web services and into a mobile era, decentralization of one’s address book becomes the norm. Your phone contacts become the center of gravity for your relationships. In this world, mobile-first applications have to make a decision about how to think about the address book. Now we are mobile, where should the address book sit? Answer 1: In the Cloud They can, as Path has done, choose to still host the address book and perform algorithmic queries on it in order to provide a set of services—like friend suggestions—based off of it. It is worth noting that this decision does not require the download of a person’s address book. That was simply Path’s method of doing it. There are many other ways the goal could have been accomplished. Indeed Path’s decision to host the address book seems old-fashioned and harks back to a pre-mobile era, but it is also normal in that context. The only real crime, if one was committed, was failure to alert the user. In a mobile context this becomes an issue because it is taking something from the user. In the web era the user was putting this data onto a service via an explicit upload process. Answer 2: On the Phone A second way of thinking about the mobile address book is that its inherently distributed characteristic is a good thing, and the services that utilize it should sit on the device and be under the control of the user. In this distributed model it is still possible to provide services like friend suggestions, but without needing to host the data from the address book in the cloud. The data could remain on the device and accessed through the cloud by other devices instead. That way, nothing is stored in the cloud, it just passes messages back and forth. Clearly this architecture is more mobile centric, more under the control of the user, and not vulnerable to service providers mismanaging a person’s contact lists. In theory such an architecture reverses the web 2.0 power relationship between a merchant and a user but does not reduce the functionality that a user can expect. This set of issues reinforces once again that privacy is a product issue , not merely a policy issue. Products that empower the user to act on their address book without taking the content of it and hosting it will likely find favor in a decentralized mobile world as it emerges. Those who want to persist with hosting the address book will need to ask for explicit permission again, or face the “Plaxo is a virus” style of reaction.