Marketers: How do know which messages and campaigns will resonate best with your target audience?

New York-based Persado wants to provide marketers with data to help them build a successful campaign or promotion. Today, the startup has pulled in $15 million in funding in a round led by Bain Capital Ventures to further build-out product that automatically selects and generates optimal marketing messages for its customers.

The startup will use the funding to significantly expand its sales and marketing efforts and establish a new headquarters in New York City. Persado CEO and founder Alex Vratskides said his team spent years and millions of dollars building Persado’s “marketing persuasion technology.”

“Working with CMOs of customers on five continents reaching over a billion consumers, I became increasingly frustrated at the limitations of old methods of engaging and persuading customers to act,” Vratskides said. High-profile customers include Skype, Badoo, and TIM Brazil, one of the largest mobile operators in South America.

Vratskides said he considers companies like Bloomreach and Adchemy as competition but claims Persado is the only company that works with “language designed to persuade human readers.”

Blank billboard image // Vibrant Image Studio, Shutterstock

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BlastRoots was founded by Washington D.C. mover-and-shaker Chris Hull. Hull spent his career working in politics. He has worked for state and national legislatures, as well as for a national party committee, public policy think tanks, lobbying groups, and public affairs firms. His primary role was to advise organizations of all sizes, from grassroots campaigns to global corporations, on how to best achieve their political aims. He is also an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University.

A few years ago, Hull’s attention began to wander away from from serving special interest groups and towards creating a system where a majority of the population is not unhappy with the way government works. A Gallup poll conducted last year found that satisfaction with the government was at a record low of nearly 30%. Hull believes that these numbers would go up if voters felt they had a greater impact on policy.

“I felt for a long time that someone should automate me out of existence,” Hull said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Suddenly, a lightbulb went off in my head and I realized this was made possible by the social networking revolution. It is undeniable that the internet has changed politics by making it easier for people to organize online.”

He left his public affairs job and set out to create a platform that combined the knowledge, resources, and tools of political insiders with the capabilities of internet technology. Hull’s cofounder John Merz previously served as the Director of Technology for the AOL Greenhouse. The men combined their political and technical expertise to create what they believe is the ultimate grassroots lobbying platform.

“In my judgement, there was not a company that took the know-how of Washington and how things actually work, and applied these new lessons of technology to it, opening it up to the public. What we really need is a transparent and open marketplace where people can access these services and use them to participate in the political process.”

Hull said BlastRoots bridges the gap between platforms like Change.org and Causes which are entirely focused on grassroots momentum, and the “enormous but completely subterranean” industry in Washington that influences public affairs for a very high price.

BlastRoots is now in beta. Visitors to the site can create their own campaign using a step-by-step guide, browse existing campaigns to join, or blast out an idea to their social network to incite action. The dashboard offers tools to create a grassroots lobbying campaign, including a customized petition template, a database of email addresses and Twitter handles for directly contacting the members of Congress, customized print-and-send letter templates, and recruitment features. There are also analytical features to track progress, measure impact, and follow up as needed.

The idea is to help people without a lot of expertise, connections or money, change the world. According to an analysis BlastRoots conducted on the political advocacy market, $17.2 billion was spent on federal lobbying, non-profit advocacy, political contributions, and campaigns in 2012. However, while these numbers are high and climbing, the increase is partly driven by relatively small online donations.

“Our view is that spending not only on politics, but on policy – advocacy and lobbying – will eventually flow more and more from ordinary citizens, much of it gathered online,” Hull said in a discussion on Politico. “That’s a promising trend.”

BlastRoots is based in Washington DC. It’s core team consists of 6 people, all dedicated to the goal of a more democratic lobbying system, and the ideal of a more democratic America.

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A leaked video of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney talking frankly about his election strategy has caused an uproar in social media.

Mother Jones published clips of the speech yesterday and followed up with the full, uncut video of Romney’s remarks today. Almost immediately, both Twitter and Facebook were flooded with comments about Romney’s speech.

The speech is a doozy. In it, Romney refers to the 47 percent of Americans who ostensibly pay no income taxes and says, “My job is not to worry about those people.” Romney also quipped about his father’s ethnicity, saying, “Had he been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this,” and insisted, despite his family’s great wealth and political connections, “I have inherited nothing.” He referred to the need to softball his attack on Obama, because he didn’t want to upset independents who had voted for Obama in the last campaign, and he boasted about the expertise of his paid political consultants.

In short, the videos were a treasure trove for Democrats (and exasperated conservatives) looking for perfectly bite-sized, tweetable nuggets.

The impact was immediate and huge, and this shows the power of social media to magnify a gaffe. Sure, presidential candidates have made mistakes before, but now social media gives this an amplification effect thanks to the person-to-person sharing of links and tweets. As of this morning, Visible Measures, a video monetization and analysis company, had identified 120 separate clips of the secretly recorded videos, comprising a total of 2.4 million views. Here’s the breakdown of those views from Visible Measures:

In terms of relative impact, the Romney videos blow away the comparables, as shown in Visible Measure’s chart above. Clint Eastwood’s bizarre speech to an empty chair at the Republican National Concention was also a viral social media hit, but it only garnered 550,000 views in its first 24 hours, or about a fifth of the Romney video’s impact. The video has also obliterated the impact of two Romney campaign videos, even accounting for all of their views to date.

On Twitter, #RomneyEncore (the tag used by Mother Jones to promote the release of the full videos) is one of the top 10 trending topics in the U.S.

Click for full size image

Of course, the Obama campaign quickly took to social media to deliver its own responses, helping amplify the impact by creating its own shareable content, such as the “Romney 47% map” to the right. Meanwhile, the Romney campaign’s response has been limited to traditional media, with comments made by the candidate at a recent campaign stop. Mitt Romney’s Twitter account has been silent on the issue.

To be fair, you can’t easily respond to a social media firestorm like this via social media. The Romney campaign’s best hope is to wait for the furor to die down and then wait for Obama to make a similarly embarrassing gaffe.

Will this impact Romney in the polls? Too soon to say. But it sure doesn’t look good on the Internet.

Photo credit: davelawrence8 via photo pin

A startup created to help local leaders rally citizens has mobilized quite a bit of support for its own cause.

NationBuilder, a community organizing platform for local politicians, non-profits, and causes, has bagged $6.25 million in a new funding round led by the esteemed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz partner Ben Horowitz and round participant Sean Parker (of Napster and The Social Network fame) are joining the startup’s board of directors.

Founded in November 2009 and launched roughly one year ago, NationBuilder offers community leaders an all-in-one platform to easily establish a web presence with social hooks, run campaigns or causes, raise funds, and manage volunteer initiatives. The do-it-yourself system, which starts at $19 per month, is said to be used by more than 1,800 leaders who’ve altogether amassed more than 2 million supporters across their 500 “nations” (read: campaigns).

Isn’t this just a dressed-up WordPress copycat for non-profits and small-town politicians, you ask? In many ways, yes. But where NationBuilder excels is in delivering sophisticated features finely tuned to the exact needs of grassroots community organizers. The site, for instance, helps leaders maintain a supporter database that automatically appends public data users have shared on Facebook or Twitter (profile picture, bio, contact information etc.) for an up close and personal look at their cheerleaders.

And, according to CEO Jim Gilliam and President Joe Green, NationBuilder actually works in getting local politicians elected. Alex Torpey, for instance, was elected Village President of South Orange in May 2011. The young mayor ran and managed his campaign entirely using NationBuilder.

“NationBuilder empowers you to find who to talk to and gives you a bunch of different ways … to run a strategic and deliberate operation as a local guy running a campaign on a few thousand dollars,” Green said. “For us, the campaign office is the website,” Gilliam added.

NationBuilder is, of course, a for-charge product, which means the startup is earning revenue with each new customer — making it an especially attractive business from an investor perspective — and some of the extras such as email and text messaging to supporters come with additional fees.

NationBuilder is based in Los Angeles. The young company previously raised $500,000 in seed funding from a handful of Angels, including Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes.

Photo credit: theqspeaks/Flickr

The “our” he speaks of may actually apply more directly to brands embracing the social network for social marketing.

New data from comScore, revealed during the Monday morning presentation, highlights traffic gains big name brands recently experienced thanks to a combination of paid and earned media efforts on Facebook.

Mega-retailer Walmart, which launched a Shopycat Facebook application prior to the holidays, saw 275 million display ad impressions as a result of a paid media campaign on Facebook, but experienced an additional 117 million social media impressions thanks to the organic sharing activities of its Facebook fans and their friends, co-presenter and comScore CMO Linda Abraham shared.

comScore also looked at the percentage of people who visited retailer websites during a key week in the 2011 holiday season and found that for Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart a high percentage of visitors to these sites were either Facebook fans or friends of Facebook fans (as seen in the presentation slide deck below).

Sixty-four percent of visitors to Amazon during the week ending November 30 were brand-exposed Facebook fans, for instance, and 36 percent were friends of fans, according to comScore. Leading Black Friday retailers also saw significant year-over-year traffic lift thanks to their various Facebook and social campaigns, Abraham said.

The data, Abraham concluded, shows that brands that know their Facebook fans, know their fans’ friends and push out the right creative message are seeing quantifiable results from their social campaigns.

Brands, she heeded, should keep in mind that Facebook users spend a majority of their time on Facebook on their News Feeds (27 percent). They should alo note that Facebook fans are often a younger demographic group than their average customers, and remember that friends of Facebook fans are an equally important audience to reach.

Disclosure: The Digital Life Design conference paid my way to Munich. VentureBeat’s coverage of the conference remains objective and independent.

[Image via DLD/Tumblr]

“We’re turning a page on the President’s Facebook account. From now on, Obama 2012 staff will use this account to keep you up to date not just on what the President’s doing every day, but on how millions of supporters around the country are building this campaign,” members of Obama’s campaign wrote via his Facebook page.

As for Twitter, official messages from Obama will be signed “-BO.”, tweeted the staff. Obama’s account has 8,683,981 followers, but previous research has shown his political party tweets far less often than their friends on the other side of the aisle.

Social media is seen as a big reason for the success Obama experienced in 2008; however it was mainly used to update supporters on campaign news rather than to actually interact with voters.

It’ll be interesting to find out if real presidential updates end up helping or hurting Obama’s re-election efforts.