Jeffrey Davitz is CEO of Solariat, a venture-backed (KPG Ventures) Sillicon Valley startup that detects and responds to intention in social media data.

Maybe it’s time to ask whether we even want to be marketed to on social media.

Brands’ social marketing budgets are small enough that we know even the big guys aren’t really sure about it.

Like football games, social media draws crowds in huge numbers. Marketing of some kind is going to happen on social because people are there.

Still, it’s worth taking a beat and asking whether social will ever revolutionize marketing the way search did.

What is there now in terms of media? There is the equivalent of interactive websites, like Facebook brand pages. That’s a mixture of “slicks” (a.k.a. sell sheets) with a soupçon of old-fashioned event marketing. There is the equivalent of the online newsletter, like Twitter brand handles.

If this is a revolution, I’m going to see what else is on TV.

Social-based advertising has been a consistent rallying cry to keep up the fever pitch. The idea is that social provides such a window on the consumer’s soul that the messages would be uncannily well targeted, kind of like direct marketing on steroids. But there has been lots of fiction around this (and lots of data charlatans). Geniuses do not get much more than a few percentage points in response, and the industry has had a ton of data to work with for a long time.

So the sad fact is that is that social has not revolutionized anything. Marketing in social still feels like it goes against the grain.

To figure out what might be done, let’s remember why search marketing actually works. The story told often, but not heard enough, is that Google works because of intention. Users express intention in search, and responses that are in line with that intention have a much higher chance of getting some positive response. There are deep reasons why this works and why trying to jam something in without live intention often fails.

The magic of Google (and it continues to be magical) is that it ties intent directly to the message. A user expresses intent implicitly in the search box. And the user clearly identifies the topic of the intent, so the messages are on-topic and not disruptive to the user’s task.

Where is the intention in social? There’s actually plenty of it; it’s just all mixed up and buried.
However, there are two recent, strong signs that the intent in social is at last going to be harnessed. The numbers are dramatic and suggest the revolution might actually be at hand.

Service-related intent

Example: There are various surveys that show 50 percent of social media users have reached out in social for a customer service issue and a very significant number of these users expect a really fast response. These numbers have started to pop just in the last three months. Brands are starting to respond and social is rapidly becoming a genuine channel.

Tweet intent

This has been the subject of recent announcements by Twitter. Our own experience at Solariat is that responses to direct messaging in response to expressed intent is staggeringly high. Twitter itself is seeing very dramatic numbers.

It took a while, but intention has been found, and it’s starting to get used.

Jeffrey Davitz is CEO of Solariat, a venture-backed (KPG Ventures) Sillicon Valley startup that detects and responds to intention in social media data. Previously, Davitz was a manager for SRI’s Artificial Intelligence Center, where he founded and managed the Social Computing Group. While at SRI, he was also on the management team of the CALO project, the largest AI project in history involving research and system development efforts at more than 22 universities.

Image credit: mack2happy/Shutterstock

First of all, ixnay on the faces: brand images without faces drive many more repins than images with faces.

And generally, color is good, particularly images with more than one dominant color, which are repinned 3.25 times more often than images with just one dominant color. But even though blue seems to be many people’s favorite color, it’s a bad choice for repin-seeking Pinteresters. Red images get more repins than primarily blue images, and pictures that contain a mixture of red, orange, and brown, oddly enough, are repinned twice as as often as blue images.

Which makes the header photo for this post — a decadent Loaded Baked Potato Soup at a Disney theme park– a just-about-perfect pin: It’s been repinned almost 60,000 times and liked almost 8,000 times.

To generate its guidelines for creating more-shareable pins, Curulate analyzed 30 visual characteristics of images on Pinterest, such as color, texture, size, format (portrait or landscape), and saturation (how light or dark an image is).

Another interesting finding: Never, ever post a rough-textured image to Pinterest. According to the Curulate data, images with smooth texture are repinned a massive 17 times more often than images with rough texture. In addition, to maximize repinnability of products or objects, make the shot a close-up. Imagines with less than 30 percent background are repinned most often, while images that contain 40 percent or more background are two to four times less likely to be repinned.

One more guideline: saturation.

Very light and very dark images are seldom repinned. In fact, images with medium lightness are repinned 20 times more often than mostly dark images and eight times more often than images that are mostly white.

Source: http://pinterest.com/pin/89368373825810713/

Another very pinnable post with 165 re-pins

Finally, while it’s not an image guideline, brands need to be careful that their images on Pinterest actually lead somewhere. Pinterest is the fourth-largest traffic-generating site on the Internet, but 48 percent of the most popular pins lead to expired pages on retailers’ sites.

It’s a complete waste of time to engineer the perfectly-repinnable Pinterest pin only to have it lead straight to a 404 error page on your website.

Image credits: Pinterest; Baked Potato Soup/Disney; Pinterest Cake by Shards of Blue/Flickr

This is huge, because brands like Sephora say that their Pinterest followers spend 15 times more than their Facebook fans.

The new analytics package tells you what people are repinning from your website, how many people are seeing those pins, and — a key measure for your social marketing ROI — how many visits to your websites those pins generated. It will also show you visual selection of your most pinned, most clicked, and most recent pins so that “you have a better idea of what’s popular.”

“For example, if you have a travel blog, you’ll be able to see whether people are pinning your ski vacation posts or beach vacation posts more,” Tao Tao, a Pinterest software engineer wrote on the announcement blog post.

Much as Facebook’s Insights for Facebook page owners, the new analytics are basic measures of the most important engagement numbers. Before today, to get good information on Pinterest campaigns, brands needed a third-party analytics tool such as Pinfluencer or Curalate.

While you’ll still be able to get more insight and data and particular marketing tools from third parties, this announcement from Pinterest covers the needs of most casual Pinterest marketers.

“This is a good basic analytics product to serve as a foundation for Pinterest. It has great features around impressions and reach that large brands and agencies care about,” said Pinfluencer CEO Sharad Verma, noting that Pinfluencer also has Google and Omniture integration, as well as many other marketing and e-commerce features. “No third-party analytics can accurately report on impressions and reach.”

And the new tool is — perhaps — a shot across the bow of Pinterest third-party apps that have been “filling holes” in Pinterest’s now-growing suite of business tools. Pinterest has been fairly partner-friendly to this point, so we’ll have to wait and see if it’s now moving towards a Twitter-like practice of warning developers away from areas where it plans to make money itself.

To get access to the new analytics, you’ll need a verified Pinterest website, and you’ll need access to Pinterest’s new look.

Facebook’s presentation — and images — were curiously void of detail on how ads will fit into the new Facebook, but you can bet it’s been a hugely significant part of the conversation as Facebook continues to seek lucrative but appropriate ways of monetizing the social network.

A Facebook representative did tell me via email that businesses now have an “even more visually rich way to showcase content” and that users respond better to more visual stories. In addition, she said, your cover photo is going to be even more important in the new reality, as it will show up in the news feed in all its glory — or lack thereof — when a friend likes a business:

One superimportant point: The new news feed is NOT being accompanied by a new algorithm.

In other words, Facebook is not using this roll-out as an opportunity to revamp EdgeRank, the programmatic method by which Facebook determines how interesting you are, how interesting your content is, and therefore and most critically, how often and where to display your messages.

The early reports from advertisers are agreement with Facebook’s messaging.

“Facebook’s news is unbelievably exciting,” Fiksu CEO Micah Adler says. “Introducing enhanced feeds creates rich contextual advertising opportunities and serves as a perfect complement to Facebook’s unprecedented targeting and measurement capabilities.”

Nothing matters more to advertisers than context, Adler says, saying that while Facebook likes are simple, one-dimensional indications of positive sentiment, interactions between advertisers and people through contextual targeting in the new news feeds will “inevitably increase buyer interest.” He added that Fikus is planning to invest “significantly in new ad units on Facebook, particularly in mobile.

“The new look for Facebook’s News Feed promises new opportunities for advertisers,” Adobe media and ads director Justin Merickel said. “As users tend to show a stronger interest in active, personalized news feeds, embedded ads will likely be more relevant and generate higher ROI for advertisers.”

One concern? The feed choice options that Facebook is implementing.

“The friends-only feed could get a lot of the volume which may be a concern — but it does stop people getting upset with sponsored content appearing around their friends content,” Simon Mansell, the CEO of TBGdigital, said. “Standout will be harder for brands as a result but it’s probably a better user experience.”

Source: Facebook

Facebook’s new news feed options

That said, he added that “the chronological view is interesting — as it removes the argument that there is an algorithm in between users and content.”

Sarah Carter, the GM of social business at Actiance, echoed the concern, but she noted that overall, brands that truly get social marketing could do better with the new feed:

“People can skip content from a business if they want to,” Carter said. “The flip side is that the new design is meant to get people browsing for longer, and improve the overall Facebook experience. So if a business is able to effectively market to its audience on this channel, using content that is visual, relevant and spoken in an authentic voice, the ROI should be greater.”

One other tip from Facebook echoed Mansell’s comments: People will be able to choose the “Following” feed, which will simply display everything that every user and company they are following is publishing. That “reality-bubble free” zone in Facebook could get very interesting as people discover an unfiltered lens into their full social graph.

The new feed roll-out will happen “very slowly” over the coming weeks on mobile and web, Facebook says.

The new product, “PromoJam 2.0,” has been years in the making. It is the brainchild of brother and sister founders, Amanda and Matt MacNaughton (pictured above).

With this new product, the social marketing company is focusing on promotions, although the founders hope to build a “social network for marketers.” The product has Dropbox integration, so it’s easy to upload files, and a Yammer integration is in the works, which will enable users to collaborate on projects.

After a promotion has been released, users can view analytics on a dashboard to understand if the campaign has been a success. Results can be broken down by market segments, and marketers can create detailed demographic and geographic reports. The idea is that promotions, such as sweepstakes or a loyalty program, should be targeted to specific groups to increase engagement.

The beta version of the product counts the Los Angeles Times among its users, and the team is in talks with its existing customers, including NBC Universal, Clear Channel Radio, Virgin America, Red Bull, and The North Face.

A sample promotion created using PromoJam’s new software

The founders claim that PromoJam 2.0 is far cheaper than the alternatives, Salesforce.com’s “Marketing Cloud,” for example. It is available to companies and individual consultants on a subscription basis. Prices range from $250 to $500 per month, depending on the level of use.

Promotions have been technically challenging to develop, and these can be a drain on a marketing team’s budget. PromoJam’s team of engineers have designed dozens of templates, meaning that companies won’t need to hire a graphic designer, and users do not need to be proficient in HTML.

“Pick what promotion you want, and we’ll take care of the nuances,” said Matt MacNaughton by phone. It also has rules and regulations to consider when publishing a campaign to Facebook, for instance, which Amanda MacNaughton describes as “one of the biggest pains for marketers.” The company will ensure its customers are in compliance.

L.A.-based PromoJam‘s claim to fame is that it was the first to build a “tweet to download” application. In 2009, the artist Travis Barker offered his then just-released mixtape to fans in exchange for a tweet. Since then, it has secured customers in the entertainment and retail industry. PromoJam competes with social media marketing sites like Facebook-owned Wildfire Interactive.

This is the company’s most significant product release since it raised $1.2 million in angel funding in March.

[Disclosure: PromoJam is a former client at Eastwick, a PR firm I worked at.]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

LocBox wants to be the alternative to Groupon, Living Social and the host of flash sales sites, and has raised over $5 million in its quest to win over small businesses.

The San Francisco-based startup helps businesses run marketing campaigns. The idea is that Groupon and the like can pull customers into a store to pick up a one-off promotion, but they can’t drive long-term loyalty.

Founder Saumil Mehta said he would inspired to create a product that his parents, both small business-owners, would actually use.

“I called hundreds local businesses early last year and discovered that they really needed help with sustainable revenue and foot traffic from loyal and new customers,” Mehta told me. He explained that traditional methods and channels (Yellow Pages, for instance) are no longer reliable but the channels were either overwhelming, unsustainable, or had tenuous return on investment (ROI).

Prior to founding the company, Mehta was the director of product at Kosmix, a social media technology that was later acquired by Wal-Mart.

“I decided to help them [small businesses] by building a product,’ Mehta continued. Using LocBox, businesses can better organize their efforts if Twitter, Facebook and email content is pulled into a single dashboard. In its beta phase, the technology is currently used by several hundred customers (primarily health spas and small medical practices) who have run thousands of campaigns.

The market is flooded with email and social media marketing tools that cater to small businesses, including MailChimp and Constant Contact. Many of these tools offer sophisticated analytics on the front-end so customers can tell if their campaigns are actually working. Mehta claims to have “better targeting algorithms” than the competition.

Sign up to the site, and a potential customer will receive an overview of their current online and social media presence, and a recommendation for a marketing and social media campaign. If they decide to run it, LocBox offers a flexible price that is based on previous, similar campaigns.

It’s a crowded space, but investors see a gap in the market for this kind of consolidated dashboard. Investors in the round include InterWest Partners, Google Ventures and 500Startups, with additional investments from angel investors including Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan of WalmartLabs, and Deep Nishar, senior VP of products and user experience at LinkedIn.

Image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This week, 100 employees received layoffs at Radian6, a company Salesforce acquired two years ago.

Salesforce called it a “rebalancing of resources” at Marketing Cloud, the new software suite that Salesforce created from Radian6 and Buddy Media, another relatively recent acquisition. But some in the media immediately reported “signs of trouble,” and referred to Buddy Media as a “money pit.”

Marc Benioff: Not crazy after all.

The layoffs reportedly occurred at Radian6, but within hours, Buddy Media found itself at the center of the storm. Business Insider released a snapshot of the company’s financials from the June 2011-2012 period, when it was still a venture-backed private company, and reported that it was “bleeding money” in the months prior to the $689 million acquisition.

Reality check: After two acquisitions of companies in a similar space, layoffs are a matter of course. Logically speaking, this creates some overlap of personnel.

“When you acquire two companies, it makes sense to slash a lot of jobs that are replicating each other,” said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst at Altimeter Research. “How many managers or HR managers do you need on the same account?”

Salesforce is a public company and needs to make sure it’s still in the black — “downsizing the overhead makes sense at this time,” he added.

Adding to the speculation that Salesforce is in trouble, its competitors took the opportunity to offer the recently laid-off employees a job (most of the scale backs were in marketing and sales). View the comments here.

Still, the layoffs are not necessarily a vindication for competitors like Oracle and Adobe.

It’s also not out of the ordinary for a venture-backed software as a service (SaaS) company to overspend, then concentrate on monetization at a later stage. Before this summer’s acquisition, Buddy Media was still a private company in growth mode.

In response to the spate of recent articles that question Marc Benioff’s judgment, experts say it will be at least six months before we will say how the acquisition plays out.

“It’s just too premature to make a call,” said Jim Moore, the founder and managing director of J. Moore Partners, a M&A advisory firm. “If the layoffs were on the administrative, sales and marketing side, I don’t see any reason to say these acquisitions have not been successful.”

Salesforce declined to comment for this story beyond this official statement:

With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is re-balancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people were impacted globally.

Top image via Sarah Deer. Benioff photo: VentureBeat.

Marketers are funneling money into maintaining social presences, building social apps, and creating sponsored ad campaigns. But where’s the proof that any of these modern tactics actually work?

Adobe believes it can provide the answers marketers need with Adobe Social, a social marketing product released to customers for the first time today. The product was first announced in late March.

Adobe Social is an all-in-one product for marketing teams that includes social media engagement tools, listening mechanisms, and business analytics. Marketers can buy, plan, target, measure, and optimize their social campaigns. They can also use Adobe Social to build their own Facebook apps (Adobe is a Facebook-preferred developer), zero in on their most influential socialites, and view a customer’s journey from “like” or follow to buy.

The ad buying and campaign optimization features come courtesy of Context Optional, the social technology Adobe acquired from Efficient Frontier. Adobe Social is integrated with the company’s existing Digital Marketing Suite.

Meeting report image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Marketing startup Aditive received funding for its platform that makes advertising more fun for consumers.

According to the SEC filing, the company raised $3.3 million in equity financing. The investors have not yet been disclosed

Ads tend to be a necessary evil for consumers, a nuisance to endure while being entertained, or a peripheral item on the side of a web page. Aditive gamifies advertising so consumers are incentivized to engage with the content beyond passive viewing.

It’s like getting kids to eat their vegetables. You have to make it fun.

This model makes use of virtual currency, coupons, sweepstakes, social networks, and so on to draw users more deeply into marketing campaigns and reward them for buying and sharing offers with their friends. The solutions are intended to match brands’ advertising goals.

Examples of Aditive strategies are “Buy with a Friend” promotions, where people have to rally their social circles to activate a deal, or scavenger hunts in which people hunt through display ads and site content to find game pieces.

The company rebranded from ShopSocial, which launched in 2010 and previously raised $1.2 million from Metamorphic Ventures and X/Seed Capital in 2011. It has offices in San Francisco and New York.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Hope it’s summery and warm where you are, funding news readers. The weather in San Francisco is lovely, if you ignore the dark wall of fog creeping slowly towards the VentureBeat office. The outlook is definitely sunny for these companies! Check out who got funded today, and don’t forget to click the links in each paragraph for more details.

Note: This is just an end-of-day roundup of the funding news. For more up-to-date deal flow, you can visit our Deals channel, where we post the latest funding news as quickly as we get it, or by adding the Deals Channel feed link to your favorite reader. And as always, send funding news our way at tips@venturebeat.com.

Social marketing startup Shoutlet grabs $15M

Enterprise social marking platform Shoutlet is raising some more cash. Funded by FTV Capital, Shoutlet has raised $15 million in a third round of funding, more than doubling its previous combined funding of $9 million. Shoutlet’s platform gives companies a full-scale, centralized way to create, monitor and manage their social marketing campaigns on services like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Read more on VentureBeat: Shoutlet eases the pain of social media marketing, raises $15M.

SCVNGR finds $12M for mobile payments

Boston-based SCVNGR has picked up $12 million in funding to help its one-year-old, burgeoning mobile payment service LevelUp become a leader in the space. SCVNGR’s partial round includes participation from existing investors Highland Capital, Google Ventures, Balderton Capital, and new investors Continental Investors and Transmedia Capital, and brings SCVNGR’s to-date raise up to $32 million. Read more on VentureBeat: Forget the check-in, SCVNGR one-ups Foursquare with big raise for mobile payment app.

Unified snags $14M to run your social media campaign

Social play-calling startup Unified just raised $14 million in financing led by Condé Nast owner Advance Publications, with participation from Silicon Valley Bank. One-year-old Unified lets enterprises buy, run, and manage paid and earned media campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Read more on VentureBeat: Social marketing is hot: Unified scores $14M following big industry exits.

Design-your-own-shoes service Shoes of Prey captures $3M

Shoes of Prey just landed a $3 million round of funding from Crunchfund and other investors to help you customize the perfect pair of shoes. Sounds silly, but the site has an extensive library of customization options for its handmade offerings. Read more on VentureBeat: DIY shoe service Shoes of Prey steps it up with $3M investment.

Hire me? Willbehired gets $1M to recruit awesome employees

Recruitment platform Willbehired launches today with a $1 million seed round to help fill vacant jobs with qualified, talented people. Private investors led the round, which will covert into equity during the company’s series A funding. Read more on VentureBeat: Got talent? Willbehired launches to find your next star employee.

Ringadoc rakes in $750K to bring back the doctor house call

Doctors on demand startup Ringadoc raised $750,000 in seed money from Founders Fund. The company connects doctors to patients on the phone and through its website, no appointment needed. And if you need a non-narcotic drug, they can prescribe it for you. Read the press release.

Mobile Travel Technologies flys away with $5M for travel mobile apps

Ireland-based travel site Mobile Travel Technologies raised $5 million from European VC DFJ Esprit. The company makes and manages apps for hotels and airlines, as well as travel-focused apps for consumers. Read the press release.

Social hands image via Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Marketing automation firm Marketo has made its first acquisition ever with the purchase of social campaign service Crowd Factory, the company announced Wednesday morning.

Marketo and competing marketing automation firms like Eloqua, Pardot, and Silverpop offer software and services focused on improving and managing sales lead generation. But now with its buy of Crowd Factory, Marketo says it will have an edge on its competition by embracing social marketing, much of which is business-to-consumer rather than business-to-business where Marketo mostly plays.

“With Marketo and Crowd Factory on a single platform, marketers will be able to build and manage social campaigns alongside more traditional B-to-B marketing,” Marketo Chief Revenue Officer Paul Albright told VentureBeat.

Crowd Factory’s “social campaign management platform” assists marketers with social and word-of-mouth marketing, growing marketing databases with social data, and attracting new customers. Furthermore, it allows marketers to add social apps and messages quickly on every possible channel, including “Facebook pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, landing pages, websites, banner ads, or e-mails.” Crowd Factory then tracks the reach and impact of social sharing to help determine return on investment.

“Crowd Factory pioneered the idea of Social ROI by empowering marketers to push viral campaigns throughout the social web, and then track that valuable social activity back to individual influencers and conversions,” said Sanjay Dholakia, CEO of Crowd Factory, in a statement. “This fits perfectly into the vision of marketing automation that Marketo has led: that all marketing activity matters and can be measured against the bottom line. We are excited to join the Marketo team and help companies of any size in any market segment generate more campaigns, more leads and, ultimately, more customers.”

San Mateo, Calif.-based Marketo was founded in 2006 and has raised a massive $107 million in total funding to date. Its last funding occurred in November, with a major $50 million round raised from Battery Ventures and participation from Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), InterWest Partners, Mayfield Fund, and Storm Ventures.

Photo credit: ra2 studio/Shutterstock

The service seeks to find and tend to customer advocates, people who rally around and talk up their favorite brands and get rewards for doing so. Extole not only provides tools for clients to market themselves, it also advises its clients on how to use its services, achieve certain goals, and gain brand ambassadors.

“Our platform helps our customers find their advocates and have those advocates create and share social content,” said Extole chief executive Brad Klaus in an interview with VentureBeat, “We have two types of content we aim to generate: testimonials and social actions.”

Testimonials are what you’d expect; written recommendations and reviews of the business or product. And social actions include a Facebook “Like”, a tweet, or an email opt-in. Businesses can use this customer-generated content however they like and can reward customers for producing content with points, gift cards, or charitable donations.

One prime example of how Extole works comes from its client Roku, the small set-top device that streams movies and TV. Roku realized about a quarter of its sales resulted from customer referrals and it enlisted the help of Extole to create a “social referral program” to boost that number. Customers were asked to talk up the device to their friends and family and for every referral that resulted in a Roku purchase, the original customer would receive a free month of Netflix.

The company just announced that it’s closed a third round of funding led by Shasta Ventures, which will be used to grow the company and create more tools to spur customer referrals.

Extole was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif. The company employs a team of 70, and its clients include Redbox, AAA, and Kate Spade. Extole has raised $22 million from Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Trident Capital, and Shasta Ventures.

For Rob Tarkoff, chief executive officer of Lithium, social is the next frontier for marketers. Lithium uses social media — beyond Facebook, as Tarkoff stresses — to connect with a brand’s customers and decipher who the bull horns are.

It’s well understood that people are more willing to buy a product if the recommendation comes from a friend, as opposed to coming from the company itself. We are taught the sellers are inherently untrustworthy. Company statements are easily written off because of this, but if a peer’s has something to say, we’re persuaded to listen.

“Marketers are starting to recognize peer-to-peer and there are going to be big changes over the next three years,” said Tarkoff in an interview with VentureBeat. “CMOs are saying they’re going to double or triple their spend on social.”

Social media is effectively free marketing for a company who knows its customer base. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and other users all drive huge amounts of content every day and deliver it straight to your customers’ inbox. In order to get your product into social mouths, however, Lithium must identify the big influencers and convince them to start talking about your product on the Internet. They accomplish this convincing process by appealing to the high schooler in all of us: feeling popular. Lithium calls this the, “underlying science of behavioral motivation.”

“In the online world reputation is everything, it’s the content you produce,” said Tarkoff.

Lithium’s “engagement” products make you feel like a “thought leader,” an industry expert on a certain subject. It makes you feel like people are listening. That sense of self righteousness is your ticket to social media buzz.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg sees this sharing as the way people will ultimately engage with anything. That is, he believes when you share socially, you influence your peers to listen to a certain kind of music, read news articles, watch similar movies and more. At the company’s developer conference in September 2011, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook likes would evolve to have its own vocabulary. People sharing would then be able to do more than like, they could “play,” “buy,” or any other number of verbs.

“I absolutely think [what Zuckerberg says] is right and is at the core of our business,” said Tarkoff. “Facebook is totally aligned with us.”

Lithium plans to use the funding, led by new investors New Enterprise Associates and SAP Ventures, to acquire complementary technologies. Tarkoff, who joined the company in September, says Lithium has been on “cash flow positive” for the last few quarters and hopes the money will help it become a “consolidator” in 2012.

SocialTwist provides incentives to a company’s current customers in exchange for referrals on their social networks. The company puts a lot of stock in what many of us already know — people consult their friends before making a purchase. Particularly if that friend has heralded the product on their social network. A SocialTwist client’s customers can access a dashboard from which to share a product across Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and less social hubs like e-mail or blogs. They are provided with a link to the promoted product and then compensated on their referrals.

Thus far, SocialTwist has seen significant growth year-over-year. Last year’s third quarter compared to this year’s represents a 60 percent growth in revenue. Dillon, who previously worked for Omniture, a subsidiary of Adobe, is now SocialTwist’s Chief Revenue Officer and Sundaram who co-founded GT Nexus, will take on the roll of chief marketing officer. Last August, the scalped another big name company exec, Sanjeev Agrawal, for its president. Agrawal was once the head of product marketing for Google and vice president of marketing and cloud services at Motorola.

But beefing up its upper ranks with big names can only go so far in a sardine-packed industry. Offering someone a reward for spreading your message is not new, nor is crowdsourcing. But the company has some big name customers already and can build off of that base. They include Coca Cola, Jamba Juice, Old Navy, Barnes and Noble, eBay, and Proctor and Gamble.

Offerpop

Offerpop has developed three Twitter tools intended to better engage with followers. The New Follower tool can be used to automatically welcome your new followers. The Offer tool lets you set up a special page to drive your followers to learn more about specific offers or campaigns. The Exclusive tool creates a private page that hosts promotions or deals only viewable by your followers. And finally, the Viral tool helps you gain new followers through word-of-mouth. For example, if a tweet is retweeted at least 50 times, the deal will become available (similar to some GroupOn offers).

The service is available through a monthly subscription. Customers with fewer than 500 followers pay $100 per month, fewer than 5,000 pay $250 and, finally, less than 25,000 pay $999 per month. This is a pretty ingenious revenue model, considering that the company’s tools are ultimately meant to build a social community. It’s creating a growing revenue base for each customer as they continue using Offerpop applications and gain more and more followers. It will be interesting to see if customers do continue using the applications once they hit a certain community size.

Competitors may include other early stage companies Buddy Media and Wildfire Interactive that have tools for managing social pages, or doing things like one-off quizzes, sweepstakes and polls.

The New York City based company, founded in 2009, only has several customers, including City Sports, Dymocks, iGreenBuild.com, Layla Grace and Overnight Prints.

(For a less ambitious, but perhaps more feasible, attempt to harness social networking on behalf of people with disabilities, see our discussion of Enurgi below.)

The site, featured in this NYT article yesterday, aims to draw together people from all socioeconomic backgrounds who happen to have some form of physical or mental disability. Although associations for people with disabilities exist, they have tended to attract only a tiny fraction of the 50 million Americans that the NYT says make up the “disability community.”

Disaboom, based in Lone Tree, Colo., has set some ambitious goals. The company wants to attract more than one million unique visitors each month by February, despite the fact that it just officially launched its site a month ago, and then plans to double that again over the coming year. Admittedly, it’s already attracted some serious backing: Its early advertisers include Netflix, J&J and Avis. (The NYT also lists Cricket Communications, a prepaid cellular-service company with really spotty coverage.)

(Oddly enough, Disaboom is also a public company, having offered its stock back in April — see its SEC filings here. Disaboom, however, didn’t raise any funds in the offering, which instead appears to have served entirely as a way for existing shareholders to unload their holdings onto public investors. Those shareholders sold 6.3 million shares at a price of 50 cents apiece; according to the company’s SB-2 filing with the SEC, those individuals had mostly just purchased their shares a month earlier in a private placement. The company currently has a market capitalization of $41 million.)

As for the site itself, Disaboom offers what looks to be a varied array of resources for people with disabilities, such as basic health information, lifestyle articles, a video-sharing section, chat rooms, online forums and the like. A month in, however, members still appear to be a bit few and far between — the classified section lists only nine items for sale (and zero events, auto sales, medical equipment, real estate, miscellaneous or free/trade items), only 12 members were online when I checked in a little while ago, and the chat room isn’t exactly in full swing. As for the forum — well, the statistics can speak for themselves (I’ve included some representative advertisers as well):

That’s a long way from a million visitors a month, even when you consider that only a fraction of any site’s visitors are actually going to participate in a forum like this one. Meanwhile, the social-networking aspect of the site seems to still be in its infancy; I signed up for an account and, once in, my only choices consisted of editing my bio, writing or editing an onsite blog, and managing my “favorites,” which turns out to be what other sites would consider “friends.” But finding other people to friend — sorry, to “favorite” — looks fairly awkward, as the only way to pick individuals out of the crowd appears to involve reading their blog posts or visiting the forum.

In other words, Facebook has relatively little to worry about here. It was also striking to me that in a half-hour or so of surfing through the site, I only came across one ad from a major advertiser — an Avis spot tucked away on an inside page about cerebral palsy. For the most part, the ads mostly appeared to pitch specialty products for those with disabilities, such as wheelchairs, rehabilitative services and easy-opening grips for doorknobs, not mass-market products.

So Disaboom, while clearly well-meaning, comes up a bit short. That might not just be an execution problem, either, since the site depends upon the notion that people with disabilities really want to think of themselves as a single community in the first place. Outside of political movements such as those that produced the Americans with Disabilities Act, that appears to be an unproven, if not largely untested, idea. In which case Disaboom may have a tougher road to travel than it first appeared.

By contrast, the startup Enurgi aims squarely at a primary need of the elderly or those with significant disabilities — finding professional caregivers. Essentially, caregivers — who must supply proof of their licenses — and those in need of care register and establish profiles, then begin searching for one another. Enurgi plans to track these relationships, schedule sessions and manage payments, even offering tools that can, for instance, determine how much service existing insurance will cover. The company envisions charging a fraction of all transactions that move through the site. It may not be anywhere near as ambitious as Disaboom, but since it addresses an existing and pressing need, it may find moving forward a whole lot simpler. (Hat tip: Techcrunch.)