Tencent Weibo has over 540 million registered accounts; VK.com has over 200 million registered accounts.

“Adding Tencent Weibo and VK.com to our lineup lets our users expand their reach around the world,” Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, said in a statement. “Social has no boundaries. In fact, HootSuite has users in nearly every country worldwide, and is available in 15 languages and counting.”

HootSuite, which recently unveiled swanky new digs in Vancouver, Canada, is already integrated with other regional social networks such as Sina Weibo and Renren in China, Orkut, which maintains a foothold in Brazil, Viadeo, and Xing. And today, the company announced a new language: Russian.

Major brands that use Tencent Weibo include the NBA, Coca Cola, Pepsi, and Red Bull, and HootSuite says 79 of the Fortune 100 are its clients. The company grew sales to enterprise clients under $10 billion 272 percent and enterprises over $10 billion 900 percent in the first quarter of 2013, as new VP of marketing, Dee Anna McPherson — formerly of Yammer, helps accelerate its deployment into and within corporations.

The company’s Tencent Weibo integration includes such new features as posting and scheduling updates, viewing and leaving comments on posts, searching and filtering content, and using multiple profiles. For VK.com, HootSuite supports posting status updates, viewing and posting comments, liking updates, and monitoring news and updates.

“With our newest app integrations, you can use HootSuite to connect with hundreds of millions of users on the biggest social networks in China and Russia,” Holmes said.

HootSuite recently surpassed the six million user mark.

photo credit: @Doug88888 via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Enterprise social media protection and compliance startup Nexgate has raised $3.5 million in its first round of funding to protect businesses’ social media accounts from spam and hijacking, the company announced today.

Nexgate used to be called Social iQ Networks, and it launched a full enterprise suite in 2012 focused on discovering, protecting, and ensuring compliance for social media accounts associated with companies. Nexgate said its service is in use by “dozen multinational and enterprise” companies, but it hopes to push its service out to many more customers and improve its technology.

“Our customers and prospects have clearly expressed their need for better protection and compliance for social media and they will be even more enthusiastic about what we can do for them with this new round of funding,” Nexgate co-founder and CEO Devin Redmond said in a statement. “We will immediately expand our solution development and customer facing teams to drive forward our product delivery and market development.”

The new funding was led by Sierra Ventures, which focuses its efforts on early-state capital investment. Mark Fernandes, a managing director at Sierra Ventures, will join the company’s board of directors as well.

“There is no question that compliance and security is absolutely a requirement as organizations continue to adopt and implement external social networks as part of their key communication channels,” Fernandes said in a statement.

Check out the video below for more on Nexgate.

Photo and video via Nexgate

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Salesforce says it has the world’s only unified social marketing suite. Adobe says its marketing cloud is a single service that includes everything digital marketers need to get ahead.

Shift begs to differ.

“We’re bringing the market alternative to the closed, rigid marketing cloud that Adobe and Salesforce have created,” Shift CEO James Borow told me yesterday. “If you look at their marketing clouds, it’s really only about companies they’ve acquired and built. But the problem is, as the market moves, you really can’t acquire or build companies fast enough.”

The concept of a marketing cloud is a interoperable suite of tools that together provide the digital marketer — and today, is there any other kind? — everything they need to find, understand, attract, engage, monitor, communicate, and track consumers, fans, and customers.

Today, that’s largely about search and social.

So what Shift has done is assemble what Borow considers an all-star cast of digital marketing tools together in one platform. It’s not buying them all and not integrating them all into one inseparable suite, but making them all available in one environment, with a certain amount of interoperability, data share, and single sign in.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to break down these silos of communication,” Burrow says.

Today, those tools include:

• Aggregate Knowledge (media buying intelligence platform)
• Convertro (conversion-tracking and ROI optimization)
• Curalate (marketing and analytics for Pinterest and Instagram)
• Expion (social media management)
• Fan Appz (personalized social media marketing)
• Kenshoo (search and social ad tools)
• Moontoast (rich media social ad creation)
• Offerpop (social media marketing campaign platform)
• Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics)
• SocialFlow (conversion tool for Twitter and Facebook)
• The Trade Desk (online media buying platform)
• GraphEffect (social advertising)

Shift has brought all these tools together within one network with its own graph, somewhat analogous to Facebook’s social graph, that tracks marketing actions and attention-needed data points within each tool and provides that data in a social-network style feed.

In other words, yes, sort of like Facebook for your marketing campaign.

Source: Shift

Shift marketing cloud

The result is that all the members of your marketing team, whether internal, freelance, or at an agency, can visit the site and see what’s happening with your marketing campaign in a simple, linear view. The site incorporates a permissioning model so that people in different roles see appropriate information, and many of the updates are generated by the tools you’re using themselves.

So, what’s the cost?

“Shift is totally free,” Borow says. “And Shift will always be free.”

You can sign into Shift, create teams, invite colleagues, and go to the “app store” to install marketing apps. If you have existing accounts with them, they’ll just automatically sync up and you can use those tools within Shift’s collaboration network. If you don’t and you do happen to sign up to a new tool, Shift will take a small revshare from that transaction.

“Today, we feel like we have a really competitive stack against all the other marketing clouds,” Borow told me, adding that Shift will be adding new tools and companies on a quarterly basis. “The enterprise to date has focused on closed systems, but our thesis is that closed systems end up less dynamic and less competitive.”

That may be so, and there’s a lot in Shift’s open marketing cloud.

But there’s also so work remaining to be done. Integration between the participating apps is a little slim right now, with some integrations requiring developer work. Customer relationship management is perhaps the most obvious gap at the moment, especially considering that is natively to Salesforce clients. All of which is coming, Borow said.

And, as the company adds more tools to the toolbox, the solution will become more compelling with time.

photo credit: gordonr via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Dogs, stumps, pup tents and bikes, the new HootSuite offices in Vancouver has them all. And then some.

The popular social media management tool that just passed six million users is growing fast, CEO Ryan Holmes told me today, and needed more space for future expansion.

“We just moved in … the dust is still settling,” Holmes says. “In 2012 we went from 100 to 250 employees, and this year at a minimum we’ll close out at 350.”

HootSuite bought an old police station in Vancouver’s eastside and gave it a $1 million facelift, adding a private yoga studio, gym, and yes, the obligatory startup office nap room. Oh, and don’t forget: free beer on Fridays, on tap in the kitchen.

Here’s the new HootSuite digs, in pictures:

Note the the social media icons pillows in the lobby? HootSuite partners YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram are clearly visible, plus a few others.

Image credit: HootSuite

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Social media management startup Sprinklr has raised $15 million in second-round funding to help it continue to dominate in the social management space and keep an edge over services like Radian6, Wildfire, and Involver.

New York-based Sprinklr first caught our eye in early 2012 right after it raised $5 million in its first round of funding. The company had hardly any press at the time and was incredibly under the radar, but it somehow had attracted huge companies like Samsung, Microsoft, Target, and Nike as customers. The company’s roster of big brands continues to grow and it now claims to have signed 200 “household names.” More than 80 percent of Sprinklr’s clients take in more than $1 billion in revenue each year.

Sprinklr offers these high-profile clients a full suite of social media management tools to help them post across social networks and measure engagement. Because it has attracted big names, it has the pedigree to help it be the Radian6 of big brands.

Sprinklr CEO Ragy Thomas (pictured) told me last year that he was building Sprinklr up to be the “Ferrari” of the social media management industry. He clearly maintains that attitude today.

“The world’s most social brands consistently choose Sprinklr because we enable social engagement, activation, and management across multiple social channels, internal functional groups, and distributed geographies,” Thomas said in a statement.

The new round of funding came from heavy hitting investors Intel Capital and Battery Ventures. Including the new round, Sprinklr has raised $20 million.

Jeremiah Owyang, partner and analyst at Altimeter Group, said that Sprinklr topped the list of of its “most capable” social media management platform in a recent study and thus, he isn’t surprised at Sprinklr’s success thus far.

“After conducting an independent review of 27 vendors, we identified Sprinklr as the ‘most capable’ platform to meet the needs of large enterprises,” Owyang said in a statement. “We’re not surprised by the amount of attention they are getting from the investor community given how well they did in our analysis.”

Sprinklr was founded in 2008 and launched its software in late 2009. The company claims to have had 400 percent year-over-year growth in 2012.

The social media marketing platform that competes with the likes of Wildfire, Sprinklr, and Involver grew 440 percent last year, went global, and added companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, and L’Oreal — you may have heard of them once or twice – to its now 8,000-strong client list.

How? Through the back door.

“We’ve basically built our company around the notion of a self-service platform,” chief executive Wendell Landsford told me from New York today. “People try for free, and if they see value, they keep using the product.”

That started with perhaps humble beginnings with small companies as social marketers created Facebook photo contests and Twitter retweet offers. But it led to massive opportunities at some of the largest corporations in the world.

“As we got success on the self-service product, we started to be adopted bottom-up in enterprise organizations,” Wendell said. “In companies like Unilever, Viacom, or Pepsi, some marketer might try OfferPop. Then we’d reach out, establish a relationship, and get more exposure in these companies, which broadened our footprint.”

Initial success led to Offerpop codifying these opportunities into a sales process, and the company now has a specific division of its sales force dedicated to key enterprise accounts. It’s the new enterprise sales model, Wendell says, with Salesforce.com as its “poster child.”

The model works for upstart young startups. But it also has significant benefits for enterprise companies. As Wendell says, one massive bonus to this model is that a product “has to prove its worth … companies don’t end up with shelfware.”

Offerpop, which closed a $5.7 million series B founding round in December, is now expanding internationally, opening an office in the U.K. and one other to-be-determined location. That’s a direct result of having internationalized the product, translating it to 17 different languages in early 2012. (Which, by the way, is also helpful for major brands, who typically do business internationally.)

Perhaps the most interesting news, however, is the new product suite that Offerpop will be announcing in February. While the company wouldn’t release full details yet, Wendell did give me a sneak peek: “big data.”

“As companies use Offerpop and expand to 350 campaigns or more, there’s a ton of data that gets built up and captured,” he said. “Historically, that’s been kept in individual campaign reports, but it doesn’t provide cohesive, actionable insight.”

So Offerpop is pulling out all the data from all of a company’s campaigns, enriching it with everything that it knows about the company’s fans and customers — including the content they tend to respond to — and making is useable for better marketing on social media, as well as multichannel marketing via email, online marketing, and more.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this product sounds perfect for enterprise as well.

photo credit: Dunechaser via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013 San Francisco, CA

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Salesforce has added a wider array of services to its Marketing Cloud toolset, including Klout, Kred, Kanjoya, and PeekAnalytics, to help businesses not only listen to customers but also better understand them, the company announced Friday.

The company introduced Marketing Cloud back in September. It uses the power of Salesforce acquisitions Radian6 and Buddy Media to give marketers a massive social toolset. and companies like HP, Ford, and the National Football League are using it.

But now Marketing Cloud will get even better with a full ecosystem of services. Previously, it offered just four services, a la carte. Now it offers 20, and even the most basic package gives people “credits” to use on any of these services without paying extra for them.

“The goal is to not just get behind the ‘what’ and ‘where,’ but get to the ‘who,’” Rob Begg, VP Marketing for Marketing Cloud, told VentureBeat. “You can use these new social analytics providers to make sense of large data sets. It can provide intelligence, influence, and intent.”

The 20 services Salesforce now offers inside Marketing Cloud are:

• Bitext
• Calais
• Caterva
• Clarabridge Link
• EpiAnalytics
• Kanjoya
• Klout
• Kred
• LeadSift
• Lexalytics
• LinguaSys
• Lymbix
• Metavana
• OpenAmplify
• PeekAnalytics
• Rapleaf
• Solariat
• Soshio
• The SelfService Company
• Trendspottr

By using these services, you can boil down your data into things like who has influence and what demographic a customer belongs to. With those analytics in hand, it’s way more feasible to take action on your data.

The most basic version of Marketing Cloud offers “social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation, and measurement,” starts at $5,000 per month, and includes 1,000 partner credits. Extra block of 10,000 credits costs $100.

You can get more info on Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud in the video below.

The company, which helps clients connect with and respond to customers and fans on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, recently celebrated a second birthday with its 10,000th corporate customer, 10 percent month-over-month customer growth, and an astonishing revenue explosion of 750 percent over last year.

That growth, chief executive Justyn Howard says, is due to two factors.

New clients are certainly a big part of the story, he says, but not only is the company growing its customer list with names like McDonalds, Microsoft, and Adobe, SproutSocial is going deeper with each client. In fact, Howard told VentureBeat, where once small numbers of people — two to three at each client — managed social, many of its clients have dozens of social media managers, and some now have literally hundreds of employees using SproutSocial.

That’s a significant development in social media, and it shows that more companies are adapting a Zappos-style communications strategy: Every employee is a brand advocate.

But it’s taken a while to get there.

Source: Info-Tech Research

SproutSocial was recently recognized as a leading social media management tool

“Our product’s been in the market for just over two years now,” explains Howard. “We spent the first year testing, looking at different directions, and this year we’re bringing on a lot of new customers and are adding new features.”

When bringing any tool to a wide audience, user experience is key. Companies who give hundreds of employees access to a comprehensive social media toolkit will likely not be able to train all of them intensely.

“We take a different approach than a lot of the tools that have been in the market for a while,” Howard says. “You see a lot of columns from some of our competitors … we’ve tried to distill it down and make it a little easier to grasp.”

So SproutSocial brings all conversations from multiple social networks down to a single stream, with full conversation history in one place. Multiple users can dip their toes in that same stream without crossing wires, and queue up content to be released at optimal, spaced times.

“For people who aren’t used to a bunch of information on the screen, something about the efficiency of our interface resonates,” says Howard.

One of the new features SproutSocial launched recently is “Optimal Send Time,” which automatically schedules tweets or status updates for times when they are most likely to get maximum engagement and go viral. SproutSocial launched this functionality to compete with social engagement tool Buffer – as did competitor HootSuite – and its clients are seeing about a 30 percent increase in response, and a 100 percent increase in clickthrough.

As social media spreads across the entire company, SproutSocial is looking at better ways of integrating into enterprise data via, for example, customer relationship management software. But the company is not releasing any more details about its plans in that area at this point.

There has been considerable consolidation in the social media space lately, with Google buying Wildfire, Oracle buying Involver, Vitrue, and Collective Intent, and, last year, Salesforce acquiring Radian6 for $326 million.

I asked Howard if he would consider a buyout.

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” he said. “A lot of the acquisitions have focused on social media marketing … but the engagement space hasn’t seen a lot of that activity. It’ll be interesting to see when Oracle and Google and others start to make that a priority.”

And I noticed that the company’s last funding round was early last year. With the company’s recent growth spurt, however, SproutSocial may not need any more capital.

“We’re thinking about another round, but we haven’t made it a final determination. We’re not in a hurry — growth has been strong.”

photo credit: Rosaura Ochoa via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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HootSuite announced today that it has acquired social media tool maker Seesmic.

Seesmic, led by charismatic chief executive Loic Le Meur, who also runs Le Web conference in Paris, is the king of the pivot, starting life as video commenting tool, becoming a Twitter client, transitioning to a client for social services in general, transmogrifying (yes, I’m running out of synonyms here) into a customer relationship management system, and most recently, transforming back into a social media cross-posting tool via its Ping.fm acquisition.

That, of course, is very close to what HootSuite does, and while HootSuite’s press release didn’t disclose any details, Ping.fm’s capability to post to many, many sites may be the value HootSuite’s acquiring.

In addition, while Seesmic’s team was just halved, there’s still talent for HootSuite to aqui-hire. There’s no word on this yet, but the acquisition also gives Vancouver, Canada-based HootSuite a foothold in San Francisco.

I have a conversation with HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes scheduled for tomorrow, and we’ll post more details then.

Le Meur had nice words for Holmes and HootSuite:

“We’ve always been big fans of Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team, since the days we were all pioneering the social media landscape. We’re thrilled today to announce that Seesmic is joining HootSuite, and we’re excited for our users: They are becoming part of the HootSuite family, and they will be able to continue to build their brand and social business.”

And Holmes had nice words for Le Meur and Seesmic:

“I have always had a lot of respect for Seesmic’s CEO, Loïc Le Meur, and the role Seesmic has played in advancing social business. We are thrilled to welcome Seesmic’s users into the HootSuite family.”

The one pertinent detail, other than the plain fact of the acquisition itself that can be derived from the press release, is contained in Le Meur’s statement that Seesmic users will become HootSuite users (“part of the HootSuite family”).

This suggests that HootSuite will shutter Seesmic as a product.

That seems to be the only common sense solution, given that HootSuite has almost five million users, and Seesmic has been floundering for years, with only perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 unique visitors a month.

Other than those two paragraphs, literally 90 percent of the release is about HootSuite’s product, pricing, and clients.

More details tomorrow.

Image credit: Big fish eating little fish/ShutterStock

Corporate social media strategists at global brands are confronting a new set of tough challenges. Enterprise executives are beginning to take notice of the socially empowered customer and looking to meet those demands.

Now, leading social strategists are starting to field requests from press relations, human resources, special events, and crisis management teams about being “more social.” Combine internal demands with an explosion of new social channels to contend with and a burgeoning volume of messages, and it’s no wonder that Calm.com exists.

As if that weren’t enough, there’s increasing pressure from all sides inside the organization. According to the analysts at Altimeter Group, large enterprises average 178 social media outposts and proliferation is continuing. Sprinklr’s work on behalf of new clients actually shows the number to be significantly higher. For one Fortune 50 client, we found close to 1,400 accounts globally.

Pressure from all sides internally and an accelerating number of channels and messages puts the corporate social strategist in a challenging position and most aren’t ready for it. Most social strategists don’t know what to do when the time comes to write a request for proposal (RFP) for an enterprise-wide social platform. Sprinklr had one executive (who heads social for a major hospitality chain) admit, “I didn’t know what to write in an enterprise social RFP, so I just Googled it.” A large part of the problem stems from a deficit of common terminology and frameworks for thinking about social at enterprise scale.

We’ve been thinking about these requirements for a long time. Based on our work with more than a hundred global brands, we’ve identified six elements that every Social RFP should have. Obviously, we’re not a disinterested party (here’s our free PDF on it), but you can judge for yourself.

The six must-haves for every enterprise social request for proposal are as follows:

1. Multi-Channel management

Brands know that it is critical to deliver a consistent experience to a customer, prospect, or influencer regardless of the channel through which they choose to engage. If a brand cannot recognize that @jr123 is the same person as john.russell on YouTube, it will have a difficult time providing an experience that drives satisfaction and word of mouth. As more channels come online, global brands will want and need to integrate those into a single platform and create and maintain a Universal Profile of the Social Customer.

2. Cross-functional capabilities

The Social Customer doesn’t care if she is interacting with a Twitter account managed by a Facebook page managed by customer service. She expects that an inquiry will be received and she will get a response. Easy enough for her, but behind the firewall, this creates a set of requirements such as escalation, issue tracking, audit trails, templates, digital asset management, and more to make sure that messages can be routed from one team to another and the customer experience is unified and consistent.

3. Scalability

There are two sides to the scalability coin. On the one side, enterprises will need a solution that can be implemented in multiple countries and geographies, support for multiple languages, training, and global implementation capabilities. The other side is message volume. The social customer is still just “warming up” and we all know that message volume will continue to expand. No human (or group of humans) will be able to manage the quantity. Enterprises will need smart technology to identify, score, rank, and route messages to the right departments, divisions, and teams.

4. Social governance

Lawyers lie awake at night worrying that social media policies are being followed and access is not given to corporate social outposts without approval. Business executives fret over inconsistent brand voice and improper asset (images, logos, URLs, etc.) utilization, particularly at the local level. For both, a strong infrastructure that supports centralized control over passwords, access, permissions, and assets is a must.

5. Customized reporting

With so many stakeholders and channels, it will be impossible for anyone drafting an enterprise social RFP to predict the reporting needs of those using the platform. The critical component here is flexibility. Social strategists will have the need to offer their constituents a set of pre-configured reports, for sure, but on top of that, the capability to take various social metrics and create dashboards and reports that meet each group’s unique needs as they seek to connect social with traditional KPIs.

6. Rapid product enhancements

The social space evolves quickly, and the needs of enterprises are dynamic. Too often, enterprise software vendors are rigid in release schedules and feature road maps. While planning is important, so is flexibility, particularly in a market which is not fully mature yet. There has to be a process and methodology for developing and implementing client-specific requests.

It’s an exciting time for the social customer, and it’s an exciting and challenging time for global enterprises as they seek to adapt to new realities. As Chris Baccus, executive director of digital and social at AT&T said, it’s time to “get over the fear” and lay the foundation now for enterprise-wide social at scale.

That foundation is built upon asking the right questions at the beginning.

Jeremy Epstein is the Vice President of Marketing for Sprinklr. Prior to joining Sprinklr in Feb. 2012, Jeremy was the Founder/CEO of Never Stop Marketing, an international consulting firm which served F50 clients such as Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft. Before that, he served as the lead instructor for Microsoft’s global Digital and Social Marketing training programs.

Top photo credit: tovovan/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Oracle has agreed to buy social media monitoring startup Collective Intellect, further showing that it wants to own the social management space after recently agreeing to buy Vitrue for $300 million.

In light of Salesforce’s recent purchase of Buddy Media for $689 million and Oracle’s prior buy of Vitrue, there is clearly a battle brewing for social media monitoring, CRM, and management tools. Salesforce also has Radian6 in its pocket.

Collective Intellect offers cloud-based apps to help businesses turn social conversations into intelligence, marketing campaigns, customer service, and sales leads. Oracle says it will integrate Collective Intellect with Oracle’s SaaS products and social platform.

“Gaining intelligence from consumer conversations across social media, and knowing customers’ intentions and interests helps organizations create better products and deliver better service,” said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle Development, in a statement. “Collective Intellect’s leading cloud-based applications for social media monitoring, combined with Oracle’s social relationship platform offers a complete social experience to our customers.”

Boulder, Colo.-based Collective Intellect has raised about $14 million in funding to date from Appian Ventures, Croghan Investments, Crawley Hatfield Capital, and Grotech Ventures. The terms of the Oracle buy were not disclosed.

Photo credit: ra2 studio/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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Cloud enterprise powerhouse Salesforce is in talks to buy social media and brand management business Buddy Media for more than $800 million, according to an AllThingsD report.

Buddy Media helps many major brands manage their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ presence. Presumably, Salesforce could add Buddy Media to its long roster of services targeting the enterprise like Chatter and Force.com. It’s unclear how much crossover there would be with Salesforce-owned Radian6, another social media management service.

New York City-based Buddy Media raised a monster $54 million round of funding last August at a rumored $500 million valuation. Buddy Media’s total funding sits at $90 million.

We chatted with Buddy Media a few months ago if you want to see what’s been happening with the company as of late:

Photo credit: Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

Radian6 has done a great job of making itself known in the social media management space, attracting a $326 million acquisition by Salesforce a year ago. But now, it might have to watch its back when it comes to maintaining its largest clients.

Meet Sprinklr, the New York-based social media management startup that’s quietly won over more than 100 top-tier companies, including Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, SAP, Target, Nike, and Virgin America.

With so many big companies being represented, you might be wondering why we don’t hear more from Sprinklr. It’s intentional. The company has kept relatively quiet about its major customer acquisitions and strong capabilities because it’s only targeting the biggest companies in the world. CEO Ragy Thomas (pictured) told me last month that Sprinklr turns down at least a few businesses each day because they simply aren’t big enough.

“We’re building the Ferrari of our industry,” Thomas said. “We’re only working with select companies for a reason. With us, you’re not just getting a platform — you’re getting a partner.”

Sprinklr offers its clients a full suite of social media management tools to help them post across social networks, analytics, and measuring engagement. Specifically, it offers what it calls the Social Intent Revelation Engine (SIREn) platform. SIREn has two goals: A) make sure the largest companies can engage at scale with millions of customers and B) make sure clients can speak with the voice of the brand regardless if the interaction occurs on Facebook, Twitter, or elsewhere.

For example, Microsoft (see above) uses Spinklr to maintain, track, and analyze many of its Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels. Dell uses the service in even more ways, tapping into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Slideshare, and LinkedIn.

“We believe the world is changing rapidly and the biggest brands have to adapt to social networks,” Thomas said. “We help companies manage all these social relationships.”

Thomas started the company in 2008, and worked hard to launch the software in late 2009. In terms of funding, the company was bootstrapped for several years, but just recently raised a $5 million round from Battery Ventures in early March.

That funding has gone to help the company hire new employees and finally let the world know that it exists with at least a little marketing. Sprinklr has hired more than 40 people since the beginning of the year and intends to do even more throughout 2012. While Thomas wouldn’t reveal financials, he did say the company is “cash-flow positive” and “we’re growing like crazy.”

Just like it has limited its number of clients, Sprinklr has limited the number of members on its board of directors so it can grow responsibly. The board includes Thomas, Sprinklr Senior VP Murali Swaminathan, Battery Ventures General Partner Neeraj Agrawal, and Cisco Senior VP Carlos Dominguez.

Check out some of Sprinklr’s tools below to get a better idea of what it provides for its customers:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

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At VentureBeat, we come across a lot of funding news every day. In order to bring you the most information possible, we’re rounding up the quick-and-dirty details about the funding deals of the day and serving them up here in our new “Funding daily” column.

Kibits raises $1M for micro social networking

Kibits emerged from stealth today with a $1 million round of funding from Google Ventures and Charles River Ventures. The company unveiled an iPhone and iPod touch app for its micro social network service. The service lets people create a small social networks for events such as weddings or conferences.

Famigo snags some seed capital for family-friendly online games

Famigo is a marketplace for family-friendly games and apps. The service vetts apps and games for iOS, Android, and the web to determine if they are family-friendly, and parents can choose which games and apps their kids can access through Famigo. It announced today it has raised a $1 million dollar seed round from Silverton Partners.

Upclique raises $350,000 to help kids find the right college

College search tool Upclique announced a round of funding from Ancora Group. The search tool connects high school students with college counselors to help them find the “perfect fit.”

InsightsOne raises $4.3M for big-data marketing analytics

InsightOne has raised its first round of funding of $4.3 million from Norwest Venture Partners. The company sells marketing analytics software to small- and medium-sized businesses. Gaurav Garg from Sequoia Capital, former Yahoo chief technical officer Zod Nazem, and Alpha Venturi founder Peter Wagner also participated in the funding.

Hootsuite sells $20M in shares to Omers Ventures

Omer Ventures has purchased a $20 million ownership stake in Hootsuite, a social media management service that counts blue chip companies like Pepsi, Fox, and the NBA among its clients.

If you’ve got funding news to report, send it our way at tips@venturebeat.com.

Social network image via Shutterstock/De Mango

Hootsuite is headquartered in Vancouver and has grown from 25 people last year to a team of 140, with plans to expand to 250 this year. This mirrors the growth trajectory of its competitor Buddy Media in New York, which recently moved into new offices to accommodate its rapidly expanding staff, and raised $54 million dollars.

The power of Hootsuite is that it allows companies to execute their social media campaigns across multiple networks from a single, simple dashboard. As diverse  networks come to play a role in business –Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Tumblr, Google+, Pinterest, the list goes on — companies need more help than ever.

HootSuite was founded in 2008 and its major investors include Blumberg Capital and Hearst Ventures, the venture capital arm of the Hearst Corporation.