Enterprise social network Tibbr has had a strong emphasis on mobile access for some time but today it has taken another step forward with newly designed apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry 10.

Tibbr is the enterprise social networking solution made by Tibco, the 15-year-old $3.5 billion enterprise software company. It competes against solutions Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Moxie. Tibbr now serves more than 1.5 million paid users across 157 companies.

It makes sense to see Tibco push Tibbr’s mobile capabilities to a new level, especially in light of competitors like Chatter upping its mobile game recently.

Ram Menon, president of Tibco’s social computing division, told VentureBeat the new apps are about making sure workers have access to the service and collaboration tools no matter where they are. Even in the office or at home with computers nearby, many workers want the flexibility to respond and check feeds on their smartphones and tablets.

“Mobile has always been our strong point,” Menon said. “We want to make it easy to see what’s happening in your network. Irrespective of device we’ve got you covered.”

The new apps are all unified with a similar design and feature sets. Each app takes advantage of Tibbr’s “Enterprise Social Graph” to make sure employees see people’s updates and important documents. Through integrated apps, you can even edit and open documents from other services from within Tibbr. For example, if someone in your feed has posted a document from Box, you can tap on it and it will open the file in the Box app. Menon said the apps only do this with apps like Box, Salesforce, Oracle, and SharePoint, but Tibco plans to add more.

Two other handy features in Tibbr’s mobile apps are called “Links” and “Files.” In the top photo, which shows the iPad version of the Tibbr, you can see these sections of the screen near the top. Menon said “Links” and “Files” give a strong visual representation of what the content has been shared on your network.

Take a look at what the iPhone version looks like the photos below.

Photo via Tibbr

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has faced a lot of criticism recently as his company has struggled to define itself as a full-fledged business. Today, he acknowledged those negative perceptions and defended Foursquare.

“We’re not the shiny new thing anymore,” Crowley said today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “We’ve been around for four years. People are still skeptical of whether we can pull this off or not. … We’ve seen other people, like Facebook, go through this as well.”

Foursquare recently raised a $41 million loan to help keep the company growing and heavily shift its focus on helping people explore good places to eat, shop, and more. The loan generated more criticism, but Crowley said the company is growing and generating revenue.

“There’s a lot of perception we’re not growing — that’s totally false,” Crowley said. “A lot of folks think we aren’t generating revenue or that we don’t care about revenue. They’re wrong. … This past March was our highest-generating revenue month so far. We expect to see that going forward.”

One of Crowley’s most prominent recent attacks came from former Square COO Keith Rabois. Crowley said that Rabois is on the board of Yelp. Because Foursquare provides similar data, it’s clear Rabois can’t be considered a fair source.

“If I was on the board of Yelp, I’d be nervous, too,” Crowley said.

The most important thing to Crowley now is building a good product and creating the best location data on the web. Apps like Instagram, Uber, and Path all use Foursquare’s API, and more companies will likely come to rely on that data.

“People get caught up in the story and not the things we’re actually doing,” Crowley said. “Facebook has built the social layer of the Internet. We’re doing the same thing around places. … That’s one of the biggest assets we have.”

Dennis Crowley photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Enterprise social networking business Jive Software has launched its spring 2013 update with new features including “rooms” for collaborating on specific projects, and integration with cloud storage service Box.

Jive competes with Microsoft’s Yammer and Salesforce’s Chatter to provide enterprise social networking services to companies. On top of that, smaller player Moxie  just took a shot at Jive and its competitors by offering its enterprise social service for free.

With this fierce competition breathing down its neck, Jive has pressure to add new features. Its spring 2013 update fits the bill and offers two major updates:

• Purposeful Places: Jive offers up “deal rooms” for sales teams to work together on deals and “campaign rooms” for teams working on a structured campaign.
• Structured Outcomes: Jive takes conversations and converts them into trackable actions

Jive product marketing VP Nathan Rawlins told VentureBeat that these features are centered around lessening the amount of email workers need to deal with each day.

“In a big company, you’ve got a really big challenge with keeping track of information,” Rawlins said. “Email is a curse. Our focus is to help people communicate more effectively than they do on email.”

Jive has also announced that its services are now integrated with enterprise cloud storage hotshot Box. So Jive customers will be able to collaborate on Box documents from within Jive, and comments are synced across Jive and Box. Customers will also be able to upload content to Box from Jive and access Box docs from Jive mobile apps on iOS and Android.

The new Purposeful Places also have integration with Box and Salesforce data.

Top photo via Jive

It’s been seven years since Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent his first tweet (back when it was called Twttr) — since then the company has gone on discover vowels and reach more than 200 million active users.

Twitter created a short video (below) celebrating the major moments leading up to its seventh birthday, but beyond that the company surprisingly doesn’t have anything else to mark the occasion (even its user metrics have been announced previously). So what batter chance to reflect on the massive impact of 140 character messages on the world?

Like many, I thought the very idea of Twitter was silly when I first heard about it in 2006. How much can you really say in 140 characters? It seemed to signify that texting was creeping towards more general communication, and there simply was little room for in-depth thought in modern communication.

By early 2008, when I finally joined Twitter, it’s utility was quickly becoming clear. It wasn’t meant to replace longer communication, it instead seemed like the perfect way to join in on a larger, global conversation. Watching my Twitter feed automatically refresh and respond to breaking news, it began to remind me of how characters in The Matrix could see the shape of that virtual world simply by staring at code.

Throughout 2008, Twitter became an indispensable tool for all of my work. It helped me keep track of news for my IT support job, and it was also a great way to get in touch with people in the entertainment industry for my budding movie podcast.

Twitter  became the first thing I looked at in the morning, and the last thing I checked in with at night. My infatuation only intensified when I got my first iPhone, the 3GS, in 2009. Indeed, Twitter seemed like the perfect medium for the smartphone age: it fostered public communication, and its character limit meant users were forced to be clear, rather than ramble on like so many do in e-mails.

Now, Twitter sees more than 400 million tweets a day, and it’s an even more integral part of my daily life.

“Twitter has become a true global town square — a public place to hear the latest news, exchange ideas and connect with people all in real time,” wrote Twitter editorial director Karen Wickre in a blog post today. “This is where you come to connect with the world at large. Get on your soapbox to critique elected officials, or go sotto voce to the neighbor next to you.”

Photo via Clever Cupcakes/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Enterprise cloud software giant Salesforce has updated its iOS and Android versions of Chatter — the company’s business social networking and collaboration service — with critical new features to match their browser counterpart, the company said today.

“Companies are social at their core, and Chatter can be the heart of that,” Michael Peachey, Salesforce’s senior director of solutions marketing, told VentureBeat. “Legacy CRM software isn’t social or mobile. This next generation of Chatter sets the bar for mobile and social CRM.”

Chatter competes with Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software, Moxie Software, and Tibbr to help big companies with social networking and collaboration. Salesforce claims Chatter is the backbone for nearly 200,000 active business social networks. Chatter helps Salesforce compete in social, but you can’t really own that arena now unless you have robust mobile apps to support it.

Today’s update sees the Chatter’s mobile apps updated to help with Salesforce’s push to own social and mobile and to be a “customer company.” The Chatter applications have received two major updates, so now you can:

• Post and edit media on the go from the new “publisher” including files, photos, polls, tasks, thanks, and more.
• Access and edit customer information from the Salesforce platform including customer accounts, campaigns, cases, leads, and more

“This makes it so you can see all the context of the account and your key customer data in one place,” Peachey said. “You want to take action in less than 60 seconds, and we’re making that happen.”

Both features seem important to making Chatter more powerful on mobile devices. The “publisher” especially is critical because lets you post polls for your colleagues or photos of whatever you can take with your iPhone or Android device. These sort of things are important for quick collaboration among mobile employees.

While Salesforce does seem to have a strong mobile push as of late, it only seems to care about equipping iPhones, iPads, and Android phones with its tools. Peachy said the company has not yet committed itself to creating Chatter applications for Android tablets, Windows Phone, Windows RT, or Windows 8.

“Our customers aren’t asking us for that today,” Peachey said.

Top photo via Salesforce

In a strange social media move, the Vatican has deleted all of the tweets sent from Pope Benedict XVI’s @Pontifex account to make way for a new pope.

Benedict XVI was the first pope to use Twitter to communicate with his flock (though, of course, he’s the only one to hold the pontiff position since Twitter’s founding), and he urged Catholics to use Twitter to spread the “Good News.” The account has more than 1.6 million followers. Benedict XVI stepped down today as pope, and his resignation will become official at 5 p.m. Pacific. His new title will be “pope emeritus,” which was created just for him.

He sent out one final tweet today reading:

“Thank you for your love and support. May you always experience the joy that comes from putting Christ at the centre of your lives.”

The Twitter account’s name now is titled “Sede Vacante,” which is the name of the period when the papacy is vacant.

Those who want to read through an archive of Benedict XVI’s tweets can still do so at the Vatican’s website.

While it makes some sense to have the Twitter account reserved for just the thoughts of the current Pope, it does remove a lot of history from the account. All of Benedict XVI’s tweets that had been re-tweeted by followers now will not show on their timelines as well.

It’s almost as if Benedict XVI’s messages had never been spread in the first place.

Photo via Pontifex/Twitter

Facebook’s mobile app for iOS has been updated with several new features today, including placing free calls over data.

Facebook’s less-popular Messenger app for iOS previously got free voice calling, but now it looks like it wants all of its members to call their friends through the main FB app as well. As long as you have an active Wi-Fi or data connection, you’ll be able to place a call through Facebook with the ease of an app like Skype or Vonage. Calls only work in the U.S. and Canada so far.

On top of free calling, the application has also improved buttons to like, comment, and share posts.

Woman using call me gesture via Shutterstock

Oh, you thought your trip photos from Cancun were great for Facebook? Sorry, next to Col. Chris Hadfield — who is posting his Facebook photos from space — your pics aren’t that special.

A Canadian astronaut on the International Space Station, Hadfield is one of the most social savvy spacemen ever. He recorded a moving Christmas song on the ISS and posted it to SoundCloud. He’s taking part in a Google+ hangout from the ISS soon. And now he’s hosting his own cooking show from space.

Another part of Hadfield’s experience with communicating to the world below is frequently posting to Facebook and Twitter. On Twitter, he’s amassed more than 418,000 followers, and on Facebook, he’s attracted about 44,000 likes.

His Facebook posts have gotten especially interesting in the past few weeks, with plenty of amazing photography from the International Space Station. The picture above is what Budapest looks like at night — from space.

Check out more awesome photos that Hadfield has posted recently in the gallery below.

Photos via Col. Chris Hadfield/Facebook

Imagine having access to a Rolodex of two million of the wealthiest people in the world — bankers, private equity folk, and venture capitalists — and charging everyone thousands of dollars for a peek.

A new service has emerged to do just that. Relationship Science is charging bankers to use its cloud-based CRM tool to track the “1 percent” and already has some high profile Wall Street firms signed for its beta. It describes itself as the “ultimate business development tool.”

As the New York Times reported, the technology is still buggy and in the early stages of development. But it has received sufficient buzz to attract the attention of heavyweight investors, including Ken Langone, Henry Kravis, Stanley Druckenmiller, Andrew Tisch, Ron Burkle, and Joe Perella.

Today, Relationship Science announced it has raised $60 million in funding to date.

Founder and CEO Neal Goldman gave me access to the beta version of the website, which has taken almost 700 people (primarily in India and New York) over two years to build. His team of developers did not scrape data from social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn; instead, they manually input information. It also has an algorithmic component, which automatically refreshes the site with updates like a personnel move or a new board member.

According to Goldman, this decision not to rely on an algorithm was deliberate, since many influential people have not signed up to a professional social networking site like LinkedIn. The results are more sophisticated and personalized than a simple Google search, which is why this will set customers back $3,000 a year.

Perform a simple search for a well-known financier, JP Morgan Chase’s chief Jamie Dimon, for instance, and the system will scan a list of Dimon’s contacts through his civic and philanthropic efforts, family connections, political affiliations, board positions, and work circles to uncover unexpected connections. Relationship Science will assign connections as “strong” or “weak” and suggest to its client the “shortest path” to make their acquaintance.

“You can understand what’s important to a person — everything is linkable and clickable,” Goldman explained by phone.

Goldman’s previous startup, CapitalIQ, is a financial database service that dozens of Wall Street firms use. Likewise, Relationship Science has found a niche with finance folk, but Goldman told me that he envisions the service will be useful to technology entrepreneurs, politicians, and nonprofit executives. He plans to offer a massively discounted subscription to nonprofits.

The database does not contain people’s phone numbers or email addresses — the customer must use the information and track down a desired contact.

For this reason, Spencer Chen, a senior director of business development at Silicon Valley-based company Appcelerator, is skeptical that a service like this would resonate with marketing and business professionals outside of the finance world. “Individuals are already equipped with finding common connections,” he noted.

These kinds of relationship CRM tools have been attempted in the past and have largely failed.

Blumberg Capital’s Jon Soberg has invested in similar companies over the years. He said that Relationship Science’s true value will be if it can perform predictive analysis, perhaps even suggesting experts who might add value to a customer’s ongoing research project. “I don’t know yet if this is a feature of an existing CRM or a standalone huge business,” he said.

Relationship Science is an audacious undertaking with a huge staff, but the company is well-funded. Goldman responds to criticism by emphasizing that he’s in it for the challenge. “I really love information, so I’m building the entire inter web of relationships,” he said.

 Top image via © Alexey Stiop // Shutterstock 

Updated at 7:45 a.m. after the outage was resolved.

Social media titan Facebook was down for a large number of users Monday morning, leaving those affected people less than thrilled but still willing to make a few jokes.

Last week, a Facebook issue took down websites as large as CNN, BuzzFeed, and Yelp, whose visitors were redirected to a Facebook error page, so scrutiny of the site’s performance is higher than normal.

Two VentureBeat writers and and the site Down For Everyone Or Just Me confirmed that Facebook was not functioning normally this morning. The site Down Right Now indicated that based on usage, Facebook was suffering a “likely service disruption.” However, two VentureBeat writers said Facebook was working smoothly for them.

Some folks on Twitter used the opportunity to crack jokes about the situation:

Heart attacks crossing many states.Facebook is currently down for “numerous” users.

— Kevin Clamato (@KevinClamato) February 11, 2013

Facebook is down. Pope resigned. Apocalypse obviously coming. #facebook instagr.am/p/Vl9mqWEAko/

— Alex M Morales (@QbanWong) February 11, 2013

#Facebook is down. Productivity goes up 500% at offices worldwide..including here @majic100ottawa #MajicMornings

— Stuntman Stu (@stuntmanstu) February 11, 2013

We’ve contacted Facebook about the outage and we will update this post if we hear back.

Mark Zuckerberg photo via Guillaume Paumier/Flickr

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.

Twitter handily beat Facebook and Google+ during the Super Bowl in social media mentions, according to an informal analysis by Marketing Land.

During the Super Bowl, brands are fighting almost as hard as the players to out-perform the competition. They use whatever marketing tricks they can to score points, including mentioning social networks and other sites where fans could connect with the brand during or after the game.

Marking Land’s Matt McGee counted the number of mentions Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ got during the ads that aired during the Super Bowl. He only counted the 59 national commercials that aired after kickoff and before the game clock hit 0:00.

In order of mentions, here’s his breakdown:

• Twitter or hashtags were mentioned in 50 percent of ads
• Facebook was mentioned in 8 percent of ads
• Google+ was mentioned in 0 ads
• Instagram was mentioned in 1 ad
• YouTube was mentioned in 1 ad

For Twitter, he counted a hashtag, a logo, or a URL. Other mentions required a logo or URL.

Now, to be fair, hashtags are most commonly associated with Twitter, but they are sometimes used in Facebook and Google+ posts. So brands are showing a preference to Twitter, but it’s not like those marketing messages can’t leak out elsewhere.

Twitter also racked up some impressive stats during the game itself. These moments sent the most tweets flying:

- Power outage: 231,500 tweets per minute (TPM)
- 108-yard kickoff return for Ravens TD by Jones: 185,000 TPM
- Clock expires; Ravens win: 183,000 TPM
- Jones catches 56 yard pass for Ravens TD (end of 2nd quarter): 168,000 TPM
- Gore TD for 49ers: 131,000 TPM

Facebook’s wrap-up of Super Bowl activity doesn’t mention number of posts but does identify the biggest moments of the game shared on the platform:

1. Ravens win the Super Bowl
2. Beyonce’s halftime performance
3. Blackout in the Superdome
4. Jacoby Jones’ 108-yard kickoff return for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
5. Joe Flacco’s 56-yard pass to Jacoby Jones for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
6. Joe Flacco’s 13-yard pass to Anquan Boldin for a Ravens touchdown (and Justin Tucker’s field goal kick)
7. Frank Gore’s six-yard run for a 49ers touchdown (and David Akers’ field goal kick)
8. Destiny’s Child surprise appearance with Beyonce during the halftime show
9. Ray Lewis’ retirement
10. David Akers’ field goal kick from 27-yard line

Looking over these charts, there’s a clear difference in the type of content shared. Twitter prioritizes big and small events happening in real-time, like the power outage and the 108-yard kickoff return. Facebook’s users clearly focus on big, flashy moments, with the Ravens’ win and Beyonce’s performance in the top two slots.

As for which brands made the most impact using social media, Oreo was the clear winner. The brand used the Super Bowl’s blackout as an opportunity to run a clever ad on Twitter and Facebook that was shared an enormous amount of times. Oreo’s executive team pulled the trigger on the spontaneous ad just after the blackout happened, according to Buzzfeed.

As of this morning, Oreo’s clever blackout ad was retweeted more than 14,500 times and re-shared on Facebook 6,740 times.

Take a look at the witty Oreo ad below:

Facebook has updated its popular iOS application with the ability to record and share videos and voice messages, a big improvement to the already well-featured app.

The Facebook mobile experience is one of the most important aspects of Facebook these days because more than half of the social network’s 1 billion users are accessing the app through phones and tablets each month. And so, it must continue to make the native app experience better. Video recording is especially important, as Facebook can now encourage users to record and share directly on its platform, rather than via apps like Vine.

On top of the voice and video recording, Facebook has also improved the Nearby tab, which gives you information about restaurants and local businesses nearby.

The updated app promises the following additions:

• Send voice messages when you have more to say
  
• Record and share videos right from the app
• Share and connect with your favorite places using the improved Nearby tab

Take a look at the new version of the app in the photos below:

Mark Zuckerberg photo via VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alastair Mitchell

Think of standalone social business software like a point-and-shoot camera.

Cameras are perfectly suited for achieving one singular thing: taking a picture. Now, pick up your mobile phone. Right there, jammed into just four ounces, is a camera that not only rivals many point-and-shoots when it comes to picture taking, it can do so much more. You can edit images, share them instantly with countless people via any number of channels and add endless comments and captions. For many, point-and-shoots just don’t make sense anymore — as Kodak’s decline has demonstrated.

Standalone social business software companies may soon find themselves in a similar situation.

About five years ago, standalone social software defined a new class of business software. Yammer, Jive and countless other companies saw a new market emerging that seemed to answer one of the most frequent questions in the modern workplace: how can we make workers as communicative, engaged and connected as they are in their personal lives thanks to tools like Facebook? The promise of the social business was, and still is, compelling. By connecting workers, businesses can unlock and distribute siloed worker knowledge and information, thereby increasing collaboration and achieving boosts in productivity, creativity and efficiency.

In some ways, these standalone social business tools were great. The interface mimicked consumer platforms that were quickly becoming ubiquitous, like Facebook and Twitter, ensuring rapid adoption. Instantly, workers around the world had a space, outside of email and personal social networks, where they could communicate and share ideas with colleagues. Those were the days when activity feeds seemed somehow magical—and proved useful.

And then, suddenly, it happened. Noise began to fill the once-glorious activity feed as coworkers started to chat idly about their cats or favorite lunchtime sandwich. Suddenly, the useful business conversations that the platform was purchased to foster were made obsolete.

Businesses began questioning whether there was any measurable ROI, or if they had simply provided an online location for water cooler conversation.

A little less conversation, a little more action

So, why, given that “social” is still a popular buzzword, will 2013 herald the end for standalone social software?

Primarily, it’s because social software facilitates communication but doesn’t facilitate action, making it difficult for businesses to determine ROI. Business action, that is, workers getting work done, is typically how businesses determine ROI. As content (documents, files, multimedia, webpages, and so on) is central to all of the work we do, effective collaboration must unite conversations and content to create context.

Communication is only as useful as the context that exists to enable workers to act upon it. Elvis Presley summed it up perfectly when he said, “A little less conversation, a little more action please.”

Indeed, in 2011 and 2012 we started to witness a shift in standalone social business software as content management providers augmented their offerings with powerful social features (or vice versa) and standalone social software providers declined or saw themselves consumed by bigger businesses. Just look at the following examples:

• Microsoft purchased Yammer for $1.2 billion to incorporate Yammer’s social functionality into its decidedly unsocial SharePoint content management product.
• Salesforce augmented it’s “Chatter” social offering with a file-sharing and content management offering, “Chatterbox”
• Google Apps for business began integrating with a business version of Google+, Google’s flavor of social network.

Fortunately, the business software marketplace is maturing. This is evidenced by these acquisitions and other developments, including the U.S. Federal Government shifting billions of dollars in IT budget away from inherently “unsocial” legacy technologies and into cloud content collaboration services that have social features baked in.

In my opinion, the future of social software isn’t as a standalone service, which simply becomes a fire hose of irrelevant conversations for workers, but as part of a suite of applications that enable workers to collaboratively share information and act upon it. So, perhaps it’s less of a death and more of an evolution — after all, where would Instagram be without Polaroid?

Alastair Mitchell is the cofounder of Huddle, a cloud-based content collaboration and content management provider. As CEO, he has raised more than $40 million in funding since 2007 and has grown Huddle to more than 150 employees in London, San Francisco, and New York.

Huddle is currently being used by more than 100,000 organizations around the world. 

Alastair lives in the San Francisco Bay Area where he regularly hosts DrinkTank and HuddleUp networking events for tech entrepreneurs. Reach him at @alimitchell and on the Huddle blog at http://www.huddle.com/blog.

This is a guest post by Jon Siegal, founder and CEO of Fan Appz.

As the Great Facebook Debate over the past few months has made clear, in 2013, reaching your fans and followers at scale will require paid promotion.

Meanwhile, the thrill of counting likes, comments, and retweets has faded, and businesses want to see a real return on their investment. Marketers everywhere are asking how much they should continue to invest in building out and engaging with their social audiences.

Here’s the deal: You can’t invest to maintain your social reach unless you are netting a positive return that delivers meaningful business value to your company.

Social media is rapidly evolving into a data-centric and performance-driven marketing discipline. While it will always revolve around compelling content, when you are paying for impressions, you will be called to defend your budget.

As a marketer, your challenge now is to:

• Figure out what you are getting in return for your investment in social today. Define your social KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) so that you can benchmark your performance and measure it over time.
• Ask how many people in your social audience “convert” — however you just defined that for your particular business — and then determine the value of those conversions now and over time.
• For everyone else in your social audience, find ways to extract meaningful and lasting business value from their connection to your social profiles.

The key to success on all three of these fronts is to collect relevant, actionable data about your fans and then use it to inform your ad buys, optimize your social profiles, and, ultimately improve the targeting, personalization, and performance of all of your marketing efforts.

So stop panicking about this or that reach algorithm, and start taking control of your brand’s social destiny. Here are the three essential steps.

Step 1: Get a data ROI

Wherever you go to connect with prospects and customers, and whatever you do there, collect the data. If you are engaging in social and failing to either convert or capture data, you are wasting time and money.

Gather actionable, relevant data about each fan, along with permission to use it, according to the terms of service of each social network.

• Ask for contact information (such as email addresses), along with permission to use it through your own channels wherever possible.
• Gather behavioral data based on the actions people take, and ask for direct data inputs, such as fans’ ranked favorites across relevant product or service categories.
• Use social authentications to get permission to access fans’ interests, demographics, follows, and likes.

Step 2: Analyze with intent to personalize

Organize your social data such that it is easy to analyze for insights and filter into targeted segments. Integrate it with your customer and transactional data when possible, for greater context on how to personalize your approach to each fan, be they a new prospect or existing customer.

Why? Because people like to be treated as individuals. Personalization works:

• According to Econsultancy, 6 percent of marketers are already using social graph data for website personalization, and 88 percent of those say it has a high impact on both ROI and engagement.
• McKinsey partner Josh Leibowitz says research shows that personalization in retail can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spend and lift sales 10 percent or more.
• Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of online shoppers say they would trade increased privacy for more personalized offers from retailers, according to Accenture.

Step 3: Put the data to work

Use your social data insights to improve the targeting, personalization, and performance of all of your marketing and communications efforts. Specifically, use this robust, personal, and relevant data set to:

• Target your social ad campaigns to individuals for greater click-through and conversion.
• Personalize your emails with relevant content and offers that drive open rates and sales.
• Tailor your website with personalized offers and promotions that increase average order value.
• Use aggregate data, such as favorite features, colors, etc., to inform offline and in-store creative.
• Mine likes and follows (brand preferences) to identify new partners, sponsors, and advertisers.

For example, one of our retail clients used our platform to ask mothers on Facebook and Twitter to rank which items they most wanted for Mother’s Day. Our client then used that data to create a multi-channel marketing campaign across its social, email, and print catalog efforts, as well as online advertising, website, and in-store promotions.

The campaign drove a significant increase in sales of the items the moms picked for that season.

You can get great results and build lasting value for your business if you start asking the right kinds of questions and then really listening to — and remembering — what your fans are sharing on social channels.

A veteran of the CRM Software industry, Jon Siegal launched Fan Appz as a second-generation social media marketing solution to help brands leverage engagement for social data capture. You can follow him on Twitter: @jonsiegal.

Social media concept vector via venimo/Shutterstock

Google has added 24 new features to its Google+ service and updated its beautiful Android and iOS apps inyet another show of commitment to the social network.

Despite issues with getting people to spend a lot of time on Google+, Google claims 500 million users have upgraded to Google+ accounts, while 235 million are actively using Google+ features (like +1-ing apps or following friends in Google searches.) The company says 135 million users are actively using the Google+ stream proper. So it makes sense to keep refining the network.

For coordinating holiday gatherings, Google+ has added new event-planning features. Through Google+ Events, you can send messages to specific guests and see who’s viewed your invitation. There’s also a way to invite people by simply putting a link to your Google+ event into an email. Guests can also RSVP for how many people they will be bringing.

If someone can’t make your event, you can have them attend a Google+ “Hangout,” the social network’s version of group video chat. Handily, Google+ Hangouts now can run on lower bandwidth so even more people can try it. You only need 150 KB of bandwidth to take part in a session.

And here’s a list of what’s new in Google+’s updated Android app:

• New feature: Google+ Communities
• Support for full resolution photo uploads via Instant Upload
• Subscribe to any circle for notifications
• Support for time zones in Events
• Basic profile editing
• Integration with Google Now to send birthday wishes to friends
• Support for animated GIFs
• Express your mood via animated images in posts
• View and explore Photo Sphere images (Android 4.2+)
• Add the Google+ widget to your device’s lock screen (Android 4.2+)

The iOS app’s update isn’t quite so extensive, but it’s still seeing some decent changes. You can now:

• Swipe through photo albums inline
• Tap once to view photos in all their glory
• Now applies a subtle pan-zoom-scale effect to pictures in the stream

Photos via Google

Time to update your Twitter photos! No. 2 social network Twitter will roll out its bigger and bolder profiles to all users on Dec. 12.

As you can see in the photo above, the new profiles include a large header photo behind your main picture. This allows you to personalize your page more and make it more colorful. I’ve got a kick for nature photography, so my page is decked out with scenic pictures.

The company announced the rollout in a short blog post:

A few months ago, we introduced new Twitter profiles so that you could make your profile beautiful and display your style on your profile page. By uploading a header photo on twitter.com or our mobile apps on iPhone, iPad or Android, you can make your profile more uniquely yours. We’ve seen a lot of cool takes on these new profiles –– including shots from Mars, silly themes, and brands and celebrities expressing themselves in clever ways.

On December 12, we’re rolling this out to all users: you’ll automatically get this new version of the profile on twitter.com. If you don’t upload a header photo by then, you (and everyone else) will only see a default grey image on your page. That’s not fun! To get inspired about what you can do, check out this video to see how to make your profile a little more “you”, less generic. Have fun out there.

Check out the video below for more.

Facebook has started testing a new sound for whenever a user receives a notification, the social networking titan confirmed today to VentureBeat.

Facebook often tests new features and designs for a small amount of users before deciding whether or not to take it live for all of its 1 billion monthly active users. Notification sounds were turned on a few days ago for my Facebook account, and ever since, leaving my Facebook page open in a tab has been a gamble. Will I hear a lot of pings for that new picture I posted, or will I hear nothing?

You could also argue that these sounds would be handy for some folks. If you only occasionally receive likes or comments on your posts, then these pings could be informative. Or, perhaps, if you post something important and need to know the second it gets a response, you’d want the sound on.

Facebook manager of corporate communications Meredith Chin told us notification sounds are “currently just a test,” but she shined no light on when and if these sounds would be made permanent.

Thankfully, it’s easy to turn off. If you’re like me and are being hit often by notification pings, you can turn them off by going into Account Settings > Notifications. Simply click “View” on the top tab and then uncheck the box that says “Play a sound when each new notification is received.”

Check out a video of the notification sound happening to me below.

Kid covering ears photo via panco971/Shutterstock

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has taken its integrations one step further and made it incredibly easy to share files from Google Drive to its Google+ social network, the company announced in a blog post today.

Google Drive launched in April and has likely taken away at least some business from Dropbox, Box, SugarSync, and other cloud storage players. In June, Google said it would bring Drive to iOS and Chrome OS. And since then, Drive has added more features to make it a more robust offering. Now it’s got deep Google+ integration.

When you’re inside of Drive, all you need to do is click the Google+ icon to share your content to the social network. Or you can simply copy and paste a link from your Drive file into a post on Google+.

Google Program Manager Louis Gray writes:

Google+ is already a great place to share photos, videos, updates, and ideas. Google Drive is your cloud destination for all this content and more. Starting today, you can share content from Drive right here in your stream. I’ve been looking forward to this launch in a big way, and it’s incredible to see it here. Go forth and share.

Photo credit: Google/YouTube

In a surprising move, Facebook said it has no plans to build a native app for Microsoft’s just-released Windows 8 OS, the company told VentureBeat today.

After Twitter confirmed that it would build a Windows 8 app, we decided to check in with Facebook to see what its plans were. Microsoft and Facebook have a cozy relationship, with Microsoft owning 1.7 percent of Facebook and Facebook purchasing $550 million worth of patents from Microsoft in May. So it seems natural that Facebook would make an app for Windows 8, the one-size-fits-all OS Microsoft has been trumpeting loudly.

But what Facebook told us was surprising. Facebook manager of corporate communications Meredith Chin told VentureBeat (emphasis ours):

We only build the iOS and Android FB apps. You should check in with Microsoft on anything related to Windows 8.

We asked for explicit confirmation that Facebook had no plans for a Windows 8 app, but Chin did not respond. So instead we went down the rabbit hole and turned to Microsoft for answers.

Microsoft would not confirm or deny if anyone was working on a Facebook app for Windows 8, but it did provide this carefully worded statement about its relationship with app developers and companies (emphasis ours):

We are super-excited about the quality and the breadth of apps in our store for the global grand opening. More and more are being added every day. Developers are excited about our industry-leading revenue sharing and the opportunity to be in on the ground floor of the most significant release of Windows in history. Consumers are also excited about the apps in the Windows Store, and Windows 8 puts the apps at their fingertips. More great apps get added every day. If you have a question about a specific app, you should ask the developer.

Essentially, Microsoft is directing us back to Facebook to give us guidance about a potential Windows 8 app, creating a circle of confusion without any answers.

This likely means one of three things: A) Facebook is ignoring Windows 8 completely; B) Facebook is secretly working on Windows 8 app; or C) Microsoft is building a native Facebook app for Windows 8 because Facebook won’t invest resources into it.

Because neither company wants to admit what the hell is going on, we can’t be sure which answer is correct. The last option does actually seem viable in light of the native Facebook application for Windows Phone, which it now apears that Microsoft — not Facebook — is building. Since Facebook only mentioned iOS and Android in its statement, it must consider Microsoft as the main force behind the Facebook Windows Phone app. And so, Microsoft could also be building a Windows 8 app.

Photo illustration: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Twitter has announced that it’s building an official app for Microsoft’s Windows 8 OS, which was released Friday.

“#Windows8 needs a great Twitter app,” the company wrote on Twitter Mobile account. “So we’re building it. Looking forward to sharing it with you in the months ahead.”

It’s clearly a smart move to have a client on Windows 8, which includes its own app store for buying and downloading new software. But here’s the question — why is Twitter just announcing this now? Did it really need to wait until Microsoft announced 4 million people had purchased Windows 8 before pulling the trigger?

Developers from around the spectrum have been building great Windows 8 apps for months. Twitter could easily have been in the first batch of apps, but instead Tweetro was the first eye-popping Twitter client out of the gate. And based on the tweet, we’ll have to wait “months” to see what Twitter cooks up for Windows 8.

We’ve contacted Twitter to ask what the hold up was and why it’s announcing this after Windows 8′s big launch.

Twitter bird image via Zoo-chan/DeviantArt

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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.

Tagged has acquired location-based social discovery app Urbantag, a move to help the popular social network for meeting new people make more inroads in mobile networking.

Urbantag is Tagged’s fifth acquisition, following the 2011 purchases of hi5, Digsby, TopicMarks, and WeGame. Thanks to the acquisitions, the Tagged network now claims more than 300 million members worldwide.

“Urbantag’s expertise is a perfect complement to Tagged’s product efforts as we are working on taking mobile to the next level and digging deeper into local,” Tagged CEO Greg Tseng told VentureBeat via email. “[Urbantag CEO] Andrew Hoag’s mobile savvy matched with [Urbantag co-founder] Emma Van Niekerk’s design prowess make the team a perfect fit for Tagged.”

Tagged and Urbantag did not reveal terms of the deal.

San Francisco-based Tagged recently raised $15 million in new funding led by Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank, bringing the company’s total funding to $23.7 million.

Dogs high-fiving via Susan Schmitz/Shutterstock

A recent Piper Jaffray survey of 7000 U.S. teens ranked Facebook first in importance to teens. Twitter came in second, and Instagram — owned, of course, by Facebook — came in third. Detailed results, including how big the differences are, were not released, but Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, said that Facebook is well positioned to stay top dog in social networks for teens.

That, however, contrasts with a mammoth social media demographics study completed by Pingdom just two months ago.

In that survey, which analyzed social media use at 24 different social networks, the average age of Facebook users is 40.5 years, while the average age of Twitter users is slightly younger, at 37.2. And when Pingdom compared the results to a previous study, the website performance monitoring company found that while the average age of Facebookers has increased by two years since 2010, the average of Twitter users has decreased by the same amount.

All of which correlates well with statistics way back from 2009 which showed Facebook users aging and Twitter users growing younger.

Source: Beevolve

Self-disclosed ages on Twitter

And it matches up with Beevolve’s recent survey of a whopping 36 million Twitter users. In Beevolve’s study, almost three quarters of users who disclose their age on Twitter are aged 15 to 25. That needs to be taken with a big fat grain of salt, as most of Twitter’s 500+ million users don’t disclose their age on the site, but is still an interesting indicator of a sizable youth contingent on Twitter.

A possible explanation?

Facebook has more than double Twitter’s users. At over a billion daily active users to Twitter’s perhaps 550 to 600 million total users, there’s a massive size advantage. Take into account the percentage of monthly active users out of Twitter’s total userbase — about a third — and the difference becomes even more apparent.

Daily active Facebook to Twitter users is probably about a five to one ratio … a billion to maybe 200 million. And that’s even before you take Instagram into account.

Which means that even if the average age of Twitter users is young, and perhaps on a percentage basis Twitter has more teens than Facebook, Facebook still easily has Twitter beat.

But that may yet change in the future, if the current demographic trends on social network continue.

photo credit: ruurmo via photopin cc

If you’ve felt like sending out your status and content to all of your social networks was a bit laborious, Kliq wants to give you a hand with its new app that smartly shares your content through all your networks at once.

Similar somewhat to Google+ circles, Kliq allows people to mix and match their friends from various social networks into “kliqs” and share content to those designated groups.

On stage at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, Calif., the company’s CEO, Johnny Richardson, showed the audience how to create a “kliq.” Sign into the app, and you’ll see all your friends across the various social networks. Upload videos and share “relevant content and valuable moments” with a designated group.

“Since social media has become a major component of our everyday lives, I recognized that our friends … were fragmented across various social networks,” Richardson told VentureBeat via email. “And on top of that, we have accumulated very distant acquaintances in the same social networks. Increasingly we find it very difficult to express ourselves without having to give further thought to who [is] listening or watching.”

Basically, Richardson believes that because there are so many social networks, it makes it hard to transmit what we want to all the people we’re connected to. He thinks Kliq will “provide millions of people with a valuable way to share content with each other.”

To make some cash, Kliq will offer a freemium model for its service. It will offer a mysterious paid in-app feature called “Kliq 3D,” which provides an augmented reality experience of some kind. Richardson also said Kliq will have opportunities to collect licensing revenue from media companies and advertisers by offering a recommendation engine.

Birmingham, Mich.-based Kliq has raised $500,000 to date and is actively seeking to raise a first round between $1 and $5 million. The company has four employees.

In the DEMO Sage panel after the presentation, Josh Elman, principal at Greylock Partners, said that sharing with the right people is hard to do on big social networks like Facebook and Twitter. He said you could share a video, but friends from high school might see it, and they’re just not interested in that kind of thing. So there is potential for focused sharing networks like Kliq, where you can choose which people you want to share with. Elman thinks Kliq should be more focused. Jason Medelson, managing director of the Foundry Group, agreed there is user frustration on the big social networks about proper sharing.

Kliq Mobile is one of more than 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Kliq

Tired of keeping track of and coordinating your kids’ playdates? New startup Apparent wants to help.

Apparent’s app for the iPhone creates a small social network that connects parents with each other to make the playdate scheduling process easier.

“If you are a parent with young kids, you know the problem: The social currency for them is a playdate, and it’s a very complicated procedure, almost a social ritual,” Apparent CEO Gilad Katz told VentureBeat via email. “Apparent will help parents better organize their lives with kids. Find a worthy activity for their kids now, and make sure they don’t miss a playmate or activity ever again.”

Katz said his small team was deeply inspired by real-life issues surrounding playdates. He believes that parents need more tools to help them plan events for children ages 2 through 8.

“Our team is built of parents dealing with their kids’ social lives on a daily basis and we created Apparent for ourselves and for our children,” Katz said. “We really believe that using the Apparent app can help parents like us give their kids fuller and more active social lives. As parents we know we add a lot of value to parents, too, taking away the complexity and sometimes awkwardness of interacting with other parents.”

Because the app deals with children, security is especially important to consider. Apparent says it is a “private network” and it gives you “full control” of your family’s data.

Apparent’s presence on the iPhone is just the start. The company says apps for Android and Windows Phone are “coming soon” as well.

Principal at Greylock Partners Jason Elman said that as a father with young kids, this app is something his family would use.

“What is most interesting is the idea that you can create a real social network for all the parents of the kids at that age,” he said.  ”There are so many things unique about that group, if you can figure out how to create a graph of the parents, similar to what LinkedIn did for professional world or Facebook for social graph, it could be become a large thing.”

Tel Aviv-based Apparent was founded in 2011 and has three employees. It has raised a decent seed round from Jerusalem Venture Partners, and Katz said the company is “currently preparing for our next funding round.”

Take a look at the photos below to get a better idea of Apparent’s interface:

Apparent is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Kids playing photo via Shuttestock

Last night, the Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers 14-12 after the referees blundered an important call. Today, the Twittersphere and other social networks are buzzing about the replacement refs and calling for the NFL to bring back the pros.

The NFL is currently in a dispute with its unionized referees, so it has brought in replacements after locking out the officials. Fans and players are outraged that the league hasn’t already solved this issue, one that shouldn’t cost them too much to fix. The NFL stands by the replacement refs’ call.

Green Bay offensive tackle T.J. Long’s profane tweet about the refs has attracted more than 88,000 retweets, becoming one of the most retweeted notes in Twitter history in less than a day. BuzzFeed notes that the most retweeted note likely belongs to Justin Bieber, but Long could eventually take that crown in a few days.

New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees weighed in on the controversy via Twitter.

Miami Dolphins running back Reggie Bush also tossed out his thoughts:

ESPN’s SportsCenter Twitter account reports that NFL offices have received more than 70,000 voicemails last night. That report alone has more than 8,000 retweets.

That might have been due to Wisconsin State Senator Jon Erpenbach tweeting NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell’s office phone number.

Here’s one popular meme that’s been floating around Facebook today:

Another decently funny meme circulating on Facebook:

Check out the highly contested play in the video below. (This video might be taken down shortly due to infringement.)

And watch ESPN analysts tear down the NFL for continuing to use replacement refs.

MySpace might not be cool anymore, but the site’s upcoming redesign — as shown in a new video — looks absolutely stunning.

Specific Media bought MySpace from News Corp. in July 2010 for $35 million, a fraction of the $580 million it sold for in 2005. But the site is still kicking, and it has been working hard to reinvent itself and integrate with Facebook and Twitter. It also has Justin Timberlake helping out, trying to bring some sexy back to the site.

If you’d like to sign up for the new MySpace, you can do so here.

Check out the video above for more and let us know in the comments what you think of the new design.

Wildly popular photo-sharing service Instagram has now surpassed 100 million users, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

“It just crossed 100 million users,” Zuckerberg said on stage. “They’re killing it.”

Instagram officially became part of Facebook last week after the deal was approved by various regulators. The deal is now valued at around $750 million due to Facebook’s stock price dropping.

Instagram passed 80 million users in July, so its user growth has been stunning. ComScore reported a week ago that Instagram’s website is the 56th most popular site in the U.S., with 22.7 million monthly unique visitors.

Professional social network LinkedIn has added real-time notifications to let you know when people comment on or like a post, send an invitation to connect, and more, the company announced today.

Highly reminiscent of Facebook, these notifications give you a better sense of what’s happening with people you’re connected to on LinkedIn and, maybe more importantly, encourage you to spend more time on the site so you can see real-time responses.

The company writes:

Launching today is our new notifications feature, which will keep you notified in real-time when someone likes what you’ve shared on LinkedIn, views your profile, accepts your invitation, and much more.

Here’s what you’ll see: a notification flag at the top of your homepage and a new Inbox envelope icon. A red circle appears when you have something new, such as comments or likes on your shares, an accepted connection request, new inMails and more. This new feature is all part of our ongoing effort to make it easier to keep engaging discussions going with your network.

Notifications are just beginning to roll out today, but all LinkedIn users will have the new feature within the next few weeks.

Next up, the company plans to add similar notifications to its mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android. The company says mobile notifications are “coming soon.”

Notifications screenshot: LinkedIn