Hootsuite, the digital media darling of Vancouver that went from a start-up with a few people in a Downtown Eastside office to global company with 700-plus employees in barely seven years, has laid off 20 people.

Although in the euphemistic world of public relations-speak that was described as 20 employees “transitioned” out of the business, the news still reverberated around social media channels.

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions. #MarTech #DigitalMarketing

Hootsuite announced today that it’s offering free lead-generation tools, enabling all Hootsuite users to create sweepstakes and sign-up pages. Those are the two most popular features in Hootsuite Campaigns, an enterprise suite for managing contests, landing pages and UGC efforts that the company launched last year. 

The free features enable the creation of sweepstakes and lead-generation landing pages that in turn can be promoted on Facebook and Twitter. They can also be published on a Facebook tab. Hootsuite is also offering a Pro version of Campaigns with support for UGC galleries and photo and video contests that pull from Twitter and Instagram. The Pro level costs $50 a month or $35 if you are an existing Hootsuite Pro user.

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄

Digest...

1. Setting up Hootsuite Tabs

2. Geosearch – Targeting Based on Location

3. Setting up Hootsuite Filtered Streams

4.  HootFeed for Live Twitter Streams

5.  Hootlet for sharing
6. Monitor Social Conversations Using Hootsuite Apps
7. Hootsuite Publisher

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert ◄

Digest...

The folks at Hootsuite continue to be busy. Today, the social media management provider announced $60 million in new financing, the acquisition of a social telephony company, and the addition of voice to its platform — plus the CEO is teasing more advertising tools.

The acquired company is Zeetl, which provides social voice technology to support customer service and social selling.

__________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected). 

Intermediate/ Digest...

[The author] admits that when I saw one of the screens in Social Studio, one of the thoughts that came to mind immediately was: This looks a little like HootSuite.

Of course, Social Studio is a major enterprise app, and as such it has many screens and a great deal of functionality. Salesforce execs would likely argue convincingly that comparing just one screen to another product is unfair.

HootSuite is the leader in enterprise social, but this new Social Studio could be a significant threat. Salesforce has shown strong capability in acquiring customers for components of its marketing cloud and is an aggressive competitor. That said, it will likely appeal most to those who are already on the Salesforce platform.

HootSuite’s biggest competitive edge is that doing social for business is all that it’s focused on. It also has a strong app directory, with rich integrations into many different apps and platforms.

__________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

Intermediate/ Digest...

CRM giant Salesforce, which has aggressively moved into the marketing technology and social spaces in the past three years by buying Pardot, ExactTarget, Radian6, and BuddyMedia, announced today that it is combining its two previously acquired social technologies together to create one uber-suite for social, to be called Social Studio.

“We rebuilt the whole product — it’s enterprise-scale, but simple as Facebook,” Lazerow told me. “This is the only social platform for social listening, and engagement, and analytics, and marketing.”

As you’d expect from Salesforce, the tool is enterprise-scale, with the ability to assign and manage social media users in multi-brand, multi-location, and multi-country scenarios, monitor content, and add workflows and approvals. It has a unified content marketing calendar that shows all upcoming content, and natively integrates with content discovery platforms like Kontera, Trendspotter, and Rallyverse, so you can simply find a piece of hot trending content, attach your messaging or twist to it, and schedule it for publication. It also has built-in macros to automate common tasks, and as many features as you’d expect from the love-child of two large, mature, and respected social tools.

The challenge for Social Studio, now a key part of Salesforce’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, will be to prove that it’s better for enterprise than HootSuite, clearly the current leader in the space. While other solo competitors such as Spredfast, Expion, Sprinklr, Hearsay nip at its heels, HootSuite’s 7-8 million users and its $165 million war chest are pretty well unmatched by anything except, perhaps, what the other major marketing suites from Adobe, Oracle, IBM, and others can put together.

__________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

Basic/ Digest...

HooteSuite’s social media data is now going visual in a dashboard. The data specialists unveiled what they’re calling uberVUBoards, a dashboard widget offering a continuous scroll of valuable social media data to clients paying subscriber fees for the honor.

Clients can now measure in real time all those kernels of information so dear to mobile and desktop advertisers: measuring real-time sentiment, signal exposure, the top stories people are reading, and any kind of spikes in traffic. The beauty of uberVUBoards is that those using it no longer “have to dig” for the information.

__________________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).

Hootsuite will provide Marketo with lead generation through social media

Basic/ Excerpt...

Social media management platform Hootsuite is joining forces with marketing automation software maker Marketo to provide lead generation capabilities from social media. The integration is available exclusively to Hootsuite Enterprise and Marketo customers, and is the latest external partnership available in Hootsuite's App Directory.

____________________________________________________

► Receive a FREE daily summary of The Marketing Technology Alert directly to your inbox. To subscribe, please go to http://ineomarketing.com/About_The_MAR_Sub.html  (your privacy is protected).