Agency 2012: Technology and Social Platforms for Brands

Emerging technology platforms raised more questions for marketers than it answered in 2012. In the past year, we saw further innovation in mobile advertising, valiant attempts to tie online activity to offline purchases and creative ways to measure the influence of social media. Buzzwords of the year: gamification, key influencers and earned media.

These tech companies are forging ahead with new methods for brands to track behavior, reward loyalty and capture the interest of fans.

Badgeville

“Modern customer loyalty is as much about the customer as it is about the brand. Just like frequent-flyer programs revolutionized loyalty when computers were able to store data about repeat purchases, today we can store masses of data on user behavior across all of your digital experiences. This provides many new ‘behaviors’ to reward.”

CrowdOptic

“CrowdOptic leverages technologies resident in smart phones such as GPS, compass and tilt (accelerometers), and it combines these technologies with its own proprietary algorithms to create a new way to track interest of fans anywhere. Location is good. Focus is better. Focus allows the fan to engage with ads that are personalized based on what the fan finds interesting.”

CrowdTwist

“We’re tying digital activities back to actual purchases, whether they happen online or in the store. This is extraordinarily valuable for anyone selling anything today in the real world because they can see what it means for their bottom line when a customer brings in 20,000 new Twitter followers.”

Curalate

“Visual analytics platforms do not rely upon URL matching to determine a relationship between images and brands. Instead, Curalate relies upon actually recognizing images. As a result, brands can continue to capitalize on images that are shared and discovered on image-centric sites like Pinterest.”

RapidBlue Solutions

“We’re able to create profiles of consumer mobile phone location data collected through either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signals the consumers’ mobile phones are emitting…Imagine being able to understand not only every shopping trip not resulting in a purchase, but also who these shopping trips represent — or being able to know how your advertising campaign affected different demographic groups in your brick-and-mortar stores.”

Unified

“Our Social Operating Platform matches offline media buys with social audiences to measure their impact and viral amplification, letting brands and agencies quantify a value against the investments they are making in offline media and directly align those metrics with their social advertising expenditures.”

Zapier

“Zapier lets you create simple trigger-and-action workflows with 90+ applications. So you can create Basecamp to-do’s from a Wufoo form entry or add milestones to your Google Calendar events.”