Tech Profile: Unified

What is Unified, and how did you and your team get started in this field?

Unified is an enterprise marketing technology company that helps brands and agencies activate audiences and impact consumer actions. My co-founders and I have both enterprise software industry experience, and we were early innovators in social marketing. We believe that enterprise marketing technology is necessary to manage the rising volume of data marketers need to sift through to solve complex problems. Unified was founded to help agencies drive social marketing success for their clients.

How should the marketing/advertising industry utilize Unified to create either better end-results or enhance in-house performance?

Brand marketers and their agencies should use Unified to efficiently manage owned audience channels, drive successful campaigns and measure ROI across all social ecosystems. We have self-service RFP generation tools to help manage client needs, a pricing engine that delivers cost-per-action pricing in real-time and incredible capabilities to drive cross-channel and cross-device social audience acquisition, content amplification, open web social amplification, as well as analysis of this data.

What trends and changes in the market led you to realize that Unified would fill a void?

Social media has changed marketing forever, and the incredible promise of social advertising has caused many brands to rush in and chase consumers’ attention. However, many are not taking a holistic POEM (Paid, Owned, Earned Measurement) and cross-platform approach, and instead, they often make investments in just one social network because they lack technology that can help them plan, buy, optimize and execute across all social networks simultaneously. Most importantly, without sophisticated technology, they lack any way to effectively measure their return on investment.

What are your core products for agencies specifically? How can agencies integrate these into their existing social and media monitoring workflows?

Leading agencies use applications built on top of our Social Operating Platform. Our Planning application generates sophisticated cross-channel social media plans with full campaign planning and RFP management capabilities. Agencies log new media plans, generate RFP responses and retrieve real-time, social action-based pricing from the Unified Social Action Pricing Engine.

Our Buying and Optimization application allows agencies to buy media on Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, YouTube, LinkedIn and many more simultaneously. After planners confirm campaign details, Unified tests thousands of creative permutations to determine which ones are most effective as they are deployed across social networks. We then automatically optimize the paid investment to the channel driving the highest KPIs for the lowest cost.

Our Insights and Measurement application gives agencies access to a robust set of real-time insights, reporting and measurement analytics. Campaign planners and brand managers can continuously track performance and make campaign decisions in real-time. Insights provided include creative success, social audience details (including age, gender, geography and language) and detailed keyword interest trends. We also provide earned media quantification so brands and agencies can set dollar values to benchmark what their earned media is actually worth. With one click, agencies can measure and visualize the earned media ROI generated from investments and discover the best-performing channels and tactics across paid, earned and owned channel investments.

Finally, yesterday we launched our new AMPlet suite, also built on top of our Social Operating Platform. Innovators like The Blue Flame Agency are already using AMPlets to effortlessly and dramatically amplify the distribution of ads and editorial content across Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Twitter and YouTube simultaneously. The value of the resulting viral sharing and earned media can then be tracked via the Unified Earned Media Action Framework.

CEO of Unified, Sheldon Owen, has said that the enterprise needs to become a social enterprise. Why is this? What do brands need to do to become a social enterprise?

Social media has fundamentally changed the way that businesses of all sizes communicate internally and market externally. Brands need to think social first in order to create a positive consumer experience. The days of hiding things and building products based on internal thought process is over; consumers should now drive the internal thinking of organizations directly. Brands need to embrace software that allows them to collaborate seamlessly across the enterprise and manage complex multi-party campaign workflow. They must also plan, buy, manage and measure the results of their social marketing efforts using tools that give them real-time insights into their paid, owned and earned media results across all social media.

How can working with Unified help to further an agency’s work in social application development?

Our Social Operating Platform is built to allow agencies to integrate any of their social applications data generated via API or data normalization. This allows the Unified Social Operating Platform to quantify the earned media ROI for applications developed in real-time. Leading agencies like NYC-based Carrot Creative have achieved great success by using our platform to roll out new practice areas with little to no operating expense and combine paid media with robust application development. We’re always happy to talk with agencies about how we can help their application development efforts.

How does Unified help brands to measure how offline or traditional marketing has affected their online goals?

In today’s world, traditional offline media channels are being used to drive audience action and conversation across major social ecosystems. 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.

Jason Beckerman is chief product officer at UNIFIED. Prior to co-founding Unified, Jason was co-founder and CEO of Social Suitcase, an innovator in the brand engagement space that was acquired by Connexus. He has held executive roles at a number of social media companies, including his tenure as co-founder and CEO of Teach The People, a Facebook Fund Grant Company and a TechCrunch 40 Finalist. Jason's experience also extends to financial services and enterprise software, including positions at Merrill Lynch, Siebel, and Salesforce.com. At Salesforce.com he managed the release process for the largest on-demand CRM rollout in the history of cloud computing at the time.

Jason received a BS in Entrepreneurship and Information Systems from Quinnipiac University and a Masters in Organizational Leadership from Gonzaga University.