GigaOM » Internet marketing

Best practices in optimizing content for social engagement

Mike Dover — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 20:12:39 +0000

Optimizing content is crucial as customers migrate from being passive recipients to becoming active contributors. This opportunity presents a fresh set of challenges, not only for those in traditional broadcast industries but also for content managers and enterprise leaders.

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LocalVox raises $7.4M for one-stop shop for local marketing

Ki Mae Heussner — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 13:00:22 +0000

Local businesses interested in getting their name out to clients and potential customers have increasing options, between social media, mobile, search and other more traditional channels. But New York-based LocalVox believes that for many small- to medium-sized businesses, navigating all of those options is complicated, overwhelming and expensive.

To address that, the company last year launched a full-service marketing platform for local businesses and today LocalVox is announcing that it has raised $7.4 million in Series A funding from Talus Holdings, a local media holding company backed by Blackstone affiliate GSO Capital Partners LP.

With the new funding, LocalVox said it plans to expand from New York and Hartford to the top 20 markets nationwide, as well as build out its products and strengthen its network of partners.

“Marketing, we feel, is one of the most misunderstood terms in business for SMBs,” said LocalVox co-founder and CEO David Pachter. “SMBs think about marketing inherently as something that big companies with marketing budgets and marketing directors do and not something that’s important for local businesses. What we’ve built is something that makes marketing an essential tool for local businesses.”

On a mostly subscription basis, LocalVox helps SMBs do everything from updating their own websites and publishing email newsletters to posting on and monitoring Facebook and Twitter to establishing presence on Yelp, Foursquare, Google Places and more. The company also enables clients to market across its network of publisher clients, which include Manhattan Media properties, CT1 Media (a Tribune company) and other local publishers in New York and Hartford.

Local online marketing is certainly a growth area – research firm BIA Kelsey expects it to grow from $27.1 billion in 2011 to $42.5 billion in 2015 and tech giants like Facebook and Google have repeatedly expressed their interest in going after more local dollars. While other companies offer solutions targeting specific channels in local marketing, LocalVox said it’s the most comprehensive platform for SMBs. But particularly with its recent acquisition of social marketing firm Wildfire, you could expect Google to offer a wider range of advertising products to SMBs. Other startups, such as ThriveHive and MarketMeSuite, similarly target SMBs with marketing platforms.

LocalVox said the 50-person company has hundreds of clients, including Whole Foods and Chelsea Piers in New York, and plans to further expand its mobile products in the coming months.

Image from Zinchuk_Oksana via Shutterstock.

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Taboola goes international, launches sponsored video placement

Ryan Lawler — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:47:10 +0000

Video recommendations provider Taboola is offering a new product to its customers that will allow them to boost viewership with paid placement in its recommended video widgets. The company has also found some success internationally, as it is being used for recommendations on some highly ranked sites in Brazil, Israel, Mexico and Poland.

Taboola provides a widget to publishers that provides recommended videos based upon the context of the story being read. Those videos can come from the publisher whose website an end user is on, or from multiple other providers that have agreed to make their content available as part of Taboola’s network. The website gets additional content from other providers, while the content creators get additional viewership opportunities from being seen on a wider range of publisher sites.

Now it’s taking that concept a step further, with the ability to have sponsored placement in those widgets. Publishers can now pay to have their content highlighted among the recommended videos, as a way to increase viewership from outside sites. While those videos are still recommended based on Taboola’s targeting technology, they are clearly marked as sponsored content.

Taboola is offering the model on a pay-per-click basis, meaning content owners don’t pay for a video’s placement unless someone chooses to watch it. It’s a good way of ensuring the videos shown are relevant, and that content creators don’t get charged based solely on impressions. Taboola then shares a cut of the revenues from sponsored videos with the publisher whose sites they ran on. (For a good example of this in practice, check out this local Hearst affiliate, which is offering recommended videos at the bottom of the page — including sponsored content from other providers.)

In addition to its most recent product addition, Taboola has also been making some progress in expanding beyond the U.S. market. Domestically, it powers video recommendations for clients like the Bloomberg, CNN, Hearst, the New York Times and USA Today, but it has obtained some top international customers as well. Those include Agora in Poland, Esmas in Mexico, IG.com in Brazil and Ynet.co.il in Israel.

Taboola wants to expand even more internationally, and CEO Adam Singolda told us he is looking to add more salespeople outside the U.S. The startup, which has offices in New York and Israel, recently raised a $9 million round of funding led by Crescent Point, with participation from Evergreen VC. To date, Taboola has raised $15 million since being founded in 2007.

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