Votigo has debuted a full-fledged social marketing suite that builds around its original core functionality of social promotions.
The 6-year-old company is offering a price point that is reasonable for small and medium-sized businesses, as well as functionality that can scale to enterprise level fairly easily, Mike La Rotonda, co-CEO and founder, told CRM Buyer.
“We have extended our engagement apps and added a full conversation manager that allows you to monitor the conversation from your customers across the social channel,” he said. “You can post messages out to Twitter and Facebook and can see what people are responding to.”
The company is also rolling out a social CRM feature set, which in its first iteration will focus on managing social contacts.
“Longer term,” La Rotonda said, “we envision that platform plugging into other CRM products such as Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM.”
A Range of Features
The suite includes a number of features. Chief among them is a promotions manager from which marketers can launch photo and video contests, sweepstakes, and other promotional apps in multiple languages across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social networks. It works in both the mobile environment and the Web.
The promotions manager touches on the full promotion cycle: from creating the apps, to sharing and publicizing them to social audiences, to moderating submissions and fan commentary.
Another feature is the conversation manager, which serves as an interface to manage two-way conversations with fans on social media.
Besides managing social contacts, the social CRM piece includes features that track engagement and influence, and target special offers and communications. There is also analytics functionality, allowing users to measure and assess campaigns across the various social media platforms — and email as well.
“One challenge for marketers is understanding that when they send an email message to ‘Mike’ from their database that that is the same ‘Mike’ with whom they have been communicating on Facebook,” La Rotonda said. “Our platform helps make those connections, especially when they are not obvious.”
Enterprise-Sized Customer Examples
Social promotions is where Votigo originally made its mark, and it counts a number of high-profile companies as references in that category, including Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Sony Online Entertainment, Kaiser-Permanente, NCM Fathom Events, Energizer and GoPro.
Votigo manages 1,000 unique Facebook pages for Starwood Hotels, for instance. Multiple administrator support, clear user hierarchies and strong workflow management are the reasons that particular feature works so well, La Rotonda said.
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Frankly, anyone who doesn’t go into social marketing full scale will miss out on huge dividends. eCommerce must be social, like it should also be multi-channel.