Earlier this week we reported on how Backupify was closing down TweetBackup, a free service to back up your Twitter account that it acquired in 2010; now we have confirmed that, as we’d heard, this is part of a bigger plan at the company to phase out consumer services altogether, as Backupify focuses its efforts on paid services for enterprise customers. From today, it will stop accepting new sign-ups for its free tier of back-up services for personal files. It is also discontinuing by the end of this year support for certain sites, including Facebook personal profiles, Blogger, Picassa and Flickr.

It will continue to offer services to back up Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter and personal Gmail accounts, but it’s likely that these will be moved to all-paid services over time, as part of its personal backup products, which it will continue to support “for the foreseeable future” (even if only as paid, not free, products). Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that the timescale for free support is around two more quarters.

The moves are a signal that some startups that began with consumer social media services in mind have found that market hard to monetize. On the other hand, as enterprises become increasingly social, they are proving to be willing paying customers for many of the same kinds of offerings.

Rob May, CEO of Backupify, tells us that this move has been a long time in the making — some two years in fact.

“We started Backupify as a consumer-facing business but we quickly realized there was money in SMB and enterprise, so when we raised money the intention was to use it to go after the B2B market. And this is now a bigger chunk of our revenue — over 90%,” he told TechCrunch. In a blog post on the news, May also notes that enterprise was only a small percentage of revenues three years ago.

The company is not revealing total user numbers currently but when it announced a Series C round of $9 million last year, it had 170,000 users, and didn’t break out how many of those were free or paid.

He notes that in fact there is nothing of TweetBackup getting left behind in the closure. Over time, as Twitter has changed its own APIs, the company had to rebuilt its product from the ground up. It’s that rebuilt technology that has also gone into Ditto, the Symantec service for backing up Twitter accounts, which turns out was co-developed with Backupify (one by-product of the strategic investment that Symantec made as part of that most recent $9 million round of fundraising).

In the meantime, Backupify is working on developing services to back up other platforms and sites. It’s currently in testing with Apptivo, Freshdesk, Mavenlink, Nimble and Pipeline Deals to provide backup services to their users, and with the increasing move to cloud-based enterprise services, you can see how and where something like that could develop further. May says it’s not currently working with Evernote — a company with an ethos of saving your data for the rest of your live and beyond — but that he would love to.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

FixYa, a Q&A site where consumers can seek advice from product experts, is launching a new feature today called the FixBoard, which should make the site more useful to big consumer brands.

As the name suggests, the FixBoard is basically a dashboard of FixYa data. It shows, over time, the number of FixYa owners who reported a problem with a company product, the products that have the most reported problems, the most common problems, and how those numbers stack up against the competition.

Rather than just looking at individual questions or individual products, this dashboard provides brands with a much broader view of “what customers are saying,” said CEO Yaniv Bensadon. The data is specifically about activity on FixYa — it doesn’t tell companies about complaints on their own sites or own social media, for example. But Bensadon said FixYa itself has become a big community, with more than 30 million unique visitors per month and 9 million product questions answered total.

He added that even though FixYa has been profitable since 2009, the company is looking for ways beyond its existing ad model for brands to find (and pay for) value on the site. The FixBoard is currently free and available to everyone, but it only covers the top 1,000 brands on FixYa (out of 60,000 total). Eventually, Bensadon said he plans to release a “full-blown” version that companies will have to pay for, covering more brands and offering more detailed data.

I also asked whether any of those potential advertisers/future customers are going to be upset to see the number of customer complaints highlighted in one place and visible to the public.

“We don’t think so — in the same way that no one prevents anyone from going to Twitter and reading the tweets,” Bensadon said. “Now, after several years … brands understand the fact that some users are saying something bad about your brand. It cannot be prevented, and there are two things you can do about it as a brand. You can ignore it, or treat it as an opportunity to engage with your users.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s new and mysterious startup called Jelly still isn’t saying what it’s up to, but it has announced funding. According to details posted to the official company blog this morning, the team has raised a Series A from a notable lineup of investors in a round led by Spark Capital, with additional investment from SV Angel, and a group of angels that includes Square CEO Jack Dorsey;Reid Hoffman; Bono (what!), Evan Williams and Jason Goldman via Obvious; Al Gore; Emmy-winning director Greg Yaitanes; and Afghan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob.

As a part of the funding, Spark General Partner Bijan Sabet now joins Jelly’s board of directors.

The company explains that it chose the angels for their diversity of experience, something that’s important to Jelly’s team as well as to its product, whatever that may be:

“We chose angels like Al Gore, a Partner at KPCB and Chairman and Co-founder of Generation Investment Management, Greg Yaitanes, a Hollywood director, and Roya Mahboob, an entrepreneur doing amazing work for women in Afghanistan partly because they work in divergent fields. Knowledge diversity is something we prize highly and is also something that will be represented in our product.”

The post also revealed that the Jelly product is only in the early prototyping phases right now, which is one reason why the company has yet to reveal product details to the general public.

The additional funding – no amount was provided – will be used for hiring and development, as is par for the course.

Jelly has already been busy on the hiring front as of late however, having recently hired former Twitter engineering manager and Fluther co-founder Ben Finkel as Jelly’s co-founder and CTO, as well as Kevin Thau, the man responsible for Twitter’s new app, Twitter music.

Though details as to what Jelly is up to are scarce, earlier hints seem to point to some sort of “social good” intention with the service, like perhaps offering a way for users to connect to social causes and show off their contributions. Stone recently explained that “People are basically good—when provided a tool that helps them do good in the world, they prove it.”

Philanthropy and volunteering don’t have many central homes on today’s web, as TechCrunch previously noted in a discussion about Jelly’s possible plans – save for something like Causes, which works on top of Facebook’s open graph, having never taken off as a standalone service of its own. In fact, social media-based activism has been under fire for years as being a poor substitute for real-world action. Liking and sharing and posting and re-tweeting does not necessarily have the desired impact on effecting change, though it may raise awareness.

Today’s announcement from Jelly still gives no hints as to how it plans to help people “do good in the world,” only noting that the proliferation of mobile devices is a big factor in its plans. “As mobile devices have taken an increasingly central role in our lives, humanity has grown more connected than ever—herein lies massive opportunity.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Warren Buffet: “If you lose money for the firm I will be understanding. If you lose reputation I will be ruthless.”

Why? Because, on a 10 point reputation scale, 1 point difference is worth $500m for large corporations*.

Here’s the deck from a recent course we ran on brand reputation management and social media.  How to use social media to manage your reputation – what people say about you (or your brand) when you leave the room.  Unlike other courses, we hope you’ll enjoy the fact that the solution has nothing to do with creating social spam and polluting peoples news feeds.

There are smarter ways to manage your reputation in social media…  Enjoy, download – and feedback welcome.

* Black, E., T. Carnes, and V. Richardson (2000). ‘The market value of corporate reputation,’ Corporate Reputation Review, 3(1), 31-42.

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

Social analytics startup Awe.sm has been growing quickly and getting a lot of interest from brands that want to use its platform for measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. With that in mind, the company has hired a new CEO, industry veteran Fred McIntyre.

It’s been a long time since we checked in with Awe.sm. The company, which started out as a link-shortener but quickly transitioned to focus on measuring the influence of various social sharing activities, raised a Series A round of funding about 18 months ago.

Since then, the company has been quietly tweaking its business model, moving from a platform primarily used by developers to track social sharing data, to one used by brands and marketers. That shift came about at the request of various agencies that were looking to get a deeper look at their earned media through social networks.

Awe.sm provides them with a way to track the value of individual tweets, likes, and pins, as well as their effects on traffic, page views, and sales conversions. That gives marketers insights and measurement to determine the effectiveness and ROI of social media campaigns which they never really had before. Clients include companies like Zynga, Playdom, Topspin Media, Maker Studios, and Groupon.

Anyway, with that new direction (or should we say, new opportunity?), Awe.sm was going beyond just being a pure technology company, and it was looking for someone who would help work with brands and advertisers and agencies. And in that search, it found former CBS Interactive and AOL exec Fred McIntyre.

McIntyre was most recently SVP of CBSi’s music group, which includes brands like Last.fm, MP3.com, and Radio.com. Under his leadership, those brands were consolidated into a single unit and the group acquired lyrics database Metrolyrics.com. Prior to that, he had held various executive roles at AOL, including SVP of business development, as well as overseeing the company’s Video and Music divisions at different times.

According to Awe.sm co-founder Jonathan Strauss, the decision to bring in a veteran executive to run things became necessary as the company began scaling up. Taking the Awe.sm platform and packaging it up for social media marketers meant growing the business, growing the team, managing people, and selling to brands and agencies — all of which left him feeling spread a little too thin. While McIntyre takes the reins, Strauss will take over as head of product management.

For his part, McIntyre was interested in the opportunity to start off on the ground floor of an emerging new industry. After being part of streaming music pioneer Spinner, as well as heading up AOL Video in the mid-to-late aughts, he said he’s used to seeing new markets emerge. Being there for the inevitable growth of a social media marketing business was of huge interest.

According to McIntyre, social media marketing makes up about 8 percent of marketing budgets today, and are expected to grow to about 12 percent by the end of the year, representing a huge opportunity for growth. Awe.sm, he believes, will be a part of that growth, as it provides better tracking than competitive products.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Vin Diesel leads this week’s list of top gainers in the People Talking About This metric for actor/director pages. The “Fast and Furious” star has achieved 1.6 million total engagements with his page, increasing by 546k engagements over the last week. With the newest “Fast and the Furious” release date nearing, the page is producing a steady stream of content.

This list of top gaining actor/director pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

#	Name	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Vin Diesel	1,631,816	0	+545,769
2	Sanaa Lathan	433,058	0	+383,159
3	Corbin Bernsen	540,030	-30,325	+304,178
4	Emma Watson	428,435	0	+236,397
5	Alia Bhatt	244,203	0	+194,985
6	George Takei	3,354,142	0	+141,652
7	Channing Tatum	321,030	0	+138,236
8	成龍 Jackie Chan	1,104,711	0	+124,138
9	Jason Statham	200,577	0	+121,254
10	Kirk Cameron	198,777	0	+116,564

Last week, “Fast and Furious” lead all movie pages in PTAT. The summer blockbuster and its star have generated a large buzz via social media. However, the most engaged post on the actor’s page was a cover photo update and not clearly associated to the film. With over 41 million total Likes, Vin Diesel’s fan page has ample organic reach which contributes to large PTAT.

The second fastest growing actor page this week belongs to Sanaa Lathan, best known for “Love and Basketball.” The actress takes a personal approach to her profile page, using the first person and sharing pictures taken by herself. Her most engaging post for the week took place on Mother’s Day where she shared a photo with her mother. These types of holiday themed posts can provide increased engagement due to increased relevance to the audience.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about actor and director pages as well as other categories. Now only $19.95 a month.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Let’s say you go to a lot of concerts. And let’s say you have a big social media following. And maybe, just maybe, you’re such a big deal that when you tell all your friends and social media followers about all those shows that you’re seeing, they want to go, too. Wouldn’t it be great if the venue or the promoter or whomever you’re buying tickets from could reward you for all the incremental tickets that you’re helping to sell through your charisma and social influence?

Well now they can.

Thanks to a new product from Ticketfly, the people who put on those shows you love will now have a tool for identifying and rewarding the customers who attend their events — and get other people to do so as well. Ticketfly’s Fanbase includes a proprietary ranking algorithm to create a list of the most valuable customers for promoters and vendors.

That includes attendees’ own purchase history and their social influence, including how often their sharing activity on third-party social networks resulted in a ticket sale. That will allow promoters to see how many tickets they’ve personally purchased, social sharing stats, or lifetime revenue that has come from a particular fan.

Not only can Ticketfly partners use Fanbase to identify their most important and influential customers, but they can also use the tool to contact those customers with offers to like, entice them to buy more and tell even more people about the shows they’re going to. That could include stuff like exclusive pre-sales, merch, VIP seating, or maybe a chance to meet an artist in person.

Furthermore, the Ticketfly system can narrow down users based on their favorite artists or genre. That will allow promoters and venues to provide a higher level of targeting to fans, sending them the most relevant deals or promotions, based on shows they’ve enjoyed in the past.

For Ticketfly, the name of the game is helping its partners to sell more tickets. It does that by connecting its proprietary analytics with integrated social and email marketing tools. Since about 7 percent of fans are responsible for about 30 percent of all revenue, identifying those high-value customers is key to their success. Ultimately, the tools are designed to create a stronger bond between the fan and venue, according to Ticketfly co-founder and CEO Andrew Dreskin.

The Fanbase offering was tested with 50 different venues in beta, of which 92 percent said that they plan to continue using Fanbase multiple times per week, Dreskin told me. Ticketfly will be making the Fanbase tools available to all its clients, as a way to help grow their ticket sales and maybe, just maybe, attract more venues and promoters to use its platform.

Dreskin says that revenues were up 79 percent year-over-year during the first quarter, and that’s actually an acceleration over the previous year. Much of that can be attributed to new venues or promoters coming online with its platform, but Ticketfly also has seen a steady increase in ticket sales within its existing footprint of venues.

In fact, Ticketfly has yet to see a new partner come over from a competing ticket provider — usually the incumbent, Ticketmaster — and not sell more tickets than on its previous platform. Dreskin attributes that sales lift to the integrated platform. Fanbase should only accelerate that lift, as new analytics provide new insights and new rewards can drive increased sales.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Skift, the travel industry-focused site that was launched in July 2012 by PaidContent founder Rafat Ali and Jason Clampet (who previously ran content and editorial partnerships at Frommers.com), is announcing today that it has raised $1.1 million in additional seed funding.

The new funding was led by Lerer Ventures, with participation from various funds and angel investors (skip to the end of this post for the full list). It brings the total amount that Skift has raised to $1.5 million.

Skift says that it will have more than half a million unique users this month, and that 25 percent of its traffic comes from mobile. It also says its readers are likely to be “executives and managers from leading brands” in travel and related industries, such as Expedia, Priceline, JetBlue, Starwood and others.

When I asked Ali how this growth compares to PaidContent, a news blog on the media industry that he launched in 2002 (it was acquired by Guardian Media in 2008 and is now owned by GigaOm), he said, “Just the velocity of how quickly you can make a mark, that’s changed a lot now.” Ali attributed much of the speed of Skift’s growth to social media — the company says 10 percent of its overall traffic now comes from Twitter.

Ali added that even though Skift’s topic is the travel industry, he thinks of it as a “business information” startup, rather than a travel startup. He said it’s a company where “media and data go hand-in-hand,” and where Skift’s news content can serve as a “funnel” to its other products.

That said, he acknowledged that the data side of Skift’s business is still early. In January, it released its first report, “13 Trends That Will Define Travel in 2013,” and in February it launched SkiftSocial, which offers social media data for travel brands. Ali said Skift will launch its first subscription data products next month.

“We have a big plan for the data part and we will launch these mini products along the way,” he said.

And like most online media companies (including TechCrunch), Ali plans to launch a Skift conference, though he said he wants to focus on “one flagship conference” that has multi-million dollar potential, rather than a bunch of smaller events.

Most of the Skift articles that I’ve read have been related to tech in some way, but Ali said the company’s coverage is broader than that, covering the full gamut of travel industry news, as well as other transportation trends like ridesharing.

“A lot of the traditional players in the travel industry are focused on specific verticals, while the silos are collapsing in travel, as they have in tech and finance and other industries,” he said. Ali also argued that a site covering business news (though to be clear, Skift wants to serve a consumer audience too) “doesn’t have to be boring”: “Travel is the most creative expression of human exploration. How can it be boring?”

Getting back to the funding, Ali said the company will use the money to double its staff from five to 10 and to move out of its current co-working space and into an office. The new funds in the round include Ironfire Angel, MESA+, Advancit Capital, and GrowLab/LX Ventures. The new angel investors include Jason Calacanis, Michael Cunniff, Duncan Jennings, Sean Keener, Shakil Khan, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Noglows, and Michael Yavonditte.

Skift declined to say whether any of the previous angel investors have increased their investment with this new funding, but those past backers include Chris Ahearn, Luke Beatty, Gordon Crovitz, Craig Forman, Jim Friedlich, Tom Glocer, Vishal Gondal, Jason Hirschhorn, Peter Horan, Alan Meckler,Mohamed Nanabhay, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Amol Sarva, and Chris Schroeder.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

500 Startups today is announcing the next 28 companies to take part in its Accelerator program, unleashing a largely international class of startups who have come to Mountain View to accelerate their startup progress. There are 28 companies in this Accelerator class, and as usual there’s a bunch of diversity there. (And, as has become tradition, the class made a ghetto fabulous music video to accompany the announcement.)

The group is more than 70 percent international, with 20 companies coming from outside the U.S. That’s no big surprise, as about 15 percent of the 500 Startups portfolio in general is made up of companies outside the U.S., but over the last several batches, the accelerator has skewed heavily toward overseas and non-Silicon Valley companies.

This class includes startups from Brazil, Chile, China, Ghana, India, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Ukraine and Vietnam. With Dropifi (Ghana), as well as Dakwak and Tamatem (both from Jordan), the 500 Startups Accelerator has added its first companies from Africa and the Middle East.

Notably, this batch was the first which was chosen entirely through applications posted to AngelList, so it no doubt includes a few startups that 500 Startups founding partner and Sith Lord Dave McClure probably wouldn’t have heard about otherwise.

The program began mid-April, and 500 Startups expects to have its Demo Days in Mountain View, San Francisco, and New York City sometime in July. In the meantime, enjoy the music video they put together to announce themselves, below. Oh, and here’s the list of startups:

• AppSocially – Make your app’s Viral Loop awesome with an API that lets you track activity and conversion – allowing you to take action using customer data.
• BinPress – We increase adoption of open source in SMBs and enterprises.
• BoxC – We make buying directly from sellers in China as fast and safe as buying from Amazon.
• Credii – We arm businesses with all the intelligence they need to make smart software and service choices.
• Dakwak – Effortless website translation technology.
• Dropifi – An intelligent replacement for mailtos
  and dumb contact forms. It makes customer support more effective, increases lead generation and generates valuable business insights.
• Feast – The online cooking school for the common man. It offers simple cooking guides that teach impressive techniques and recipes with an online community where you can ask questions and get feedback as you cook.
• Floqq – Makes it easy for anyone anywhere to learn the skills they need.
• Flyer – We empower commercial real estate agencies to create beautiful property flyers online.
• Geekatoo – We offer local and onsite tech support at a great value. Customers receive competing bids on tech support needs from verified providers.
• GreenGar – Seamless realtime collaboration on mobile devices. We’re building a platform that enables apps to intuitively connect people together.
• InstaGIS – Geographic information system that allows retail stores to target their audiences.
• KiteReaders – Publishing platform for publishers & authors to create, distribute, and market their children’s picture books for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook.
• Koemei – Algorithmic transcription of videos for search and accessibility, helping education and large enterprises gain value from their video investments.
• Mayvenn – Empowers the 95 percent of African American salons that do not retail products. Our mobile commerce solution eliminates a salons inventory cost and opens a new revenue stream for their business.
• PinMyPet – Social-based software for monitoring and improving the experience between pets and owners. It works with powerful, small and low-cost hardware for realtime health and location detection.
• POPAPP – App to fast sketch app prototypes.
• PriceBaba – PriceBaba is a product (re)search engine that lets you shop in your vicinity.
• Reesio – Turns the real estate transaction process into one beautiful flow for agents, clients, and third parties.
• School Admissions – Making school admissions and education tension-free. Disrupting the process of choosing the right school for your child and parents.
• Seat 14A – A complete and affordable ensemble for the discerning man every week.
• SeMeAntoja – We empower restaurants to accept orders online.
• Sverve – Sverve is a self-service influencer marketing platform for small businesses. We connect small businesses with female social media influencers to promote their products and services on the social web.
• Tamatem – Tamatem is a mobile gaming development studio and publisher focused on creating culturally relevant games for the huge unaddressed Arabic gaming market.
• TRDATA – We are the Bloomberg for emerging markets. We collect accurate real-time market information from remote places from scattered and illiquid markets.
• Tushky – Self-service online platform to monetize free time by offering interesting activities.
• WHILL – Next generation of personal mobility for wheelchair users and the elderly.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Every marketer uses Twitter to engage with customers. But there’s more to a successful campaign than simply gaining new followers and increasing your number of tweets.

That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the newest addition to the Inside Network product family: the AllTwitter Marketing Bible.

Whether you’re a first-time user of Twitter for business or an experienced social media marketer, the AllTwitter Marketing Bible is designed to help you build your audience, increase engagement, and improve conversions and customer loyalty.

This comprehensive subscription product is updated weekly with valuable how-tos and best practices, informative case studies, and detailed provider comparisons. This content will help you stay up to date on the latest platform trends and discover great ways to optimize your current Twitter strategy.

Want to learn more? You can sign up for a free trial to get a sneak peak at a few articles, or subscribe to a monthly, quarterly, or annual account for full access.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook