Damn. Buddy Media has had a big couple of months. And though it’s annoying to rewrite what you may have read on their blog, here’s why the crew of social media keepers-of-order has reason to be cheerful as we enter Halloween/Rally-to-Restore-Sanity weekend.
– $23 million in funding came in a couple months ago
– They moved into a http://www.businessinsider.com/buddy-media-office-2010-10#mce_temp_url# more recently than that
– Today, WPP announced that they’ll be investing $5 million in the company
Not familiar with Buddy Media? Maybe you’re familiar with Vitrue or Context Optional, which have been the New York company’s main competitors for some time. Er, had been. The start-up’s product is a social media messaging/monitoring/building platform that taps into Facebook and lets you do anything. Seriously, it’s robust as hell. Having been through the tutorial twice and following their efforts since 2008, when they were building Facebook apps (a feature now built in to their platform), I’m still only a novice with the program. But it’s capable of a lot, and the offering keeps growing.
Publishing, monitoring, building custom pages and analytics are well used features. However, the service has been hugely popular among agencies, 300 of them according to a company resource. That’s due in part to the ability to white label the platform. Agencies that run multiple social accounts are able to easily monitor and publish their work from one place. At the end of the month, shops tack a software fee (or something similar) onto their invoices, and in the process, save time that would be used muddling about in Facebook’s back-end. There’s gotta be a better way to say that.
So by now you’re waiting for the punch-line. And here it is – Buddy Media has, since its inception, been reliant on Facebook to do business. I don’t know how their relationship works, but it seems like every other week Facebook adds more ways for users (brands included) to track and build using Facebook.com. This isn’t meant to sound speculative, like Facebook is going to mess with Buddy Media. Just the contrary, the companies appear to be in a symbiotic relationship. So kudos to Buddy Media, and have fun tonight.
*While full time at mediabistro, I worked with one of Buddy Media’s employees, Joe Ciarallo, who is a contributor to PRNewser.