Managing the 'Sharepocalypse'

Call it information overload, drinking from a firehose or “sharepocalypse.” Social media feeds are only increasing in speed, and as the content piles up, users tend to tune out. Bottlenose, a Los Angeles-based startup, today launched a social dashboard that features with levers, filters, meta-tags, and mapping aimed to help brands and power users navigate the oversaturated feed. “As the volume of messages increases disproportionately to attention, engagement decreases,” co-founder Nova Spivack said. “The streams will not be useful, and it will be harder and harder as a marketer or advertiser to cut through.” Thus, Bottlenose’s somewhat elaborate browser-based dashboard. Spivack, the serial entrepreneur behind early Internet startup Earthweb, as well as Twine and Live Matrix, says the tools will help brands manage their social streams in a way that's more customizable than, say, the Twitter of Facebook-specific clients like Tweekdeck. In Bottlenose, there’s a monitoring function that identifies, sorts, and visualizes trends. An assistant app suggests messages to read based on popularity, interest, or friends’ interests, and it adapts to each user’s preferences. Filters and tagging allow sorting by topic, person, and type of message (opinion or news, for example). And while it’s cool to look at an interactive universe of one’s tweeting topics, the platform’s biggest use cases are sales, CRM, and marketing, Spivack said. Which explains why Bottlenose won’t be offered to the general public. Its dashboard is a bit like Twitter and Facebook on steroids, so it follows that the platform will benefit professional social media athletes in need of a little boost. The average Twitter user follows less than 100 accounts; the average Facebook user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 pages. Bottlenose is for power users and brands with high Klout scores (another startup Spivak is involved with). “Our intended user has a big need to be more productive and keep track of stuff—people who are major info hounds,” Spivack said. (Bottlenose has offered access to 1,000 social media-savvy Adweek readers—sign up via this link with the code “adweek.”) The company has raised early stage and angel investments and already turned down an acquisition offer from a large enterprise company, Spivack said.

Performance Marketing

Managing the 'Sharepocalypse'

Bottlenose dashboard aims to make social streams smarter

Erin Griffith

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Erin Griffith