Enterprise Startup Spotlight: Buddy Media

In its own words, Buddy Media offers “power tools for Facebook.” Its service is, in essence, a content management system for Facebook geared towards the needs of large organizations. For example, Starwood Hotels uses Buddy Media to manage Facebook pages for its hotel chains. Each individual hotel can have its own Facebook page, and all the pages for the brand can be centrally managed.

Other companies using Buddy media in ABC, Johnson & Johnson and Target. According to Joe Ciarallo, director of communications at Buddy Media,seven of the 10 biggest brands in terms of advertising spending are Buddy Media clients. Last week, it won the Crunchie for best enterprise startup of the 2011.

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The key features of Buddy Media include:

• Publishing (Including post management, post scheduling, etc.)
• 40+ pre-programmed apps (Including polls, quizzes, video, gifting, e-commerce, etc.)
• Comment moderation (Including keyword filtering, etc.)
• Analytics
• Localization

Ciarallo says the version of Facebook’s page launched in March 2010 changed everything in terms of how brands engage with fans on Facebook. Now, brands’ must have an ongoing presence on Facebook, not just one-off campaigns. “Buddy Media is not about launching a big thing and then forgetting about – it’s about buidlign a long-term presence,” he says.

One of Buddy Media’s more direct competitors is KickApps, which also offers Facebook and social media content management tools. However, Ciarallo sees the company as more in competition with the status quo than with other companies. The social media engagement, social CRM and related services are still in infancy as a business.

What’s next for Buddy Media? Ciarallo doesn’t rule out the possibility of moving into other platforms, such as YouTube and Twitter, but says the company is still very focused on Facebook. He says if there’s a demand for Buddy Media to move into other platform, the company will listen to its clients. For now the company is focused on hiring and building out its team.

According to CrunchBase, Buddy Media is received funding from “Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Softbank Capital, European Founders Fund, Greycroft Partners, Facebook investor Ron Conway, Facebook board member Peter Thiel, Zynga founder and CEO Mark Pincus, Roger Ehrenberg, Howard Lindzon and others.”

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