Get Satisfaction secures $10 million for social CRM

Bruce Cleveland of InterWest leads Series B for community brand pages

Social CRM company Get Satisfaction announced Wednesday that it has raised a $10 million Series B round of funding led by Bruce Cleveland, general partner at InterWest. Combined with a $6 million Series A and other earlier funding, this round brings the company’s total capital raised to $21 million.

Cleveland, who has served in executive positions at Apple and Oracle and in technical positions at AT&T, will be joining the board of directors. Other Cleveland investments (via InterWest) include Aria Systems, Cloud 9, Doximity, Flurry, Marketo and Signal Demand.

Unlike other providers in this space, Get Satisfaction does not seek to simply help a brand manage their presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Instead, the company creates community pages, where customers can interact directly with the brand, contributing to product development, marketing, PR and customer service.

Get Satisfaction takes things even further, allowing its clients to create widgets to spread across the Web and offering a solution for mobile implementation of the communities. Customization, analytics and other features we’ve come to expect are all included with the service.

So far, Get Satisfaction has created more than 58,000 communities.

"Much of the current discussion around social business today is about internal processes such as employee collaboration and file sharing," says Wendy Lea, CEO at Get Satisfaction. "For Get Satisfaction, the customer is the centerpiece of the story. Our view of social business is about customers becoming active participants in every aspect of the business, creating tangible value on both sides of the relationship. This is a seismic shift in the way companies conduct business."

Clients currently using Get Satisfaction include Amazon, Box.net, Eventbrite, foursquare, Microsoft, Spotify and more. Interested companies are free to try the service for 15 days.

The new funding will be used primarily for product innovation, distribution partnerships and international expansion.