Buddy Media releases social apps across the Web

New software suite allows marketers to take their message off Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

In a bid to help brands expand their campaigns off social networks, Buddy Media announced Wednesday the release of its newest initiative, ReachBuddy, a social networking software suite that lets brands reach users on their own websites, and off the popular social networks.

Buddy Media's 600 agencies and brands have been asking for a consolidated console to manage campaigns on their own websites sites, as well the social networks, said Joe Ciarallo, head of communications at Buddy Media, in an interview with Vator News.

Buddy Media, which launched in September 2007 and has raised $90 million in venture funding since, started out by managing social campaigns and other social initiatives on Facebook. But that's been changing.

Earlier this year, the New York-based company, whose revenue is projected to hit the $40 million range by the end of 2011, released new features to get its brand customers to put campaigns on Twitter. Then it recently partnered with LinkedIn to help marketers get their message to the business community.

Buddy Media handles many aspects for marketers. For instance, it can simply manage a brands' share buttons (share buttons being Facebook Like, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.) to campaigns that come in the form of apps, or sapplets as the company calls them. Those apps range from polls, video embeds, sign-up forms, sweepstakes or contest forms, to name a few. As users interact with these apps, Buddy Media can track the metrics, like how many forms were filled out, or how many people shared information, etc.

ReachBuddy takes all of Buddy Media's apps and now allows its customers to put them on their own website.

"If a publisher wanted to run a poll or content across all of its sites," said Ciarallo. "They can now use Buddy Media to do that, and if they want to change all of the contests or polls at once, across all sites, they just 'flip the switch' in ReachBuddy, and they all change - no need to generate a new embed code and drop it on each site."

For instance, Pepsico is running an X-Factor campaign using ReachBuddy.

The video embed comes from ReachBuddy. The reason PepsiCo would use ReachBuddy, rather than embed a YouTube video, is because it can customize the video player and also run the same video on its Facebook page or other websites it controls. It can then manage this campaign all from its ReachBuddy console.   

Buddy Media facilitates a wide array of social networking marketing solutions for businesses. Besides ReachBuddy, the company also has the ConversionBuddy, ProfileBuddy, and ConversationBuddy suites, all of which are accessible from a given user's dashboard, where account activity is managed.

BuddyMedia charges its customers a monthly install fee, which is sometimes based on volume, such as traffic. The company does not charge per seat, like typical enterprise software companies.

The Buddy Media dashboard allows for real-time analytics, allowing users to "[e]valuate the performance of activity compared to previous time periods and other Pages as well as filter results based on a date range and client view."

ReachBuddy comes only one month after the launch of ConversionBuddy, which allows businesses to track consumer's interactions on sites like Facebook and Twitter as they "convert" to consumer actions.