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In Alterian's,a provider of integrated marketing solutions, case, the unspecified sum of money involved in the deal will probably have put quite a dent in their £ 6.1 million (US$ 10.1m)pre-tax profits from the last financial year.
But both seem happy. It was a meeting of minds rather than a boardroom bloodbath they say, with the deal adding interesting new elements to the Alterian package as well as signaling a shift away from mass marketing to marketing targeted at individuals.
Alterian Business Strategy
If you look back at what Alterian has been doing over the past year, though, this latest acquisition really does fall within the bounds of their stated business strategy.
In May last year, they bought out web content management vendor Mediasurface, again for an undisclosed sum (why pay all that money if you’re not going to brag about it!). The purpose of this deal was to put them in a position to offer clients a fully integrated product including a new integrated marketing platform that supports websites of all kinds.
Following that, they announced that the two elements of analytics and web content management would ‘evolve’ into a single product that could offer database and operation marketing, email marketing and web content management.
The first step in the process of ‘evolution’ was a restructuring of the marketing department, the success of which is apparent in the end-of-year financial figures.
Changing Focus
The acquisition of Techrigy represents a change of focus for Alterian in that they are now targeting individuals rather than mass markets with a social analytics tool that only appeared in 2005, but has had some success already.
However, even the quickest look at our social media or marketing coverage, will show that Alterian is only responding to the realities of online marketing.
Techrigy volume analytics
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Deep Marketing Analysis
By adding Techrigy to their platform, Alterian says it will be able to interpret and analyze reactions to all their marketing campaigns and across all channels, including social media.
Techrigy content analytics
Specifically what they will get is SM2 -- an alert and analysis tool that sits on top of Techrigy's proprietary Social Media Warehouse (SMW).
SMW is a real-time system that collects content from sources including:
- Social networks (such as Facebook and MySpace)
- Blogs
- Microblogs, including Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed and Plurk)
- Video/photo sharing websites
- Wikis
And it does this through:
- Real time monitoring and indexing of over 100 million blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia with instant alerts based on key words in discussion.
- Sentiment analysis through language processing and Bayesian analysis.
- Monitoring of all discussions about a client’s organization, or brand, though Discussion Clustering, which provides a graphical analysis of all discussions.
If you are interested in this, you won’t have to spend a penny to find out first as a free evaluation version is available to existing and would-be customers.
This can then be upgraded if its the way you want to go as a subscription-based product.
