Editorial
Social media management provider Sprinklr last week announced it acquired Little Bird, a Portland, Ore.-based social media company that helps brands analyze connections across the social web to discover top influencers.
Little Bird’s platform will enhance New York City-based Sprinklr's audience insights, segmentation, advertising and analytics capabilities. It will also bring actionable insights to each customer-facing department, allowing marketers to find potential evangelists and reach them with content or ads.
Founded in 2011, Little Bird secured seed funding in 2012 from Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and other tech industry leaders. The Oregon Angel Fund followed with an investment in early 2014, and Jason Calacanis’ AngelList Syndicate led another round this year.
“Our influencer discovery and research technology has delivered significant value to product and content marketers, customer care teams, market intelligence groups, and many others at some of the world’s best known brands,” Marshall Kirkpatrick, co-founder and chairman of Little Bird, said. “Sprinklr offers a unified system of engagement that helps each of these functions make use of social media at scale."
Sprinklr has made 11 acquisitions in all. In July, it raised $105 million at a $1.8 billion valuation.
In other software news ...
Bots for Messenger
Facebook has added analytics for measuring bots for Messenger. Since launching the Messenger Platform at its developer conference in April, businesses and developers have built more than 33,000 bots for things like accepting payments, delivering news and content and sharing weather updates.
Facebook Analytics for Apps extends analytics support to businesses building bots on the Messenger Platform. Businesses can also use the App Events API to log custom events for Analytics for Apps.
Facebook is also inviting bot developers to apply to its FbStart program, its global program to help early-stage mobile startups build and grow their apps.
Bots for Messenger developers and businesses accepted into FbStart will receive all the program benefits — including Facebook ads credits and free tools and services from premier partners like Amazon, Dropbox and Stripe.
Episerver Adds Personalization
Episerver, a digital experience platform provider with headquarters in Nashua, N.H. and Stockholm, has introduced new omnichannel personalization capabilities with its launch of Episerver Advance, Episerver Perform and Episerver Insight.
Episerver Perform uses machine-learning algorithms for product recommendations. It looks at behavioral triggers within distinct journeys.
The release also includes the launch of Episerver Advance, a new content personalization solution. The solution includes personalization for email and event triggering and integrates with the predictive analytic capabilities of the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud.
Episerver Insight's API allows organizations to capture and process information from sources like digital interactions, CRM and ERP systems, loyalty data, as well as secondary data such as store location, competitive analysis and census and social enrichment.
All three solutions join Episerver Find, which offers automatically-generated, individualized landing pages, content listings and personalized home pages.
"Personalization should be a key component to any digital marketer's strategy," James Norwood, executive vice president of strategy and CMO at Episerver, said in a statement. "With the combined personalization capabilities of the Episerver Personalization Suite, we're able to help our customers better predict what appeals to their audiences, and then act on those preferences immediately. In doing so, we see increases in both sales and brand loyalty."
Magnolia Releases CMS Updates
Enterprise content management system (CMS) provider Magnolia announced updates, new names and a new product with its Magnolia CORE 5.5 and Magnolia NOW releases.
Magnolia NOW provides an agile, enterprise-grade CMS delivered as a cloud-based service. It offers hosting, continuous delivery and enterprise-level deployment processes.
With the 5.5 release, Magnolia's on-premises product has a new name: Magnolia CORE, a CMS built for multi-channel, multi-language and multi-site digital experience scenarios.
“Magnolia helps enterprises manage their entire digital presence from one flexible platform, and they can now choose between Magnolia on premises or in the cloud,” Pascal Mangold, Magnolia CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “By introducing Magnolia NOW, we are building on our flagship CORE product, giving businesses an easy and hassle-free way to get results fast. This allows them to deploy faster, while reducing their total costs.”
Magnolia CORE 5.5 allows developers to set up new development environments and module stubs with a single command, reduce code duplication, gain more control with the new Definitions app and JCR Browser app.
Learning Opportunities
Webinar
Jun
6
The Future of Social Media: Emerging Trends and How to Stay Ahead of the Curve
The impact of emerging technologies like AI on social media
Webinar
Jun
7
The Building Blocks of Personalization
This webinar will explore how personalization can create powerful ecommerce shopping experience.
Webinar
Jun
8
Attracting—and Keeping—Your High-Net-Worth Investors
Join PwC to dissect their recent survey findings on a specific customer subset — high-net-worth investors.
Webinar
Jun
13
The Future of Contact Centers with AI at the Helm
Learn how to balance human intuition and interaction with the potential uses of AI to create delightful and lasting CX
Webinar
Jun
20
3 Steps to Unlock Your Customer Data and Drive Revenue
Discover how Twilio Segment’s #1 Customer Data Platform helps implement data-driven strategies.
Webinar
On demand
AI for Marketers: Optimize Personalization Across the Funnel
Understand the benefits of utilizing AI across your entire marketing stack
Founded in 1997, Magnolia is a privately-held company headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.
Cross-Channel Messaging Council Debuts
Mobile marketing platform provider Waterfall and mobile marketing advisory company mCordis have teamed to form The Connected Marketer Institute Cross-Channel Messaging Council.
Matt Silk, head of strategy for Waterfall, alongside Rob Crews, former CMO of Ovation Brands and Church’s Chicken and current industry consultant, will chair the council. The TCM Institute Cross-Channel Messaging Council will focus on developing and advancing the value, strategies and execution tactics for cross-channel messaging between marketers and the individuals they serve.
The TCM Institute Cross-Channel Messaging Council will work with consumer and B2B brands to explore and refine how brands employ cross-channel messaging, including email, SMS, MMS, wallet, push and beacon.
Conductrics Releases Optimization Update
New York City-based web analytics and optimization platform provider Conductrics last week announced its third major release of its universal optimization platform built for marketers, developers and IT professionals.
The new platform, which shares the company's name, is a cloud-based adaptive testing and decision engine which aims to discover and apply digital intelligence in real-time.
The Conductrics 3.0 cloud platform uses machine learning to increase personalizing and conversion rate optimization.
"The intricacy of today's customers who interact through multiple touch-points makes it increasingly difficult for traditional digital analytics to provide richer, more relevant experiences," Matt Gershoff, CEO of Conductrics, said in a statement. "This announcement signals good news for digital marketers, programmers and product developers who need to easily incorporate advanced algorithms to derive deeper insights on consumers' behavior."
Highlights of the release include:
- Interpretable AI: Allows marketers to understand predictive analytics and results
- Automation: Applies what's learned, adapting itself in real-time to any new, meaningful changes in customer behavior
- Personalization: Blends business logic with machine learning
- Multi-channel and multi-touch: Optimization APIs can integrate across almost any channel
EverThere Raises $1.8M
San Francisco-based events advertising platform EverThere announced it has raised $1.8 millon led by Elevator Fund. The funding will be mainly used to grow its event marketing automation platform and its West Coast sales and marketing team.
EverThere’s platform enables advertisers to connect with event audiences. EverThere analyzes millions of event attendees, finds the attendees that are likely to become customers and engages them with specific and timely offerings, turning them into qualified leads.
“We believe that the world of physical event marketing will undergo a digital transformation similar to almost every other vertical, and EverThere will be at the forefront of that innovation," Maayan Levy, EverThere’s founder and CEO, said in a statement.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
