Work-related: SocialSync leaves the nest

I very rarely write about work-related stuff directly here because I figure you can get it on the company blog if you’re so inclined. That said, this is an announcement that’s been a long time in coming (more than two years!), well before I was even an employee at Blue Sky Factory. Today, we’re all very proud to kick our newest child out of the private beta nest and see how well it can fly.

Today, we announce SocialSync.

What is it? Short version: take your existing email database, turn on this service (part of the Publicaster service), and in a relatively short amount of time, see how social that database is. Who’s on Twitter? Who’s on LinkedIn? Who’s on Facebook?

Then we kick it up a notch by adding friend/fan/follower/connection numbers. Who’s influential? Who has audience? Who can, if communicated with in an intelligent manner, help you get your messaging way beyond the inbox?

The beauty of SocialSync is that no data processing is required on the customer’s part. Social segmentations “magically” appear alongside your regular email marketing segmentations, and sending socially-focused messages takes literally just a few clicks.

Why is this important? So many companies are sitting on gold mines. Treasure troves. Keys to the kingdom. Those jewels are their customer databases, but until now, there was no easy, simple way to mine that database for social information and get actionable knowledge from it. Now there is.

One of my lists

More important, from a strategic perspective (which is my specialty), SocialSync can do things that you can’t do right now. If you don’t have a social strategy at all as to even where you should be participating, SocialSync will tell you your customers are here or there, so go there and start listening. If you do have a social strategy, SocialSync will either confirm that you’re in the right place or show you where you need to be focusing more of your time.

It’s incredibly powerful for sales, marketing, and customer service. Customer service departments can learn where they should be listening for their customers. Marketing can learn where the influencers in their audience are and jump-start precisely targeted social campaigns using a tried and true asset, their email database. Sales can take existing prospect lists and understand where they should be prospecting socially.

I’m very proud and thrilled to see this service come to market at long last. It’s not the first of its kind – back in a previous career I was using similar data tools, but back then you had to be a database administrator and a developer with mad technical chops and willingness to code for hours and hours to make this work. I’d wager that no marketer on the planet could have used it in its raw form back then, because almost no marketers are programmers or database admins. SocialSync is the first of its kind that does NOT require you to have that expertise, and that’s what makes it so important.

If you’d like to learn more about how SocialSync can help your business, go hit up the info page on the Blue Sky Factory web site.

Stupidly obvious disclosure: I’m an employee of Blue Sky Factory. While I’m not specifically compensated to write about work on my personal blog, I still benefit personally from the success of the company. For a complete list of who else has paid me off, visit my disclosures page.

Get this and other great articles from the source at www.ChristopherSPenn.com! Want to take your conference or event to the next level? Book me to speak and get the same quality information on stage as you do on this blog.