Today, we’re announcing that Engagio is merging with Influitive as part of an acquisition transaction we have just completed.
I’m very excited to share this news with you because it was the right thing to do for Engagio, its employees, and the Social Conversations product we have built over the past year.
I’ve known Mark Organ, CEO and co-founder of Influitive for over two years, when he was moonlighting at the Xtreme Labs offices while Influitive was in the early development stages. Ever since, we stayed in touch and held a lot of respect for each other. As fellow entrepreneurs, we often commisurated on the lack of early interest from Canadian VCs in our startup companies (when I was running Eqentia), as we both turned to the US ecosystem for support.
Last summer, I approached Mark last summer for a partnership arrangement where we would provide them Advocacy related social conversations via our nascent API. He liked the idea but asked me to hold off a few months.
By Christmas of last year, on December 27th, we were at the lunch table discussing how we could enrich their AdvocateHubs with our social conversations data. It occured to both of us that we each held an important key to Mark’s vision of advocate marketing. Influitive offered an application and advocate experience that made it easy to mobilize customers. Engagio owned technology that can help B2B marketers identify the best opportunities for advocate engagement. After lunch, we went back to Mark’s office and behind closed doors, we almost simultaneously spurted out the idea of the merger. As it turns out, we had both been thinking about it, but didn’t want to say it upfront, til later.
It took a few weeks of negotiations and attending to the required details of diligence, and the rest is now history. Our entire team is joining Influitive, and I’ve become a big supporter of Advocate Marketing. Actually, my job will be to evangelize the concept by educating the market, publishing thought leadership and managing Influitive’s AdvocateHub, called VIP.
The synergies between Engagio and Infltuitive are very strong because the combination of customer advocacy and social engagement is a new frontier. Having visibility into social web conversations is part of the new social marketing mix.
Going forward, we will be integrating several pieces of the Engagio technology into Influitive’s AdvocateHub. You can expect to see us facilitate the tracking, and monitoring of social conversations, as well as providing further intelligence around Advocate activities.
If you have not heard of Influitive, go check them out at http://www.influitive.com, and sign-up for a free trial. You probably already know who your best customers are, but maybe you have not been able to effectively harness their advocacy activities to benefit your marketing efforts. Influitive makes it easy to mobilize them to discuss, support or evangelize your products and services on the social web where buyers are turning to their peers for advice on their purchasing decisions.
I’d like to thank all of our users and advocates for their amazing support throughout our one year of existence. 110 articles were written about Engagio in the past 12 months approximately, and that says a lot about the support we have had.
Please let me know directly or via comments here what you think of this announcement and how we could further leverage the power of Engagio inside the Influitive Advocate Marketing platform. After all, Advocate Marketing is a visionary idea that is becoming a new Core Business Process with immediate benefits to those who manage it well.
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