There’s big things happening down in Texas, especially in the social technology space. Yesterday, social media content curation platform Mass Relevance announced that it was merging with Spredfast, another Austin based marketing platform that enables brands to create and distribute content on social channels.
The new company will operate under the Spredfast name, with Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron taking over both entities as CEO. Mass Relevance CEO Sam Decker will join the board of directors and stay on as executive advisor.
With this merger, both Spredfast and Mass Relevance have a chance to offer a powerful integrated social media that allows data gathering and content distribution to far more channels than were available to each company individually.
“We built Mass Relevance to connect relevant conversations from social networks and fuse them into a customer’s brand story. Three years later, we are honored to align with our neighbors, another Austin-based company, to complete the circle of bringing audience participation into every aspect of marketing,” said Sam Decker, CEO and co-founder of Mass Relevance. “The combination of Spredfast and Mass Relevance opens up new possibilities for our customers to do more with social content in real-time.”
Conceivably, customers would use the Mass Relevance platform to listen, curate and publish content from social conversations onto a brand’s website, microsite, TV or event screen. By integrating with the Spredfast platform, it could take those same offerings and publish to social media channels, hence reaching even more screens.
Put simply, Mass Relevance is for pulling content and Spredfast for pushing content, and with the integration of the two platforms, marketers will be able to do both.
“When I look at this new platform, we see something really unique,” said Spredfast CEO Rod Favaron. “No one even comes close.”
The merger also gives Spredfast an advantage as it takes on one of its biggest competitors, the Salesforce owned Buddy Media. Buddy Media could potentially provide similar features if it fully integrates with social listening platform Radian6, but it’s a matter of who is able to offer the fully integrated product first.
Favaron said he was confident that his company would stay ahead in that race. “Out here, the rate of innovation is at 100mph, “ said Favaron.“When you get acquired by a big company, the rate of innovation goes down considerably.”
Favaron said marketers can expect more news about the points of integration between the two platforms within the next 30-45 days.
