Summary: Social Agency’s Spredfast helps marketers schedule social media campaigns the same way they schedule paid advertising. Only later would they initiate conversations and, eventually, provide tools to help their friends spread the word. Another key feature is that Spredfast supports multiple “voices” of actual or constructed individuals, each having accounts in multiple channels ( Facebook , Twitter , blogs, etc.). This helps users tailor their posts to encourage coverage. Silly me. should have known that marketers talk first and listen later. As the bit.ly MORE >>

This isn’t about making it easy to react to comments on Twitter , add friends on Facebook , or research prospects on LinkedIn , which is how most marketing automation vendors are approaching social media. Sources include blogs, social networks (publicly-accessible sections of Facebook, MySpace , etc.), In any case, this is where the Alterian engine should help. Summary: Alterian's purchase of Techrigy marks the first integration of serious social media management with marketing automation. Others are sure to follow. Sparingly. But it did give a good flavor for the system. MORE >>

It can currently post to Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. Summary : Argyle Social offers social media marketing with above-average features for tracking results. ve had a couple of conversations in recent months with Argyle Social , one of the zillions* of companies offering social media marketing tools. Argyle’s particular focus is making social media measurable. It does this in two ways: - embedding trackable URLs in social messages. This overcomes the fact that social media traffic often can’t be tied to a referring Web site. make a purchase or take some other targeted action). MORE >>

The second thing that makes Kwanzoo special is that its pages can be deployed on a client’s own Web site, on external sites and ad networks, embedded in emails, within Facebook, or on a mobile device. a parameterized API call) that makes the Kwanzoo pages available within Eloqua’s own content builder and can read Eloqua cookies in real time to help guide the response selection. I first bumped into Kwanzoo about a year ago at a conference trade show and was frankly puzzled at what they offered. But the company reached out to me recently and provided a clearer explanation. MORE >>

The new release also adds real-time social media monitoring (directly for Twitter and Facebook , and through Collecta for blogs, YouTube and other sources). Having them within a single system is particularly helpful for the small businesses targeted by LoopFuse, where all channels are likely to be handled by a small department and possibly the same individual. Summary: LoopFuse has extended its system to capture more Web traffic data, which lays the foundation for future analytics. These features are certainly useful. Users get a list of the assets ranked by number of page views. MORE >>