Meet Needium
Montreal’s Needium, a pioneer in the nascent social media lead generation space, announced today the public debut of the much anticipated next-generation of its social media customer discovery platform and managed service at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference in Santa Clara. Every minute in social media, consumers publicly express explicit (“Can anyone recommend a good sushi restaurant in New York?”) and implicit (“I’m hungry”) needs via status updates; the vast majority of these needs go unanswered.
Needium has already proven that consumers appreciate commercial conversations when they are locally relevant and arrive at a time of need, but, to succeed in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) social media market, scale is required at every point of contact. Needium’s new dashboard was built with scale in mind:
- Technology: in real-time, the Needium platform monitors and interprets the expression of explicit and implicit needs in public social media, geo-localizes the potential lead to a city, filters the expression by business category, and presents the leads to an end-user dashboard
- Breadth/Depth: the service is available in 90+ business categories and close to 100 cities
- Community management: the new dashboard enables a single community manager to manage up to 200 SMB accounts while maintaining the human voice
- Sales: the platform and service is available in white-label for large-scale resellers like ad agencies, daily deal services, Yellow Pages and newspaper publishers.
“The social media SMB space requires service and technology designed to meet the challenges of filtering massive amounts of real-time local data while preserving the human voice at the end of the funnel,” said Peter Diedrich, CEO of Needium. “As of today, our offer is the new gold standard for social media lead generation”
Needium came out of Beta in January 2011 and has experienced accelerating uptake from its direct sales and large media channel/reseller go-to-market strategies. Over 300 advertisers (retail and wholesale) are currently managed by the company. Seven resellers (including four large, North American local media publishers) are reselling the white-label version of the service with many more in the business development pipeline.
“When I met the Needium team in Montreal during the International Startup Festival in July, I was really impressed with their idea and execution,” said Matt Marshall, executive producer, DEMO. “They’ve created an end-to-end managed solution that makes it a no-brainer for SMBs to embrace social media and delivers a more graspable ROI”
