Featured Pitch: SocialVibe
Web Site: www.socialvibe.com
Headquarters: Los Angeles
Year Founded: 2007
Founders: Joe Marchese, Brandon Mills, David Levy
Investors: Redpoint Ventures
Employees: 24
By Joe Marchese, President and Co-Founder
SocialVibe.com is a new social media platform that facilitates interaction between people, the brands they love and the causes they care about. SocialVibe is truly reinventing advertising by recognizing the power of the people within social media and converting media dollars into charitable donations. We recognize that individuals hold the key to generating attention and wielding influence in social media. It’s a powerful new way for brands to interact with people and it’s changing the way brands participate in social media.
Some time ago we realized that to crack the social media code, more power needed to be in the hands of the people who were creating the content; to be able to choose the advertising they are aligned with, and to allow people and the causes they cared about to benefit in meaningful ways from sharing their influence.
SocialVibe allows people to choose a brand to support, earning chances to get brand perks and points within SocialVibe. The points that members earn are then turned into funds for the charitable cause of their choice. SocialVibe is aligned with such brands as Coca-Cola, Adobe, NBA, Sprint and Nestle. Most importantly, SocialVibe.com has partnered with the most requested non-profits in the space including Komen for the Cure, WWF, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, Invisible Children, One Laptop per Child, PETA and Donors Choose.
I don’t know that there is anyone right now doing what we are doing, but then again if I thought there was we wouldn’t have started this business. The idea that people can band together online to make a big difference in the real world is what social media is all about. In social media, people are media and only with peoples’ explicit permission can brands find their way into their online profiles. SocialVibe tries to recognize all of this. It was SocialVibe’s members that led the site to where it is today: people caring about social issues but not having the monetary means to make a difference. When we founded SocialVibe, the idea was simply that people controlled all the valuable attention and influence that brands wanted and that the people should get to decide how that value gets shared. We weren’t “charity” themed, we were actually “member choice” themed.
SocialVibe members just kept telling us that charity was the most important thing and SocialVibe evolved to best serve what our members asked for. That’s the way we will always be. It’s the only way social media survives. There was a recent article in the Wall Street Journal that reported that in 2007, charitable giving by Americans was up by almost 4 percent than the previous year despite the downturn in the economy. There is that desire in people to help their communities and support causes they’re passionate about. SocialVibe is helping people, especially young people, by granting them a way to give back just by using the social networks they use everyday and donating to causes they might not ever have the money to give to on their own.
In just six months since its launch, SocialVibe has helped its members raise over $100,000 in charitable donations, all by simply lending their influence to the brands they choose. As SocialVibe continues to grow and new members sign up, the amount of money that can be raised is limitless. I hope that over the next five years SocialVibe will set the standard for how people interact with brands and support their charities, as well as drive major brand dollars towards the social networks.
