Featured Startup Pitch: Rallyverse seeks to lead the next generation of social media marketing with its content discovery, curation and publishing platform

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By Editor February 14, 2013
Joe Doran, Rallyverse

Rallyverse logoCompany: Rallyverse

Website: www.rallyverse.com

Founders: Joe Doran (co-founder and CEO), Guy Dassa (co-founder and CTO), Gabe Bevilacqua (co-founder and VP Business Development)

Headquarters: New York City

Year Founded: 2010

Employees: 10

Facebook: facebook.com/rallyverse

Twitter: twitter.com/rallyverse

Company Description: Rallyverse helps brands discover, curate and share great content in owned and paid social media. We monitor trending conversations across the social web to discover, curate and recommend the most relevant content for brands—creating ready-to-publish status updates, tweets, and social ads.

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Joe Doran, RallyverseBy Joe Doran, co-founder and CEO

Overview

Rallyverse is solving one of the biggest problems social media marketers face today: figuring out what to say and share every day, multiple times per day. Our technology discovers great content for brands, and enables them to share that content intelligently with a set of advanced publishing and reporting tools.

With our flagship product, Rallydeck, community managers and social media marketing teams can scale their social media publishing efficiently and cost-effectively. Users provide a set of interest topics and keywords, and our technology returns a list of ready-to-send updates that can be published to company’s Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages. Content results are ranked and scored with a proprietary algorithm and presented to users in a visually engaging and easy-to-use interface.

For large companies, we offer Rallynet, an enterprise-class solution that helps marketers coordinate social media across their entire operation, giving brands the ability to centrally curate and distribute ready-to-publish content to separate departments or remote branches.

For companies wishing to accelerate their community growth, we offers Rallyads, a managed service for paid media placements in Twitter and Facebook that automates ad creation and predicts targeting segments based on the interests and likes of a brand’s fans, then optimizes delivery based upon your goals and budget.

Rallyverse was recently welcomed into Twitter’s Certified Products Program, giving them access to Twitter’s talented team. The new relationship will have a tremendously positive impact on Rallyverse’s core product, and most importantly, our customers.

Founders’ Story

The founders all worked at Microsoft in Seattle on the company’s ad platform, in a variety of leadership positions across technology and product management for online search and display advertising. Our roles were different, but our focus was the same: how to make online marketing more effective for marketers and more relevant and engaging for consumers. We reconnected in New York City in 2010 and wondered how our experiences in search and display might fit into the rapidly evolving landscape of social media marketing. Later that year, we prototyped a content recommendation engine that analyzed social media conversations and matched content to trending conversations, and soon enough, Rallyverse was born.

How Rallyverse Is Different

We believe that Rallyverse is addressing a problem that was ignored during the first wave of social media marketing technologies, which focused almost exclusively on companies building tools that focused on infrastructure , or ‘setting up shop’—social media management suites, listening platforms, etc. As comprehensive as these tools may have been for addressing those specific needs, none of those companies invested in technology to help solve one of the most daunting problems marketers face—discovering and sharing relevant content multiple times every day. We think this is a big challenge (and one that’s only getting more complex) and that an enabling technology like ours will be vital to a marketer’s success in social media.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

We’re a social media company, so obviously a majority of our marketing and promotion efforts take place on networks like Facebook and Twitter. On both platforms, we practice what we preach with our technology—sharing great, visually engaging original and third-party content that cover a variety of topics and interests. For lead generation, we’ve run campaigns that convert Rallyverse original content into paid media placements on Facebook and Twitter. The results have been significant—from October 2012 to January 2013, Rallyverse’s average weekly reach on Facebook rose from around 80,000 to just under 900,000—an increase of nearly 1,000 percent. Additionally, our customer sign-ups have increased over 100 percent in that same time period, thanks largely to our efforts on Facebook. Rallyverse also sends a regular monthly customer newsletter, and has plans to scale its marketing efforts even further as we grow in 2013.

Business Model

Rallydeck and Rallynet are offered as SaaS licenses, with pricing tiered based on the customer’s combined number of fans and followers on Twitter and Facebook. For Rallyads, we offer performance-based pricing based on a marketer’s specific goals.

Current Needs

We’re hiring in NYC—looking for a front-end developer and an account executive. If you’re interested in either, please reach out to us at [email protected].

Rallyverse – www.rallyverse.com