Meltwater Acquires blogsearch leader, IceRocket Inc., to Extend Leadership in Social Media Intelligence

The Meltwater Group, one of the world’s leading online media intelligence companies, today announced the acquisition of IceRocket, a top social search engine.
Together, the companies will provide public relations, marketing, communications and advertising professionals with the most comprehensive set of tools for monitoring, analysing and engaging in relevant conversations across social channels. All of IceRocket’s employees will join Meltwater.
Meltwater has grown to a $100 million company by delivering online news and social media monitoring and search engine marketing solutions. The company has 57 offices around the world serving more than 20,000 customers. IceRocket is an advanced real-time search engine that crawls over 200 million blogs, and an array of tweets, news, and videos that are each profiled, categorised and ranked for accurate results.
IceRocket offers market-leading blog search options for identifying trends, influencers, shared links and popular topics. IceRocket will continue to operate as a standalone search engine while its technology will be integrated with the Meltwater Buzz product, creating the most comprehensive and engaging social media intelligence platform on the market today.
“The acquisition of IceRocket gives us access to one of the richest sources of social media in the market,” said Jorn Lyseggen, chief executive officer and founder of Meltwater Group. (pictured)  “We arm our customers with sophisticated tools for mining social media for business insights, and this requires high quality sources. IceRocket helps Meltwater secure an enviable leadership position in the social media intelligence space. This acquisition represents an important step toward achieving our goal of generating $100 million in social media business within three years.”
“Since its launch in 2004, IceRocket has been at the forefront of social search – starting with blog searches and later expanding to social networking and microblogs,” says Blake Rhodes, IceRocket founder. “That’s why we’re thrilled about this acquisition and the potential to take social search to the next level. IceRocket’s integration with Meltwater Buzz will provide access to more sophisticated capabilities, such as measuring and analysing social engagement and influence. We’re excited for this next chapter.”
In addition to IceRocket, Meltwater acquired social CRM company JitterJam in March 2011 and BuzzGain last year. The company intends to acquire more businesses and technologies to help further expand its product suite.
About IceRocket
IceRocket, a privately owned and operated search engine, is a global leader in commercial search services on the Internet, providing new and more powerful ways for customers to find exactly what they are looking for. IceRocket is pioneering commercial search by putting the interests and wants of consumers before advertisers. The company has innovative blog search technology to search the blogosphere and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.
About The Meltwater Group
The Meltwater Group is a privately held software company founded in Norway in 2001, serving more than 20,000 clients through 57 offices located across North America, South America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia. Meltwater is committed to challenging existing business models by introducing disruptive technologies.​ The Meltwater Group delivers B2B solutions based on search engine technology, cloud computing and search engine marketing. For more information, please visit http://www.meltwater.com/.

Meltwater Buzz Engage allows businesses to manage their social presence and engage with current and prospective customers

ü Advanced tools help businesses find and join social communities that surround their brands to transform conversations into customers

San Francisco — June 15, 2011 — The Meltwater Group, one of the world’s leading social media and news monitoring companies, today announced the immediate availability of Meltwater Buzz Engage, a new module in the Meltwater Buzz product suite. Engage fuses the social CRM and business offerings of the recently acquired JitterJam product with the social media monitoring and analysis capabilities of Meltwater Buzz. This makes Engage the most comprehensive social marketing tool for businesses, brands and agencies on the market today.

Engage allows businesses to manage their social presence and engage with current and prospective customers. The platform’s detailed social profiles provide brands with deep intelligence on anyone communicating on a given brand or topic over social channels. Engage enables social tagging and houses all inbound social communications for more targeted engagement and immediate action and response. Brands can also take advantage of detailed measurement and advanced conversation analysis tools for maximised business value. By focusing on specific individuals within a community rather than a generic topic, Engage helps companies develop more personal, trusted relationships with customers. 

“Social media has put the customer in the power position, and influencers have sprouted all over the social Web,” said Niklas de Besche, executive director, Meltwater Buzz. “With Meltwater Buzz Engage, companies can gracefully embrace this shift in influence by identifying relevant social conversations happening on the real-time Web. Engage allows brands to take a targeted and tailored engagement approach – turning conversations into customers.” 

Meltwater Debuts Social Media Monitoring Platform Buzz Engage

Social media monitoring company The Meltwater Group is debuting new product, called Buzz Engage today, which promises to be one of the more comprehensive social marketing tools for businesses.
Leveraging the software of social CRM platform JitterJam and social media monitoring client BuzzGain (Meltwater acquired both companies in the past year), Buzz Engage goes beyond just social media monitoring, tracking and analytics for businesses. The product also provides brands with deep intelligence on anyone communicating on a given brand or topic over Twitter or Facebook by aggregating all of that person’s social history and scoring them for sentiment, brand affinity clout etc.
Profiles include full public social biographies, social activity analysis, a social graph with alternate social identities, communication history and notes, brand engagement and sentiment analysis, Jitterater influencer score (sort of like Klout), the individual’s top five personal contacts, fully customizable tagging and contact segmentation.
Buzz Engage also includes the ability to Retweet, @message, or DM contacts from the platform, as well as share to Facebook. You can schedule Twitter and Facebook posts and review a communications calendar to see outbound messages sent and scheduled.
Meltwater, which claims it is seeing $100 million in revenue per year, faces competition from Radian 6 (bought by Salesforce), and others.

via techcrunch.com

Ric Pratte of Meltwater Buzz has his say about JitterJam.../ FastRead from theMarketingblog

"TheMarketingblog Extra": Ric Pratte of Meltwater Buzz has his say about Jit...:

"WikiBrands Chats with Meltwater Buzz Recently. We had the opportunity to speak with Ric Pratte, the Director of Meltwater Buzz. Meltwater ..."

Dan Purvis Takes Charge of Global PR At Meltwater Group

Dan Purvis, Meltwater Group

Meltwater Group, the software company that provides a range of monitoring, marketing and social media services, has appointed Dan Purvis to lead global PR.

Purvis joins from UK firm Octopus Communications, where he led Meltwater’s UK PR account. He is charged with driving a global PR strategy that will improve Meltwater’s brand visibility and position the company as a leading software vendor.

“We’re right at the heart of some of the biggest and most topical debates going on across businesses of all sizes, in all sectors, in all countries – the future of online content,” Purvis told the Holmes Report. “From online news monitoring to social media monitoring and analysis, businesses are striving to come to terms with how to navigate the online minefield with its plethora of channels open to them. The trick is to then transform this ‘noise’ into a competitive advantage.”

Ric Pratte of Meltwater Buzz has his say about JitterJam etc.

WikiBrands Chats with Meltwater Buzz

Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Ric Pratte, the Director of Meltwater Buzz.

Meltwater recently acquired  JitterJam  a CRM and monitoring company to augment their currently highly competitive analytics product line and strengthen their social media presence and anlytics side of the business.  Here is a snap shot on how Ric believes the industry is moving.

The Social Soapbox – What do you do as a company?
JitterJam is a social business platform, a brand monitoring and consumer monitoring company that builds community and development. We do integrated marketing reach out’s and targeted marketing to said communities. It’s a way to not only be listening to what is happening in the market place but become part of that community and engage.