A few weeks ago the Crowd Factory batphone rang and a very insightful journalist by the name of David F. Carr called to ask if he can interview Crowd Factory CEO Sanjay Dholakia during Jive’s annoucnement of their new App Market, which includes our Social Offer platform.  Below is an excerpt from the article published this week at the Brain Yard, a social community that is part of Information Week.  After this small bit we hope you will take a minute to read the entire article on their site.

How To Exploit The Power Of Crowds

“You wouldn’t think today of having a website with no Web analytics underneath it,” he said. “We’re not very far away now from where people would not conceive of doing social without having the direct causal analysis to go with it.”

By David F. Carr of Information Week on August 8, 2011

Crowd Factory CEO Sanjay Dholakia explains how to apply and measure social interactions across all marketing channels.

Crowd Factory already has marquee customers like HBO, Microsoft, and Sony Music to point to in support of its social marketing platform. Now all CEO Sanjay Dholakia has to do is figure out how to explain how his company is different from every other vendor promising to unlock social media riches.

Some of Crowd Factory’s apps for driving social behavior might be compared to North Social‘s Facebook apps or Wildfire‘s tools for creating promotions such as contests. However, what distinguishes Crowd Factory’s approach is really its emphasis on analytics. “The apps in some sense are just Trojan horses for the analytics on the back end,” he said.

Potential customers are often confused about the categories, Dholakia said, and he pointed me to a video blog he prepared explaining the different types of social media marketing companies. He came up with seven categories, which tend to be lumped in together even though they do pretty different things.

• The public social networks themselves, Facebook and its competitors.
• Listening tools, “putting the rabbit ears up” to hear what people are saying about your brand.
• Social media management, including publishing tools like HootSuite.
• Facebook applications that specifically exploit Facebook’s development platform.
• Social sign-on, making your identity portable across websites.
• Community-building tools, offered by companies like Lithium (and the public-facing side of Jive).
• Social campaign automation.

Be sure to read the rest here!

How To Exploit The Power Of Crowds

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