Synthesio is announcing its second acquisition of the year — it’s buying Social Karma, a company that uses social data to help marketers understand consumers.
Back in January, Synthesio announced that it had acquired presentation software-maker Bunkr. Co-founder and CEO Loic Moisand told me that this is all part of a two-year strategy to buy up companies and technologies that can help turn Synthesio into a comprehensive social listening and analytics suite.
In this case, Moisand said he was particularly impressed by Social Karma’s ability to help marketers research the interests and preferences of different consumer “personas” — rather than relying on old-fashioned surveys, they can use Social Karma to automatically collect consumer data from Facebook.
Social Karma could also help Synthesio customers formulate their content strategies and track the results of their efforts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The plan is to continue selling Social Karma as a standalone module, with further integration into the Synthesio platform down the road.
The Social Karma team will continue to work out of Brussels, adding to a list of Synthesio offices that already includes New York, Paris, London and Singapore.
“Social Karma was founded to help marketers and advertisers measure, compare and optimise their advertising and campaign performances on social networks,” said Social Karma founder and CEO Thierry Soubestre in the acquisition announcement. “This is why becoming a part of Synthesio will help us reach this ultimate goal, as Synthesio’s industry leading and incredibly rich global social data will allow our platform to provide insights that we have never before been able to access.”
As for where Synthesio fits into the broader landscape, Moisand acknowledged that it can look like there are hundreds of competitors. (“It’s crazy,” he said.) On the other hand, he argued that “if you look at companies that have reached a certain size, have raised a significant amount of money … when you look at who’s working with global brands, you’re down to a few players.”
Naturally, he sees Synthesio as one of those players. The company has raised more than $30 million in total funding, according to CrunchBase, and it says its customers include L’Oreal, WPP, Conde Nast and many others.
[Source”timesofindia”]
