Meltwater Launches Buzz Engage

Meltwater unveiled yesterday Buzz Engage, fusing the social CRM and business offerings it gained in its March acquisition of Jitterjam with the social media monitoring and analysis capabilities of its own Buzz solution.

Engage lets businesses engage with current prospective customers. The solution enables social tagging and houses all inbound social communications for more targeted engagement and immediate action and response.

"Engage is the first result of the acquisition," says Ric Pratte, director of Meltwater Buzz and former CEO of JitterJam. "What we've done is create this first module utilizing some of the JitterJam technology to allow our clients to engage back and connect with the things they are hearing on the real-time Web."

"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 of Meltwater Buzz, in a statement. "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.

According to Pratte, Engage extends from the "core of the Buzz monitoring platform," and, as a result, social conversations become "actionable" and "measurable."

"It's improving levels of intimacy with these connections," he explains. "We retain some very deep profile information about these social connections, knowledge, history, and background, providing context for conversations."

Pratte also notes that Buzz Engage is geared toward small and midsized business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies. "It probably wouldn't be for the corner pizza shop, but for any ongoing business concerned about marketing and wanting to engage in the social sphere, this would be a great product," he says.

Meltwater Buzz Engage includes the following:

• Social profiles on each social author, including 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, the individual&'s top five personal contacts, fully customizable tagging, and contact segmentation.
• A social inbox with all inbound communications.
• Social actions available for every conversation found through Buzz's monitoring system, including Twitter retweet, @message, or direct message. Users can also share conversations found through Buzz via Twitter and Facebook, post a comment on a Facebook wall, mark as favorite on Twitter, and add the contact to a Twitter list.
• Content posts and sharing through immediate and scheduled Twitter posts and Facebook page updates.
• Communications calendar to review outbound communications sent and scheduled.
• Conversation analysis and social tagging.
• Detailed measurement and analysis of social activity, including message effectiveness, engagement by channel and by message, brand impression analysis, most engaged contacts, most active retweeters, and communication frequency analysis.

Engage is now available with a $5,000 annual contract with Buzz.