Genius Simplifies Social Media Tracking With Launch Of New Integration Tools

Genius.com rolled out several new tools last week designed to allow sales and marketing executives to better integrate and track their social media conversations. The core of the expanded toolset is a URL shortener specifically designed to track both structured marketing campaigns and ad-hoc social-media conversations. The Genius URL shortener or “GURL” for short, enables any member of a Genius customer organization to include trackable links in their Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blog, or other social-media posts.

After customizing the URL, users can then add optional descriptions to help track social media posts, or associate personalized web promos or chat invitations which will appear when the GURL is clicked. Web promotions and chat invitations can be associated with each GURL, providing a customized message to be presented. The Genius application then allows marketers to see how many people clicked through from GURLs posted by various members of the organization as well as how many inquiry or web2lead forms were submitted and even drill down to view reports of single and multi-page visits.

David Thompson, CEO and Co-founder of Genius.com, said these news are part of the company’s broad approach to bring social media and marketing automation together. “It starts with the simple fact that at the end of the day, a deal derives from a conversation between a Sales Rep and a customer,” Thompson commented on the company’s blog. “Given the potential volume and frequency of cloud-based conversations, it is immediately apparent why the old model of marketing automation simply doesn’t scale to the opportunity. You simply cannot “set and forget” these conversations with a triggered scoring algorithm. The whole notion of social media is founded on the idea of authentic, human communication between real people–not between a person and a robot.”

Felicity Wohltman, VP of Marketing at Genius.com, added, “Genius.com was the first to ‘democratize’ email marketing by enabling anyone in an organization to see the email opens and website visits resulting from their individual messages, as well as from formal marketing campaigns. The new Genius URL shortener extends this concept by tracking social media outreach from anyone in the organization and integrating the results with strategic lead nurturing programs.”

Genius also previewed new website tracking and visitor identification features that give marketers the ability to assess social media and SEO impact on website performance, while giving Sales more tools to identify and connect with interested visitors using integration with Sales 2.0 data sources like LinkedIn and Jigsaw.

The new tools are scheduled for beta release in September, with a full scale launch slated for later in the fall.

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