Today, Toronto-based Influitive, a B2B advocate marketing platform, announced that it has acquired another Toronto-based startup Engagio, a platform to search, discover, and follow online comments, for an undisclosed amount. Influitive will leverage Engagio’s platform to better help marketers to discover conversations on blogs and other social networks that relate to their organization, and quickly share them with other advocates to encourage them to join the discussion.
Influitive’s CEO and co-founder Mark Organ and Engagio’s CEO William Mougayar met at Toronto’s Xtreme Labs a little over two years ago. Mougayar debuted an update to Engagio late last year, and initially started the conversation with Influitive earlier in 2012, pitching to provide Influitive advocacy-related social conversation data through its API, and the deal was sealed a few months later. Engagio’s team will be joining Influitive, with Mougayar coming on board as Chief Evangelist, Advocate Marketing at Influitive.
“The synergies between Engagio and Infltuitive are very strong because of the combination of customer advocacy and social engagement is a new frontier. Having visibility into social web conversations is part of the new social marketing mix,” said Mougayar in a statement to BetaKit. “You can expect to see us facilitate the tracking and monitoring of social conversations, as well as providing further intelligence around advocate activities.”
BetaKit only recently covered Influitive when it raised a $7.3 million Series A round in November 2012, and previously when it launched its AdvocateHub. The platform provides a company’s top customers with incentives in the form of rewards and recognition to engage them in writing reviews, making introductions, driving references, all with the goal of adding to an organization’s lead generation funnel with referrals.
One of the first integrations between the platforms will be with Disqus, where Engagio’s technology will help comments left by advocates. Prior to the acquisition, Engagio had indexed over 50 million comments across more than 100,000 sites like Facebook, Twitter, AngelList, StockTwits, and StackExchange, among others.
Word-of-mouth, peer-reviews and peer-trusted recommendations have become an important facet of both B2B and B2C marketing. Whether it’s brands getting their consumers to be social advocates for them or channel marketers looking to better track their sales incentives and rebate efforts, the advocacy space has been getting plenty of investor attention. In January alone, BetaKit covered consumer advocacy platform Extole raising $7.6 million, and 360 Incentives raising $7.65 million.
The acquisition puts Influitive in a position to integrate Engagio’s technology and help its users leverage online social conversations to drive business objectives. How the companies will integrate beyond the Disqus integration remains to be seen, since Engagio’s social inbox doesn’t seem to fit directly with the AdvocateHub at first glance. How the two companies choose to integrate over the next few months will be telling, but at the very least Influitive has added to its team, and will likely continue the momentum it’s built over its last two funding rounds.
