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HOLLYWOOD portrayed Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, as aloof, disinterested and awkward in all manner of ways in “The Social Network”. During important meetings with venture capitalists and potential investors Mr Zuckerberg’s character became increasingly distracted and at one such appointment his business attire was a bath robe, pyjamas and slippers. (This made-for-the-movies moment actually stems from a real event, when Facebook made a pitch to Sequoia Capital.) Despite his apparent insouciance, Facebook secured enough capital to finance its business, turning it into one of the world’s largest companies. Facebook’s experience, however, is rare. Most companies need to lay on the charm to get investors to prise open their wallets. When it comes to starting up a small tech business, having a good idea is the easy part. Financing that idea and marketing it is where many start-ups fall down. And geeks are not known for their social skills. Many struggle to come across well in the slick, fast-talking world of venture capitalists and angel investors. Esther Dyson, an American angel investor in tech companies, recently told peHUB, a private-equity website, that “it’s much easier to invest money than to attract it.” Those who do manage to get enough cash face another problem. All that time spent glad-handing businessmen and investors means the development of a product can stagnate. The geeks need to return to programming, error checking and developing, while juggling the composition of a commercial team from scratch. It is little wonder that so few ideas come to full fruition. The Sandpit was featured in an episode of The Tech Show about the changing role of social media today. You will need to either speak Persian or have an interpreter in order to understand this clip! Click here to watch. There’s certainly a lot of change in social analytics as we begin 2012 – and some of the “hottest” platforms to follow are among those you probably never heard of. I’ll run through some of these here, but if you come to my Social Media Monitoring Training in London on 26th January (hosted by Our Social Times) you’ll hear the “lowdown” on these platforms and others, and learn how you can use them to advance your business. Edinburgh based Sodash were one of the 10 winners of the PepsiCo10 and will now work with some of PepsiCo’s leading brands in the U.K. Chosen from submissions of more than 130 impressive and innovative technologies, Sodash provide an online tool to manage social media data The selected PepsiCo10 start-ups in Europe include a wide range of social commerce and mobile technologies. More information is available from PepsiCo10. After scoping out startups across Europe, PepsiCo announced the 10 finalists it has chosen to participate in in its 2011 PepsiCo10 program. The program gives startups the opportunity to work together with PepsiCo companies on pilot marketing programs. For the second year, Mashable participated as a media partner, meaning we reached out to our community to help find the best ideas. This week, PepsiCo announced the 10 companies a panel of company executives, digital strategists and brand managers have selected from more than 130 submissions. New technologies in display advertising, interactive ads, television and even football are represented in the new class — many of them with a mobile twist. PepsiCo has finally selected the winners of its PepsiCo10 program in Europe, which was rolled out in early summer as a follow-up to the U.S. version of the initiative launched last year. On October 4, the food and drinks giant, which is committed to driving innovation in everything it does, announced the 10 technological start-up companies, which were chosen from over 130 submissions from all across Europe. The emerging technology-focused businesses received an opportunity to collaborate with the most successful brands in the company’s portfolio including Walkers and Pepsi, to activate pilot marketing programs, just like the winners of the inaugural year did (for instance, Table Top Media and Tongal continued their partnership with PepsiCo, going beyond their pilot projects). The company also announced that it might be going to launch PepsiCo10 in Asia or Latin America to seek out and collaborate with the most promising emerging tech companies in the region (the details of the new round of the PepsiCo10 program will be announced later). LONDON: PepsiCo, the food and beverage giant, is seeking to move its European marketing towards a “future state” defined by digital tools such as social media and mobile. The company’s PepsiCo10 incubator scheme for promising start-ups was launched in June 2011, and received over 200 entries covering fields like social networks, mobile, location-based services and gaming. “We are seeing a creative renaissance driven by digital, which is creating a new canvas for brands to communicate through,” Bonin Bough, PepsiCo’s director of digital and social media, told Marketing Magazine. “With PepsiCo10 we are looking to expose ourselves to that future state.” The company has unveiled the winners of its ‘PepsiCo10 Europe’ initiative, in which 200 firms competed to win £10,000-worth of investment as well as pilot marketing projects with leading PepsiCo brands. The winners include Roamler, an app that uses a network of consumers to act as a “mobile workforce”, enabling them to earn rewards by performing tasks such as creating branded flashmobs. The first work from the winning companies will reach the market within the next three to six months. Bonin Bough, PepsiCo’s global director of digital and social media, said these technology platforms would change consumer behaviour over the next 12 months. Although the marketing pilots for each brand are still in the early stages of development, the project is being used as an ‘engine of change’ across the PepsiCo business. Ten start-ups have been handed the task of inventing new sales techniques The British division of PepsiCo is teaming up with ten European technology start-ups to help it to find new ways to advertise and sell its brands online. Each of the fledgeling businesses, eight of which are British, will be linked to the American group’s brands, such as Walkers crisps and Tropicana juice, to work on marketing and e-commerce projects over the next year. The move, which mirrors an initiative in the United States last year, is designed to help PepsiCo to learn more about the digital world, an increasingly important way to reach consumers who are spending more time and money online. Ian Ellington, general manager of Walkers Crisps, said: “Social media is growing in importance and I think there will be a strong commercial benefit for us ultimately. I’d be surprised if all ten work, but I’m confident there’s a handful that will become part of our marketing toolkit.” The Sandpit, a new London-based “sales accelerator” for new technologies, says it is taking a 25% stake for “up to £500,000″ over the next two years in SoDash, a web-based tool that helps organisations to manage their activity on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The Sandpit has an option to purchase a further chunk and also has the exclusive commercial rights to the product, enabling the tech team to focus on development. SoDash is a spin-out from Artificial Intelligence specialists Winterwell. But who are these Sandpit guys? Coming out of London, The Sandpit is a new kind of tech startup investment vehicle formed by serial entrepreneur Simon Campbell, formerly CEO of Viapost. He bills it as a form of early stage VC/incubator. It takes 10-30% of a company, wraps sales and marketing around it, and takes it to market – so this is quite a bit different from a normal Seed or VC deal. But let’s take a look at the issue this ‘sales accelerator’ is addressing. Keeping track of discussions surrounding your brand or competitors is crucial for successful social media monitoring and listening. One challenge is the sheer range and volume of conversations that take place online, and determining what to do with them. Sentiment analysis is a difficult task to automate as irony and sarcasm can generate false results, affecting accuracy. Being able to identify what action a posting needs, if any, is also difficult, as spam or bot messages might drown out genuine users. We spoke to Simon Campbell about the exciting approach SoDash has taken to social media monitoring. SoDash uses artificial intelligence which means the tool can be “trained” into determining the sentiment and category of a social media posting. This advanced approach to social media monitoring can potentially result in greater effectiveness at gathering intelligence from online conversations, and reacting to them appropriately.
The Economist
21/03/12 - Geeks aren’t known for their social skills
Manoto
03/03/12 - The Tech Show
We Are Social
06/01/12 - Social Media Monitoring Platforms to Watch
The Financial Times
06/01/12 – Sales Incubators offer alternative to VC
Scottish Enterprise
02/11/11 - SoDash wins PepsiCo10 Europe 2011
Mashable
06/10/11 - PepsiCo Selects 10 Startups
Popsop
05/10/11 - PepsiCo Announced Winners
Warc
05/10/11 - PepsiCo plans European digital drive
Marketing Magazine
04/10/11 - PepsiCo invests in tech start-ups
The Times
04/10/11 - Pepsi and the online whiz kids
Peter Stiff
October 4 2011 12:01AMTechCrunch
29/06/11 - The Sandpit emerges as start-up sales accelerator
Social Media Today
29/06/11 - SoDash - Bringing artificial intelligence to social media monitoring
Scottish Enterprise
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