There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about the effectiveness of Facebook advertising, with General Motors recently pulling the plug on its paid marketing efforts because the auto execs said the ads just didn’t work.
That presents an opportunity, and some advertising veterans from the Seattle area are looking to take advantage of it with Blab Inc.
We just encountered the company for the first time after coming across a SEC filing showing that it raised $850,000 in new equity funding. Listed as executives of the company are CEO Randy Browning — the former CEO of Publicis in the West — and Chief Client Officer Malcom MacGregor — a veteran of Microsoft and Razorfish. The company’s Web site lists David Snelling — formerly of MSNBC.com, Microsoft Research and Disney — as vice president of technology.
What’s Blab up to? Like many other companies in the social media monitoring arena, the company is attempting to make better sense of the constant chatter on social networking platforms.
According to Browning’s Facebook page, the company “improves Facebook advertising performance by predicting trending topics by target audience and executing real-time relevant content/targeting.”
A description on the Web site adds:
Blab tracks millions, if not kazillions, of conversations a day across 50,000+ data sources to categorize trending conversations by lifestyle (not just words or mere data).
Blab analyzes the conversational flow between types—competitors, professional pundits, influencers and followers. And between sources like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. So you can discover what works best for you.
We’ve seen a whole host of companies operating in this arena, including Seattle companies such as Simply Measured, Visible Technologies, Banyan Branch and Prosodic. We’ve reached out to the Blab team, and we’ll update the post as we hear more.
