Announcing AppatureLabs - and it’s first pupil, Chatterfly

I’m proud to announce AppatureLabs – our sandbox for new and innovative ideas from the Appature team.  As the enterprise marketing space rapidly evolves, we felt the need to have a mechanism for members of our team to explore new areas without sacrificing the immediate needs of our customers.  This allows us to continue to serve short and medium term customer needs, while getting ahead of the curve in areas that could *potentially* become important for marketers very quickly.

One such need, is allowing marketers to leverage the fast-growing community on Twitter.  I’ll be the first to admit that I was skeptical of all the hype, but as I have learned more, the applicability for companies like @dell, @comcast, and even healthcare organizations like @childrensLA certainly has significant marketing and customer service value.  While it remains to be seen if Twitter will be a viable marketing “channel” long-term, developing an application for Twitter has allowed us to build a practice around quickly adding new communication channels to Appature Enterprise Marketing, as well as get solid ground in the broader social media space.

With this in mind, I’d like to introduce you to Chatterfly – one of the first Twitter applications developed for marketers and brand managers.  For our customers that choose to try Chatterfly, it fully integrates with our enterprise marketing platform, adding relevant trending information to a customers profile and providing all the benefits that come with that.  Some specific capabilities include:

• See what’s trending on your “friends” stream. For marketers that have already created a Twitter identity for a specific company or brand, you will now be able to get quick market intelligence on what your brand stewards care about at this very moment.
• Search your friends stream. You may want to see if there are specific keywords that are being mentioned by those following your brand – for example things like “heart disease” or “exercise”.  This can provide intelligence on what programs to launch, which existing programs may resonate, and whom to target.
• Archive all tweets. As we evaluate the need of this technology, we’ll work to provide intelligence tools on top of archived tweets to provide trending and analysis against the timing of marketing programs allowing you to associate the launch of initiatives or programs and the reaction on social media sites, like Twitter.

Having Chatterfly integrated with Appature Enterprise Marketing will also enable a number of automated communication capabilities on top of action or behavior in the social media world.  Even if you are not an Appature customer, feel free to give Chatterfly a try and let us know what you think.  It’s free.  Try Chatterfly now @ chatterfly.appaturelabs.com

Lastly, I want to extend my congratulations to the Chatterfly team on a great launch.  This kind of innovation is critical for Appature as we will always be looking for new ways to help our customers and partners gather market intelligence and capitalize on new communication channels.  If you have any questions, comments, or ideas we’d love to hear from you – feel free to send me email: ceo [at] appatureinc [dot] com.