Direct marketers feeling lonely in 2014’s online world can take heart. ExactTarget and Socedo have the tools required to potentially transform an outbound strategy into an online, social media winner.

I’ve been using Socedo for about a month, and recently sat through a couple of ExactTarget product presentations. In my opinion, either of these tools provide direct marketing professionals with methods of proactively engaging with prospects online. The opportunity for this type of, hopefully, person-to-person interaction (as opposed to person to bot interaction), in a world of online product promotion otherwise dominated by inbound marketing solutions (like HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo), is no small feat. Certainly the prominence of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, (along with the information-heavy alerts/newsfeeds they each provide) near the top of the heap of opportunities, online, for personal engagement, contributes to the promise of these tools. But readers are advised not to get sidetracked: the tools themselves are definitely worth some study.

Both tools can be used to identify online content matching patterns, including keywords, prospect profiles, etc. The ExactTarget demonstration I attended included identification and aggregation of online content matching pattern targets in real time. The presentation method included a set of browser widgets, which a user can run, ad hoc, by simply refreshing a browser window.

Socedo and ExactTarget each include a workflow engine. So some of the task of engaging with prospects can be automated. Socedo’s workflow is complex and includes a component which can be configured with a set of criteria the solution will then use to analyze targets prior to presenting them as “leads”. The brief glimpse I had of ExactTarget’s workflow leads me to assume their automation engine is more useful for routing information along to designated contacts within a marketing team, than it would be as a means of placing the whole outbound engagement process on auto pilot (which is where Socedo looks to be going with their processes).

As far as scope is concerned, ExactTarget presents online direct marketers with a panoramic view of just about all of the social media venues they could imagine. In contrast, Socedo is limited (at least at present) to the Twitter fire hose.

Bottom line: early stage ISVs after a method of neutralizing the “passivity potential” of inbound marketing should take a look at one, or better yet, both of these tools. Feel free to contact me for more of my thoughts on either product.

Ira Michael Blonder

© IMB Enterprises, Inc. & Ira Michael Blonder, 2014 All Rights Reserved