Postling

LocalVox Media Acquires Social Reputation Management Engine Postling, Launches 3.0 Platform with Mobile Deal Targeting

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:30:38 -0400

New York, NY – LocalVox Media Inc., which two weeks ago announced its $7.4m Series A funding, today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Postling. With the world’s leading Social Inbox application, Postling and its over 20,000 small business customers will become part of LocalVox’s commitment to making simple, effective and affordable online marketing available to the 27m small and medium size businesses in the US.

“LocalVox is committed to making marketing affordable and effective for any size business and Postling helps us deliver,” said David Pachter, LocalVox CEO.

Postling’s product has been integrated into the newly released LocalVox 3.0 content marketing and local discovery engine which will now include a unified social media inbox that publishes to a host of social media channels; and MobileCast, a mobile, geo-targeted deal platform that makes mobile marketing easy.

The Postling Social Inbox will also continue on as a standalone social media management application at Postling.com.

Postling’s email-style inbox that was designed to help local businesses focus on the specific actions they should take based on how customers are interacting with them throughout the web and how influential they are. Postling subscribers can respond to such action prompts and post to social media sites via email or mobile without having to login to a social media service or even Postling.

“Social media has become the leading channel for customer relationship management and loyalty marketing for local businesses. Postling takes something that is inherently complex like monitoring and driving social conversations online, and makes it simple. Postling’s Social Inbox lets businesses focus on what actions they need to take as opposed to overwhelming them with ‘Matrix-like’ streams of data and forcing them to guess like most tools,” said LocalVox President, Trevor Sumner.

Postling is architected to support large multi-location businesses managing thousands of individual locations and social media accounts. Postling enables each location to post separately while providing oversight, mass syndication and brand enforcement by central management.

“Social media has become the core distribution and feedback mechanism for a company’s local online marketing efforts and Postling simplifies the task of spreading the word about your business, monitoring relevant posts and quickly and easily responding to what is being said ” said Haim Schoppik, the Postling CTO and Etsy co-founder, who has also joined the LocalVox team.

LocalVox is the leading software as a service (SaaS) provider of local, social and mobile marketing applications for local businesses and publishers. LocalVox’s mission is to make local online marketing simple, effective and affordable to enable all businesses to market like big brands. The company is headquartered in New York City and was named one of the six fast growing tech companies by Forbes and ten hottest NYC startups in 2012 by Business Insider.

Postling is an industry leading online and mobile application that helps small business owners tackle the often daunting task of social media management. Postling allows small business owners to take control of their social reputation by aggregating all of their social media accounts into a simple, actionable, email-style Social Inbox. Businesses can manage their reputation via the web, mobile app or entirely through email, making it the most simple and affordable way for local businesses to effectively leverage social media.

Introducing Postling’s New Analytics — And...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:19:44 -0500

Introducing Postling’s New Analytics — And More!

Statistics can be tricky.

If you don’t pay enough attention to statistics, you may miss out on valuable insight that could help you make better business decisions. On the opposite hand, if you obsess over every obtainable figure you run the risk of getting bogged down and losing sight of what’s actually important.

At Postling, we believe that numbers are only as useful as the conclusions you’re able to draw with them. While redesigning our Analytics system, we put a great deal of effort towards communicating cause and effect.

If you look at a standard graph, you might be able to see quite clearly that there was a spike of activity on December 1st, 2011. You might even be able to see that the days afterwards trended slightly higher than usual. What if you wanted to see what happened to cause this spike?

With Postling’s new Analytics, this information is only a click away. If you click any point on your graph, we’ll immediately show you exactly what happened on that day. You’ll see the posts you made, the comments you received, and the reviews people have written — all right there underneath your graph. You’ll be able to see which of your posts have gotten people talking, and which ones fell flat.

You’ll also find a set of trend charts to help you determine how you’re doing compared to past performance. They will illustrate the areas in which you’re doing well, and also those in which you can improve.

As a companion to the new Analytics page, we’ve added some enhancements to viewing your posts. If you’ve linked a Bit.ly account to Postling, you can now see how many people have clicked on the links in your posts and where they’re coming from.

We hope you enjoy having access to these new insights – we’re just getting started!

Let us know what you think in the forums!

Introducing Postling’s Social Inbox Here at...

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 18:07:28 -0500

Introducing Postling’s Social Inbox

Here at Postling, we’re always thinking about how we can make social media easier. Through the popularity of our Daily Email Digest and Instant Email Notification features, we’ve discovered that our users love the convenience and familiarity of email. As a result, we began to re-imagine Postling itself as a new sort of social inbox.

Postling’s Social Inbox is a list of recent activity across all of your social media accounts. In your inbox, you’ll see new comments, reviews, and keyword tracking results as new unread messages. Just like you do with email, you can click to open the message and publish a reply if necessary. You can filter your inbox by content type, view it by brand grouping, and remove items as you see fit. You can also share notable posts with any of your connected accounts. Another important new addition is the ability to search all of your social media content by keyword (we’re kinda proud of this because no one does it as comprehensively as we do).

This opens up some pretty exciting possibilities. Here is a sampling of the things you can now do entirely through your Postling Inbox:

Manage and reply to comments on your blog or Facebook Page
Use Postling as an RSS reader and share your favorite posts anywhere
Learn about influential people who are following your company and reach out to them
See new reviews published about your business and share them with your followers
Search through your entire social history to find the last time someone mentioned “pie”

We’ve been having a blast using the Inbox to manage our own social media these last few weeks — we can’t wait to see what you think.

Let us know in the forums!

We’re so thrilled to announce that you can now manage your...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:56:29 -0500

We’re so thrilled to announce that you can now manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blog (Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, and more) all from one place. Publishing, monitoring, and comments bundled into one app and one login, no matter how many social media accounts you manage.

If you are an existing Postling customer, you can download the app by searching “Postling” in the App Store or clicking here. If you aren’t yet a customer, you’ll need to register at Postling.com first. Feedback is welcome!

Woah. Screenshots of the app coming next.

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:12:08 -0500

Woah.

Screenshots of the app coming next.

mattangriffel: This interview with David Lifson, co-founder...

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 08:55:32 -0400

mattangriffel:

This interview with David Lifson, co-founder and CEO of Postling, was conducted and condensed by me, Mattan Griffel. It’s the first in a series of interviews I’m doing called the Founder’s Funding Series, in an effort to shed some light on the process of raising money for your startup.

I first met David when a mutual friend introduced us and I later read about how he raised $200k in 6 days for Postling. So I reached out to interview David about what that was like, and he happily obliged.

Q: Do you remember the first time you decided to start a company? That wasn’t Postling, right?

A: Yeah it was a company called Waffl, which was Esty for Bed & Breakfasts. In the last couple weeks of my time at Etsy, I decided to go to Ithica for a weekend with my girlfriend and stay at a bed & breakfast. Long story short: I couldn’t book a room. They don’t do online reservations at these places because they’re mostly run by older people. So I thought, “Damn! Someone should build an Etsy but for Bed & Breakfasts.” But I put that idea aside and when I quit Etsy I started looking around for a regular job. That was November 2008 and it was like the death of the stock market no one was hiring.

Then a friend from college who I hadn’t spoken to in 3 years saw on Facebook that I was looking for a job. He reached out and asked, “Do you want to start a company?” So we met up for dinner, I pitched him three ideas, and he liked the bed & breakfast one the best. He asked, “How much do you need to get it going?” I told him, “I don’t know, probably $5,000 a month.” He said okay, wrote me a check and gave it to me right there.

So for three months I would meet him and get my $5,000 check. But at the end of the third month he said, “Dave, I’m really disappointed. You don’t have a website yet. You don’t have any customers. You haven’t even picked a name yet. What the hell are you doing? This is my last check.” And then he cut us off. That was a really great wake up call for us because at the time we hadn’t understood the difference between work and progress. We had plans, lots of plans. We had specs, we had database schemas, but we didn’t have anything that real customers would use.

Q: So what did you learn from that experience about the process of developing an idea?

A: Well we abandoned Waffl three months after launching it and switched to Posting. And the reason was customer acquisition. We hadn’t through how the hell we were going to get in front of people. If we had built a model I think it would have been obvious to us before we had even written a line of code. It’s like, “Well to make this work we’re going to need to charge this much money a month and we need to acquire this many people a month. How the hell we are going to do that? There’s no way? Okay next idea.”

We got the idea of Postling from from the bed & breakfast people, actually. They’re the ones who told us, “We’re overwhelmed by all this social media stuff. Put it all in place and we’ll pay for that.” And thought, “Okay, you’ll pay for something? We’ll build it.” And so again it was six weeks from idea to launch: we launched August 1^st 2009.

Q: What kind of entrepreneurship lessons what did you learn from that experience?

A: Don’t spend a lot of time planning. Once reality hits, it becomes a very different thing. However you should build a business model. Don’t worry much about the business plan because there are so many assumptions there it’s kind of waste of time, but building a spreadsheet is really important and something we didn’t do. What the spreadsheet does is tell you what numbers need to happen such that you get a business that’s worth your time. Like… it only works if we are able to charge more than $20 a month… or it only works if we are able to acquire more than a 1,000 people a month. Whatever those assumptions are, you need to find out what your limits are so you can ascertain if it’s worthwhile.

Q: What were some lessons you learned from the process of startup funding?

A: We already had all the documents figured out so we knew that we were going to raise on equity, not convertible debt. We knew that we were going to raise at $1.4 million pre, and that we were raising $350,000. We knew that we were going to give ourselves 60 days to close the round. Because we had all the things figured out, all of the usual negotiations and wishy-washyness was off the table. It became very black and white: Do you want to invest or not? And the reason why I was so non-negotiable is that we already had the first $130,000 committed on those terms.

Q: What kind of advice would you give to an entrepreneur in process of funding a company?

A: Don’t ask for money. Investors aren’t interested in funding you because you’re going to run out of money if they don’t. You have to put yourself in the mindset of the investor: why do they invest us? Most angel investors do it because they have a lot of money and they set aside a certain amount to invest in startups because it’s fun. It’s an asset class just like stocks, or mutual funds, or treasury bonds. And so since investing is a hobby for them, it’s very emotional. They want to be a part of an adventure. So what you need to do is convey to them that you’re doing something amazing and you’d like them to be a part of the process. And that the reason why you are choosing them is specific. You want them because they have certain experience or certain connections, whatever it is so they can feel like they’re actually helping and that they’re not just dumb money. You really have to project a lot confidence and strength and say,”Our numbers are great. We don’t need you. But if you want to be part of this, we can make some room.” You’re trying to create scarcity out of nothing and it’s really a hard dance. These people are smart. They made the money because they are smart, and they have a really good bullshit sensors. But there is a way to do it.

Often that means you have to start raising money before you need the money, because once you need it everyone can smell that. And then they’re thinking, “Why should I give you money if it’s likely that you guys are not going to raise enough and therefore go bankrupt anyway?”

Q: What advice would you give people in the earlier stages, maybe those who are at a job thinking of starting their own company?

A: When people think about starting their own companies they spend a lot of time creating a business plan and thinking about all the mechanics of what they will do once they quit. I think what they fail to do is properly validate whether or not their vision of the future is one that’s both profitable and possible. Because how you get there is probably going to be different than what you thought. The point is: is the promised land worth getting to? And do you have the means, the people, and the talent to figure out how to get to the promised land? If so, how you get there actually doesn’t really matter so much.

That’s what I would think about: does your vision of the future work? And make sense? And excite you? And be the thing that you want to give up the next three to five years of your life to do? And do you have the team and the right skills to do that? If so, then don’t really worry so much about how you’re going to do that. Because you’re going to be wrong. Reality will hit your business plan and you’ll realize, “Oh man, I was totally wrong about that.” But if you have the right faith in your vision then you can get through that. Too often people think about tactics and that’s the part that actually changes the most.

Also when people try to work full-time and do their start-up on the side, it almost never works. Part of it is psychological. You’re not making yourself vulnerable enough to really make the sacrifices that are necessary. It feels like you’re making sacrifices. Your life sucks because you’re working two jobs. But in the end I just feel like the necessary amount of focus and determination and passion really only comes out if you’re doing this full-time. The last thing is that investors will almost never fund you if you still have a job. Because they’re thinking, “If you don’t believe in this enough to quit your job, why should I give you my money?”

Postling’s CEO talks startups and what you need to think about if you want to start your own internet startup.

msg: Last night I went to dinner w/ my buddy Nick , his mom who...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:26:01 -0400

msg:

Last night I went to dinner w/ my buddy Nick , his mom who was in town, and Charles.

We went to SPQR bc Nick was in the mood for lasagna and when he typed that into foursquare the machines suggested he eat there along with the fact that Foursquare displayed a Groupon Local deal that offered $20 worth of food for $15. Nick purchased the deal from his phone and we sat down to have our meal.

The food was good but the service sucked (the waiters were asked multiple times to bring water, bread, cheese to our table and never did)

When we were ready to pay for our meal, Nick reminded the waiter about the groupon. The waiter told us he cant accept it because it was on Nick’s phone. At some point the manager came out and explained to us that he cant accept the groupon mobile deal because we dont have a print out and he needs the print out to staple to his receipt to reimburse himself. He was not interested in writing down our confirmation code and even offered to go on record with his statement, as you can see in the video above.

Nick’s going to file a complaint with Groupon but we still arent sure why they gave us a hard time. We have two theories:

My theory is that they are old school and process all their accounting by hand and dont want to be bothered with the hassle of lost notes or something.

The second theory posited by Charles is that the manager knows that when faced with confrontation the customer will always back down and pay their bill. This way he can say he doesnt accept the Groupon and he gets paid twice via the customer and via Groupon.

Either way whatever really went down, we are definitely never going to eat there again.

We are going to file a complaint with Groupon + Foursquare to have the deal removed and the restaurant notified.

Now we understand why the Yelp reviews are so low

Wow, this is terrible. Studies have shown that Yelp ratings drop once merchants begin using Groupon, and this is a first-hand example of exactly why that is.

Since Postling is for merchants, let’s try and understand from the manager side of things. Here are some of the challenges merchants face:

The person creating the Groupon is often not the person who has to accept and process the offers from patrons. Any kind of miscommunication with front-of-the-house staff can lead to poor customer experiences.
Technology platforms change faster than businesses can adapt. In this case, the manager Michael spoke to clearly had a “process” that he was stubbornly sticking to (“I need a paper copy”). His process couldn’t yet cope with the migration from paper redemption to mobile redemption.
Groupon offers create a wave of new business (that’s the point) but often times businesses can’t handle the flood. This also seems to be the case for Michael… too many busy tables means not enough waiters to go around for water, bread, etc.

No customer should receive an experience like Michael did, and any merchant who launches a Groupon campaign should do so with eyes wide open and smart plans in place to handle this new shift in business.

datainsightsideas: As an entrepreneur, it feels good to be in...

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:45:39 -0400

datainsightsideas:

As an entrepreneur, it feels good to be in New York.

Nice of them to include us!

Postling in Businessweek! Read the full article...

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 15:54:47 -0400

Postling in Businessweek!

Read the full article here.

Bloomberg / Businessweek just published an article about mentorship and decided to feature us for the story.

For Lifson, the mentoring relationship evolved: Thompson invested $50,000 in Postling in November 2009, the first of several outside backers who have bet about $1 million on the startup. She started using the service for 700 clients of her apartment rental service 4 Walls in Narberth, Pa., immediately after Postling launched in August 2009.

[….]

He says Thompson’s perspective was as important as her business. “She gets to see a side of the market that is a little different from what we see,” he says. “She was good at all the things that we were bad at.”

Thwipster When looking through the lists of who uses Postling,...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 14:49:55 -0400

Thwipster

When looking through the lists of who uses Postling, we stumbled across these guys - http://www.thwipster.com/. I must say, as someone who loved comic books growing up (Marvel, for me), this is kinda cool.

Glamour Magazine (in Greece) is using Postling! … too bad...

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:06:47 -0400

Glamour Magazine (in Greece) is using Postling!

… too bad it’s all greek to us :P

Check ‘em out if you speak greek.

Guess what?!? We launched Postling exactly 2 years ago, today....

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 19:12:40 -0400

Guess what?!? We launched Postling exactly 2 years ago, today. Wow.

Current stats:

22,000 businesses
40,000 users
97,000 social media accounts
15,000,000 posts or comments tracked in our database
$900,000 raised

What an amazing experience so far. Thank you!

(photo by Matt Comi)

How awesome is this! Falseone created designs for how he...

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 15:58:50 -0400

How awesome is this!

Falseone created designs for how he imagines what a Postling mobile app would look like! We’re completely flattered and honored.

Hey Falseone - if you’re reading this - shoot me an email at dave@postling.com. We’d love to personally say thanks.

Postling Co-Founder David Lifson talking about his background...

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:38:08 -0400

Postling Co-Founder David Lifson talking about his background and how he got into startups (by UNYstartups)

How Social Media helps CMJ Stay in Tune With Fans

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 10:32:23 -0400

It’s the time of year when college graduation is rapidly approaching. However, fans of college music and radio stations can stay connected to the music played on-campus long after they graduate thanks to CMJ, a network connecting fans and music industry professionals with the best in music through interactive media, live events, and print with a focus on non-commercial and college radio stations. Postling sat down with its Marketing Director, Amy Hintz to learn more about how she utilizes social media to build CMJ’s brand.

How do you use Social Media to interact with fans?
Social media bridges the events and editorial sides of CMJ’s fans. “There was a division between those who attended shows and those who read about bands,” Amy explained. “Facebook and Twitter brought those sides together. If fans came in October to our concerts and enjoyed it, now they can spend all year doing virtually what they like to do at festival – hear new bands, and vice versa.”

What is your favorite social media tool and why?
Twitter enables CMJ to really get to know their fans beyond a show. “With Twitter, we are able to interface with people coming to an event, get back to people who have questions, and get to know the audience,” Amy explains. It has broadened and deepened their audience at the same time.

How does Postling help you with your social media?
CMJ publishes numerous news stories on its website daily. CMJ want to get those pieces out to fans in as many ways, and as quickly, as possible while tracking the results. “With Postling, I can take a look at what our schedule is going to be like for the day, queue everything up, and not sign into three different accounts,” Amy shares how Postling offered the tools they needed, “We can also see when people are talking about CMJ across many different platforms.”

Julia Levy

At the 27:00 mark, Postling CEO David Lifson is interviewed by...

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 11:08:16 -0400

At the 27:00 mark, Postling CEO David Lifson is interviewed by Brian Lehrer (of WNYC) about Postling and the NYC startup community. Also mentioned are our friends at General Assembly, AngelList, Art.sy, and Yipit. (by cunytv75)

SoftLayer featured us in their Technology Partner Marketplace...

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:08:00 -0400

SoftLayer featured us in their Technology Partner Marketplace and did a short interview with our CEO.

(via Technology Partner Spotlight: Postling – The InnerLayer – SoftLayer Blog)

Build More Trust With Social Media

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:00:14 -0400

Want to get more customers and earn more loyal fans? You need social media. This method of marketing can help you promote your solutions to your ideal customers. Using Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and other social media sites allows you to interact with and build a relationship with your audience in real time. You can take communication between individuals and turn it into an interactive, community experience.

Social media builds trust – and it can build it faster than traditional forms of media. For example, you may be familiar with email marketing, email newsletters and different types of broadcasts that are sent via email. It can take you weeks, months or even longer to develop relationships with those people using email marketing. Although the relationship develops over time, it can be a little slower than you anticipate.

Social media allows you to build relationships very quickly and give a boost to your business. You can interact with your audience on a very regular basis and build trust rapidly and reliably.

Why is trust so important? When your target market trusts you, they’ll be more likely to buy from you. You’ll become the relied upon expert that they come to when they need the solutions that you offer. You’re the first person they think of when someone in their network needs your services. In short, trust is the foundation of a successful service practice.

Social media allows you to create a personal connection with your customers. You can incorporate them into the process of planning new products and new services. By looking to your social networks for ideas, feedback and market research you can tap into the exact problems and frustrations that your market is facing – and become the problem solver that they are looking for.

Using social media regularly puts you at the heart of where your ideal customers are hanging out. More people than ever are using social media, and in addition to using it to connect with people they are using it to find solutions to their problems. When you are looking for a resource or a solution, what do you do? Chances are you ask your friends, colleagues, your social network, etc. You ask “Do you know anybody who does this?” or “Have you heard of anything that can help with this specific problem?”

Having a strong presence on social media can encourage people to keep talking about you, which is great for visibility and great for your business. You’ll become the answer to the question “Do you know anybody who does this?”

Through social media, you’re going to build strong relationships with your ideal clients. Your customers are going to become your advocates. They’ll do marketing for you as they spread the word about your expertise and your solutions. You’ll end up having an influx of customers due to your great relationships.

In order to get more business, you need to build trust with your ideal clients and social media is a terrific, easy and cost-effective way to do that.

———

Sydni Craig-Hart, The Smart Simple Marketing Coach, is founder of SmartSimpleMarketing.com. She is known for teaching her clients step-by-step how to fill their practice with ideal clients and create more money in their business. Check out www.SmartSimpleMarketing.com for your free marketing tools and to schedule your own “Profit Breakthrough” session with Sydni!

Scheduled Maintenance Tonight

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 09:20:49 -0400

UPDATE: We’re up and running again! Thanks for waiting!

Due to an emergency condition developing with one of our hosting providers, Postling’s web interface will be inaccessible tonight between 9:30pm and 11:30pm EST.

We do our best to keep site outtages as rare as possible, but this particular issue is beyond our control. We thank you for your patience in advance as we work to get things up and running again!

Announcing Postling Suggestions!

Tue, 31 May 2011 11:34:36 -0400

When we started Postling, one comment we heard from small business owners was, “I’m using social media, but it’s taking up way too much of my time.” As a result, we purpose-built Postling to allow small business owners, who have 100 other things to do each day, to manage their social media in 5 minutes a day. Another common comment we heard was, “I want to use social media, but I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to do next.”

Today, we are proud to launch the Postling Suggestion Engine and our first three Suggestions to help small business owners get smarter and more effective at social media.

The three Suggestions we are launching with are:

Monitoring your Twitter account for new influential followers.
Alerting you when you get a new 4 or 5 star review on Yelp & CitySearch.
Showing you popular posts by other Postling members in your industry.

Our vision is to provide dozens of Suggestions, driving by algorithms or heuristics, that each have a recommended action tied to them, so that one day marketing with social media is as easy as running through the day’s Suggestions and triggering the ones that work for you.

Winning with Klout

For our first Suggestion, we’ve partnered with our friends at Klout to monitor who your new Twitter followers are and alert you when any of them are influential, according to Klout’s influence score. We then suggest that you reach out to this new follower and optionally follow them back. While it’d be ideal if you could say hi to every new follower, we know that you’re too busy. The smart compromise is to focus on the ones who carry the most influence, because those people are the ones who can make the most impact if you can convert them into vocal supporters.

Spread the love

There is a concept amongst social psychologists called social proof, which is the idea that people value something that is valued by other people. For example, crowded restaurants get more crowded and businesses thrive when celebrities endorse their products. With our second Suggestion, we’ll tell you when you get a new 4 or 5 star review on Yelp or CitySearch and encourage you to share that review on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. The idea is that a business should highlight the positive review to all of their fans as a form of social proof - if this person likes you so much, maybe others will as well!

Inspiration without perspiration

Ever sit down, stare at a blank screen, and suffer from writer’s block? To give you ideas, we’ve mined our database of 15 million blog posts, tweets, and FB messages to find the most popular posts by other Postling members in your industry. Maybe you get inspired to run a contest or share what your special of the day is. Whatever it may be, learn from the best!

The future of social media tools

After years of using tools that seem to just give you an overwhelming (and unnecessary) amount of data, reports, and graphs, it’s time that social media tools actually start helping you get smarter and more effective. We believe Postling with Suggestions is the first in the industry to do so. While we are launching with three Suggestions, stay tuned for Suggestions specific to an industry, a geography, a media format, or even a time of day. With 15 million posts in our database and growing quickly, we have an incredible amount of data we can aggregate and mine to answer questions like “What’s the best time of day to publish a post for real estate agents vs. restaurants?” The future of social media tools is using collective intelligence, data mining, and disparate APIs to help everyday people get results they couldn’t get by using Facebook or Twitter or Wordpress alone.