25 May 2011, Amsterdam - big crowd – Internet geeks, entrepreneurs, investors and aficionados alike. It was at the backstage of the SIME conference in Amsterdam that we managed to find Erinn Marzo – Vice President at Buddy Media, in London. The Buddy Media Platform provides tools for brands to launch and maintain their Facebook pages, grow their fan bases and monitor feedback. According to CrunchBase it is the Facebook management system of choice for eight out of the ten top global advertisers. Erinn has been with the company since 2008 and is responsible for Strategic Brand Partnerships. She is currently in London setting up their new office. So in one of the coffee breaks, over some coffee and stroopwafels we had the chance to ask her what she thinks about the future of Facebook and social media branding.

Buddy Media’s tagline is “Every brand needs a buddy”. Who is your company’s buddy? In other words how do you promote and maintain the Buddy Media brand?

That’s a great question. I would say we have lot of buddies. Everyone who works at Buddy Media, we call them buddies. Everyone of those people has a network of people, who just because of the nature of our company and how personal it is to everybody, does quite a good job of promoting us. We have excellent friends in the form of our board of advisers and our board of directors. All of them helped us quite a lot in terms of getting exposure for Buddy Media as a brand. It is important to make people understand that we are a technology company, but we enable marketing programs for brands and agencies, which is probably not so obvious from the name. And then in addition to that the agencies that we work with become our buddies. Once they use our system and understand that it’s valuable they do a good job introducing us to different brands that they work with.

What are, in your opinion, the future trends in social media branding?

I think commerce is a big one, but not only commerce on Facebook, which a lot of people are experimenting with now. We found that this is actually not always the most ideal interaction that people want to be having on Facebook directly. So, Facebook commerce, but powered on existing e-commerce sites. This is becoming really powerful. The users go to a site, they engage, share and understand reviews about a product using Facebook technology and then complete a purchase that in some way is tracked back to Facebook and to the originator of that message,. That’s becoming a huge traffic wave for Facebook- and when combined with Facebook’s direct products like Places and Deals, Facebook commerce is becoming a large initiative for brands.

Buddy Media is the leader in Facebook Marketing, can you share with us what are some of the new Facebook tools that will help brands leverage off the social networks.

One of the features that we just developed for our Platform and continue to enhance is this idea of a pledging application for Facebook. We found that so many people discover Facebook, and rightfully so, as an ideal place for social cause awareness, charities, as well as phenomena like crowd-sourcing deals, opportunities, and discounts. What the pledging does is it allows you to say ok, when you get 50 000 people or 100 000 people on Facebook to say “I pledge my support for this cause” or “I want to participate in this deal”, much like Groupon does, then we as the brand are going to unlock a certain piece of content for them or a discount or voucher offer. In the case of non-profit awareness, perhaps when we get 100 000 people to pledge then we will give 100 000 or 50 000 euro away or whatever it might be to a non-profit initiative. So, because Facebook is inherently social and people want to be virally spreading the word about something they believe in, it’s the ideal place to leverage a technology piece like this that connects it together.

Buddy Media has recently acquired Spinback. The Spinback EasyTrack Plugin™ and EasyTrack Analytics™ allow the brand to measure sales from social networks and to identify their influencers on social networks. This hits directly into the ROI issue. What other tools would you like to see developed for measuring ROI and helping brands make decision on how to allocate their marketing spends.

Another excellent question… we were discussing earlier on stage about geolocation and integrating things like Facebook Places with geo-technology. Right now there are not a huge number of tools that help you track that local aspect with your deal or promotion. Creating something that ties in and sorts out the mobile specific data, i.e. people who are checking in using Facebook Places have slightly different behavior and different patterns of returning to the site. What that data shows when compared with the open web, that will be really important in the future because mobile is becoming more and more of a significant area for Facebook as a company and for everybody who is using Facebook to promote their business. So, I would love to see robust tools that present both of those sets of data next to each other to allow marketers to compare behavior across online, mobile and in-store.

How do you see your business beyond Facebook?

I think the question is really not about going beyond Facebook, but how is Facebook going beyond Facebook.com. We are always going to be tied to Facebook technology because we believe in it and we believe in what it’s doing for the internet. We’ve been very close with Facebook from the beginning.  Now we are going beyond developing tools just for Facebook Pages to creating technology that measures how Facebook is impacting people’s behavior all over the internet thanks to Facebook’s Open Graph technology.

In other words it’s still Facebook, but because Facebook is moving beyond Facebook we are certainly going to be moving with them.

Elina Zheleva is working for the European Aviation Safety Agency in Cologne. Currently she is located in Paris, where she is finishing her EMBA and is specializing in Marketing and Communications.

Interested in joining the Social Media Week Global Editorial Team? Apply here!

The post 5 questions with Erinn Marzo from Buddy Media appeared first on Social Media Week.