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bdg Plumtree • BEA AquaLogic Interaction • Oracle WebCenter Interaction

Crowd Campaign, The Social Contest Builder

(I-Newswire) November 16, 2009 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CC_Glossy_Side2.pdf (1 page)New York, New York – November 16th, 2009 – At Web 2.0 Expo today, Social Collective, Inc., the company behind the hosted social networking and scheduling software that powered SXSW and Oracle OpenWorld, announced the launch of their newest product, Crowd Campaign. Using Crowd Campaign, Twitter users can easily launch cost-effective branded online contests.

With the power of Twitter and the social web, people who enter these contests, vote on entries, or make comments help propagate their viral spread via easy-to-use sharing tools that facilitate posting contest updates to a multitude of different social networking sites.

When setting up a contest, Crowd Campaign offers the ability to customize the contest’s subdomain, upload a logo and background image, write a Terms & Conditions page, set colors and styles, insert Google Analytics tracking code and change all of the contest rules and other marketing copy. Contest winners can be decided by popular vote or by an “expert panel” or some combination of both. Contests can include text entries, photo or video submissions and links to other content such as blog posts or web sites, meaning that Crowd Campaign contests can be used for any type of competition. Crowd Campaign also offers a rich set of entry management tools for removing offensive content, merging duplicate entries and tallying entries, votes and page views. Crowd Campaign offers a free version for contests containing no more than 10 entries and/or 100 votes. To increase these limits, contest managers can pay as little as $95 up to $4,995 for a one-year unlimited-use license.

Crowd Campaign is used by ad agencies, event managers, social media marketers, small business owners, popular authors, independent film makers and musicians – anyone who wants to leverage the power of the social web to build a brand. Any type of contest can be set up in 10-15 minutes, limited only by one’s imagination and federal, state and local laws.

During the private beta period that ended with today’s launch, hundreds of Crowd Campaign sites were created, including these prominent contests:

http://w2e.crowdcampaign.com — Ask Beth Noveck, Deputy CTO of the US Government a Question: Tim O’Reilly will pick from among the top questions and ask Noveck the best one during their Web 2.0 Expo Keynote later this week. The winner will also receive an autographed copy of Noveck’s book, Wiki Government.

http://w2e.crowdcampaign.com — Search for the Best LinkedIn Profile: Mike O’Neil and Lori Ruff will feature the top five vote-getters in O’Neil’s new book, Rock the World with Your Online Presence.

http://expoexpo.crowdcampaign.com — Ask Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogan, Rick Calvert, Ann Hamilton and David Rich a Question — the panel moderator will ask the panel the top question at Expo! Expo! in Atlanta in early December. The winner will also receive an autographed copy of Kawasaki’s book, Reality Check.

http://techcocktail.crowdcampaign.com — Enter a DC-area startup company and Frank Gruber and Eric Olson will give the top vote-getter a free Bronze Sponsorhip at the next TECH Cocktail DC event (a $999 value).

http://digitalmarketingmixer.crowdcampaign.com — Suggest an idea for MarketingProfs’ Digital Marketing Mixer: the winner of a random drawing will receive a free registration to MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2010 in Boston, MA (a $695 value).

Mike O’Neil, who launched a Crowd Campaign contest in support of his book, Rock the World with Your Online Presence, said:

“With just weeks from start to finish, we embarked on a partnership with the folks at Crowd Campaign to see how we could find and refine applications for [online contest] technology in social media.”

O’Neil launched a very successful contest centered around finding top LinkedIn profile pages and featuring the winners in his book, which is “something that money can’t buy.” O’Neil remarked on how powerful it was for CrowdCampaign to “create a following around the pop culture image we represent with social media, networking and music.”

About Crowd Campaign

Crowd Campaign is a social tool for building brands. It’s used by ad agencies, event managers, social media marketers – anyone who wants to leverage the power of the social web to build a brand. Easy to customize and manage, you can launch a Twitter-powered contest including a branded promotional site in minutes from your desktop. It’s FREE to get started and there’s no sign up or credit card required. Start a contest today by visiting http://crowdcampaign.com

For more information, contact Clinton Bonner at Social Collective, Inc., [email protected], 860-608-9074

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Featured Posts The Social Collective

Social Collective, Inc. Featured on TechCrunch

techcrunch2Having “graduated” from the LaunchBox Digital program, which culminated with East and West Coast Demo Days last week, TechCrunch ran an article with a description of each of the eight companies. You can also visit our CrunchBase profile for more information about Social Collective, Inc.

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The Social Collective

The Social Collective to Provide Social Media Software for Experient’s e4 Conference

e4-sphere_bigger.gifToday we are pleased to announce that Experient, Inc., a full-service solution provider for conferences and events, has chosen The Social Collective as the social networking platform for Experient’s 2009 e4 Conference. Here at Social Collective, Inc., we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to help Experient fulfill their brand promise of “delivering the total event experience” by adding a social networking component to their wide range of pre-existing services. These services include everything from scalable registration to a suite of event logistics solutions, and on to amenities that make for much happier attendees and much more profitable exhibitors. Experient has been a trailblazer in the events world since its inception. In their quest to be recognized as a thought leader in the events space, Experient continues to seek out and provide its clients with the best event services in the industry.

The Social Collective is a white-label conference social networking suite and social media aggregator which will serve as the event-centric networking community for Experient’s 2009 e4 Conference. The e4 event is the annual gathering of Experient’s clients and select sponsors. The typical attendee of e4 is an association executive or an event management professional. Each year, Experient chooses an overarching theme that is most relevant to the times the industry is facing. This year’s theme is Networking and the Infusion of Social Media into live events and their surrounding communities.

According to Karen Watson, Director of Strategic Events at Experient:

“Our goal is to simplify the social media experience for our e4 attendees and by using the Social Collective white label platform, we should create more opportunity for interaction before, during and after e4. Our ultimate goal is to create a community for our attendees to connect and interact with their peers year-round.”

At Social Collective, Inc., we’re looking forward to this opportunity to serve Experient and their e4 2009 conference. We’re excited about ushering this vibrant community of attendees and sponsors into a new era of inter-connectivity and social networking. The e4 gathering — taking place between August 2nd and 5th in National Harbor, MD — will showcase how physical meetings are evolving through the use of new technologies and techniques. As a result, the meetings industry can continue to grow by enhancing attendees’, sponsors’, and exhibitors’ experiences leading up to, during, and well after the physical event has taken place.

Visit http://www.experient-inc.com for more on their suite of professional services. Visit http://thesocialcollective.com for more information on how to build a thriving year-round community for your next event or follow The Social Collective on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nowgetsocial.

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The Social Collective

Social Collective, Inc. Joins Launch Box Digital Class of 2009

launchboxCo-founding CEO Chris Bucchere and CTO and Lead Developer Mike Buckbee of Social Collective, Inc. just accepted a seed round of funding from Launch Box Digital and an invitation to join their 2009 summer incubator program, which began on Monday.

“We’re thrilled to be a part of this great summer program and very excited to work with the investment team, sponsors and advisers to continue to give Social Collective, Inc. the momentum it needs to keep gaining traction with conferences, trade shows and festivals worldwide,” said Social Collective, Inc. President and CEO Chris Bucchere.

The company also recently announced the acquisition of several new customers, including National Association of Dental Professionals, The Sloan Consortium and the Open Government and Innovations conference. In addition, they recently brought on software sales veteran Clinton Bonner as Senior Vice President of Sales.

For more information about Social Collective, Inc. or to schedule a demo, contact them at [email protected].

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The Social Collective

my.SXSW Goes Mobile

South by Southwest (SXSW) Music, Film and Interactive Conferences and Festivals has launched the official mobile social networking and scheduling tool for their 23rd annual event, which begins Friday, March 13th. Powered by the industry-leading whitelabel conference software application, The Social Collective, the mobile site integrates seamlessly with my.SXSW’s networking, messaging and calendaring features. Open to registrants of the film, music or interactive events, the site can be accessed by loading http://my.SXSW.com in most mobile phone web browsers, including Blackberry, iPhone, Andriod, Treo and other handsets with modern web-browsing capabilities.

SXSW teamed up with The Social Collective to provide anywhere/anytime access to all the official films, music showcases, parties, interactive panels and other events via my.SXSW.

People who have phones with web-browsing capabilities can use my.SXSW’s lightweight and highly optomized mobile web experience. People who do not can still build their personal schedules using my.SXSW via a full-blown web browser and then use the provided iCal synchronization to push events to Apple’s iCal, the Google Calendar, or any other iCal-compliant software, which can then be synchronized with virtually any mobile device. my.SXSW also supports personal schedule export into Microsoft Outlook, which can be synchronized with many other types of phones including Blackberry and Treo devices. Finally, in leiu of (or in addition to) using a mobile phone calendar, registrants can use my.SXSW to sign up for SXSW Alerts, which provide realtime schedule updates via SMS.

“We didn’t want people to feel that they needed to lug their laptops around at SXSW,” said founder and CEO of The Social Collective, Chris Bucchere.

“Nearly everyone is already going to be carrying some sort of mobile device and we didn’t want to leave anyone in the dark.”

“So if you have an overacheiving ‘smartphone,’ you can use my.SXSW through your phone’s web browser. If your phone is more of a C-student, you can probably still synchronize your calendar using iCal, Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook. If your phone is more of the ‘beauty school dropout’ variety, at least you can still use SMS.”

The launch of my.SXSW’s mobile experience will make finding contacts, finding great events, and finding the locations of the different venues dead-simple, quick and portable. With The Social Collective’s modular design, enabling the mobile version of the hosted software was easy and painless. The resulting mobile web application carries the SXSW trademark and brand, just like the rest of the integrated social networking, messaging and scheduling features of my.SXSW.

“Our goals were simple: provide SXSW-branded social networking and scheduling capabilities to the greatest number and variety of mobile devices possible,” said Scott Wilcox, CTO of SXSW.

“Between The Social Collective and SXSW Alerts, we can easily reach nearly all of our registrants and provide a great user experience.”

SXSW opens Friday, March 13th with the concurrent film and interactive festivals. The music festival starts Wednesday, March 18th. Find out more about SXSW at http://my.sxsw.com

The Social Collective provides whitelabeled social networking, messaging and calendaring for events of all shapes and sizes. Visit http://thesocialcollective.com to find out how they can help you grow and serve the community around your next event.

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The Social Collective

BIL Conference 2009 Selects The Social Collective to Provide Conference Social Network

(I-Newswire) – Long Beach, CA

The second annual BIL Conference, scheduled to take place on February 7th and 8th, 2009, announced today that they have selected Herndon, VA-based BDG‘s white-label conference social networking platform, The Social Collective, as their provider for conference registration and social networking services.

BIL is an ad-hoc conference for people changing the world in big ways. It’s a place for passionate people to come together to energize, brainstorm, and take action. Last year’s BIL had over 300 attendees. This year, almost twice that have already signed up on the social network. Confirmed speakers include TED Prize winners Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity and Eric Rasmussen of InSTEDD.

Other proposed talks include Silona Bonewald’s (founder of The League of Technical Voters) “Transparent Government Starting With The Federal Budget” and Ben Huh’s (of I Can Has Cheezburger) “What’s Funny About The Interwebs.”

BIL’s “unconference” format permits anyone to speak, so interested parties may sign up to give a talk.

The talks are then “favorited” to the main stage by peers, or remain in a breakout room if they don’t receive enough favorites.

“We chose The Social Collective because it’s a great way to herd smart people,” said BIL Conference co-chair Todd Huffman. “In addition to posting new talks and adding talks to their favorites, people can create and join groups, engage in discussions, make a new network of friends and keep their new relationships alive post-conference. The format was a great fit for BIL, but I can see it working well at more structured events, too.”

“We’re really enjoying the experience of watching and participating in the growth of the online BIL community, powered by The Social Collective,” said BDG chief and one of the The Social Collective developers, Chris Bucchere. “The BIL team has been a pleasure to work with and the community has been very supportive of our efforts. The outstanding content and people involved should make BIL one of the must-attend events of 2009.”

For additional information or to register for free, visit the BIL Conference web site.

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Business Feedhaus

Feedhaus Launches Public Alpha to Deliver Real-time Personalized News, Images and Video

Feedhaus announced today that it has released its social news site into public alpha to deliver real-time news, images and videos that are personally relevant.

Leveraging the power of news feeds and the flexibility of user-generated tags, Feedhaus offers a unique, real-time view of today’s hottest digital media including personalized online news items, images and videos. It gives people the ability to tag and follow their favorite RSS or ATOM feeds from news sites or blogs in real-time so that they can be the first to know about breaking news.

Feedhaus is a powerful new real-time social media website that aggregates content from thousands of user-submitted feeds and tags, offering a never-before-seen mashup of social feed aggregation, user-generated tagging, social networking and rich personalization. Following an extensive private alpha, Feedhaus is now available to the general public, providing for the first time a place to filter out and discover “what’s hot now” across thousands of content sources and topics of general or personal interest.

“Until now, I couldn’t find a good way to keep up with the wealth of news, blogs and other content sources on the internet,” said Chris Bucchere, founder, President and CEO at Feedhaus. “Feedhaus gives you the power to tag feed-based content and design your own ‘My Feedhaus’ pages that deliver specific, personalized news, images and videos to you exactly the way you want them, in real-time.”

Invented and developed by a team of enterprise software veterans with deep internet and intranet portal experience, Feedhaus is led by CEO, President and founder Chris Bucchere, formerly Lead Engineer at Plumtree Software, the market-leading enterprise portal software company that was acquired by BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) in 2005.

Privately held and personally funded, Feedhaus was built by a small team of developers in a matter of months using open source Java technologies such as Rome, Lucene and Apache Tomcat along with advanced Javascript libraries to enable real-time publishing of news, images and video via an Ajax-like technology called Comet.

“Ajax has its place in the industry and we use it throughout the site,” says Feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. “However, Comet allows developers to provide real-time updates to tags and detail pages without any user intervention, providing a whole new twist to our Rich Internet Application (RIA).”

This real-time updating technology, which Feedhaus has dubbed “ActiveCloud (TM),” shows tags pulsating and growing in size when they’re active and shaking and shrinking when activity slows down, giving readers perspective on what topics are currently newsworthy along with a “top story” news ticker to show current breaking news updates. Feedhaus also captures a daily news snapshot, allowing readers to drag a slider bar backwards in time and find out what made the news yesterday, last week, last month or beyond.

Feedhaus also provides a rich set of tools to allow you to click and drag tags to create your own personalized feed-driven news site. Known as “My Feedhaus,” this part of the site gives readers the ability to target and follow only the topics in which they are interested.

Feedhaus already offers integration with the popular social networking site Facebook, allowing Feedhaus readers who are also Facebook users to share tag clouds on their Facebook profiles. More social networking features, including the ability to track view and track other people’s public ActiveCloud (TM) tag clouds, are being planned for an upcoming release.

About Feedhaus

Feedhaus is a privately-held company dedicated to providing real-time, personalized content from a wide variety of feeds, tagged and filtered down to only “what’s hot now” for a set of personalized topics. Feedhaus users engage in an intuitive experience of submitting and tagging feeds and narrowing their interests to only those topics that reflect their passions. Be the first to know at http://www.feedhaus.com or send an email to [email protected] for more information.

Feedhaus is a trademark of bdg, llc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective holders.