Local Social Media Company Has Global Reach

Devoted Patch readers already are familiar with the Maplewood Blogolopolis(TM), a bevy of seven websites all dedicated, to one extent or another, to Maplewood and its 23,000 residents.

But Maplewood’s importance as a blogospheric hub doesn’t end there. Social Media Today LLC, a startup headquartered in the historic Map Building on Valley Street, builds and maintains business-to-business social networking sites (think “Facebook for business”). The company currently maintains eight active websites, collectively drawing on the daily output of hundreds of bloggers around the country and the world.

And while the headquarters is in Maplewood, the Web sites are maintained by a network of employees and consultants from around the world. Part of the technology team is in Colorado, and the rest of it is in Bulgaria, where the WordFrame networking software was developed. Some of the editors are based in Brazil, India and Mexico—the last being South Orange resident Mark Lazen, who is finishing up a school year abroad with his wife and children.

SMT LLC launched its flagship website, SocialMediaToday.com, in 2007, and last fall celebrated the first anniversary of publication. The company is the brainchild of Maplewood resident Robin Carey and her longtime business partner, Jerry Bowles, who lives in Manhattan. (Disclosure: Robin Carey has been a friend of mine for years, and last year I performed paid consulting work for SMT LLC under a contract that has ended.)

SocialMediaToday.com and its sister sites are based on a moderated blog-aggregation concept. This means that bloggers can arrange to have a feed of all of their own blog posts sent to SMT. Human editors at SMT then decide which posts should be featured on the SMT homepage. The editors act as filters, selecting the best and most interesting posts of the day. Each site becomes a community of interest for a specific topic, as anyone can comment on the blogs or use a variety of social networking functions. The bloggers contribute their content for free, in exchange for gaining exposure to a wider audience.

The sites sell some advertising, but the business model is based on corporate sponsorship—and the company’s sponsors include the second- and third-largest software companies in the world. A sponsorship is a six-figure annual expense—which sounds like a lot, but it’s a fraction of the cost of a nationwide business-to-business advertising campaign.

When a corporation sponsors a site, it buys a way to reach already-engaged readers in a particular field of business. For example, software giant SAP is best known for providing enterprise software applications for huge corporations. But the company wanted to grow its division focused on small to midsize enterprises (SME). So SAP sponsored an SMT site MyVenturepad.com, which bills itself as “the web’s best community for growth-stage businesses” and features blogs about entrepreneurship, leadership, globalization of small businesses and other topics of interest to SMEs.

The  sites include:

Social Media Today, the largest site, with an average of 8,000 unique daily visitors, draws on a huge community of bloggers focused on web-based networking and information-sharing;

Social Media Actualités is a French-language version of SMT;

My Venturepad, described above;

The Customer Collective, sponsored by Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, is a forum for sales and marketing executives;

Smart Data Collective, sponsored by Teradata, a Fortune 1,000 data warehousing company, has tapped into a surprisingly large community of bloggers focused on business intelligence and data warehousing. “Who knew there was so much passion about business intelligence?” Carey said with a laugh.

The Energy Collective focuses on public policy related to climate change and other energy-related issues. This site is a labor of love for Carey, who has strong feelings on the topic. She recent wrote a post titled “Message to the Nuclear Industry: Get Over Yourselves”;

Governing People is a forum for advocates of “smarter government”;

Sustainable Cities Collective focuses on the growing movement for reducing the environmental impact of cities.

“All the sites are growing and thriving,” Carey said. Only three of them currently have corporate sponsors, but she hopes to change that soon.

“We had a very strong first quarter, and we’re on track to become profitable,” she said. “We think we have established proof of concept.”

Carey doesn’t fit the typical stereotype of an internet entrepreneur. She’s a long-time advertising executive who previously worked at The Washington Post and National Journal, among other traditional publications. She got the entrepreneurial bug more than a decade ago when she started Carey Publishing Group to create advertising sections for major publications. Carey Publishing began to morph into Social Media Today LLC after it became clear to Carey and Bowles that the internet was a more powerful tool for developing business-to-business relationships than a paper publication ever could be.

She believes that after the recession ends, corporate marketing dollars will start to flow more freely again. “But it’s not going to come back to the same place [massive business-to-business advertising campaigns]—the genie’s out of the bottle,” she said. You might say that Social Media Today LLC hopes to become Genie Central.

Kirk Petersen is a Maplewood writer and communications consultant who maintains a mostly political blog at http://blog.kirkpetersen.net. He has worked as a paid consultant for Social Media Today LLC, but has no current financial relationship with the company.