Event Report: Third Tuesday Toronto
Carol Leaman, the CEO of AideRSS , the company behind PostRank, and Melanie Baker, Community Manager, shared their start-up success story with an enthusiastic Third Tuesday Toronto crowd.
AideRSS’ PostRank is a filtering and ranking service of RSS feeds. It constantly monitors RSS Feeds and searches for the most social engaging new posts and gives them a PostRank score. As an RSS subscriber, your feeds are scored and you can easily and quickly pick from the most engaging posts what news you want to stay on top of and read.
Just before the end of 2008, AideRSS announced that it had closed a second round of financing. Fortunately, AideRSS’s financial partner, Tech Capital actually had some money left over for the second round, unlike other venture capitalists in the current economic climate.
What does it take to nail down a second round of funding, especially in the social media space?
Create something that nobody else is doing that meets a real need (solves a problem) and then take it to the next level—monetize.
In early February 2009, AideRSS added real-time monitoring capability to PostRank, giving online content publishers immediate feedback on the social engagement of their posts.
Carol shared that they are expanding their analysis of online content to benefit the publishers. The focus is on larger content, the posts and stories. Micro-blogging is collected as the tweets relate to the larger content.
Collecting all ways an online publisher’s audience is interacting with its content, all levels of interaction, such as in the last 5 minutes, the last hour and providing that data to the publisher—for money.
Why would an online publisher pay for this knowledge? Because, as you know, online, content is king. Publishers want to know where their audience are and ideally the degree of their social engagement. Knowing the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ will give publishers the power to dive in the communities where their audience are and engage with them more effectively and in real-time.
Online publishers can look forward to a dashboard and different levels of analytical packages offered as low-price subscriptions starting in May 2009. Subscribe to the PostRank blog to stay on top of developments.
That’s how you get funding in the social media space and thrive in an economic downturn.
Oh, and you should move to Waterloo, Ontario, where both AideRSS and Tech Capital reside. According to Carol, it is a “great place to have a start-up” and Tech Capital offers some good advice to get your start-up going in the tech hub of Waterloo.
Do you think it makes sense for AideRSS to start charging online publishers for this service in the current economic climate?
Melanie believes that despite the fact that we are in an economic downturn, online publishers still need to know what is going on. Through solid trustable data and automating the process of gathering the data, online publishers will want this new service.
Carol believes that there will be an upswing in reading online, therefore putting even more importance on online content. What do you think?
Maria Koukopoulos has more than 13 years of writing experience in the fields of media relations, public relations and marketing in the technology, corporate, and non-profit sectors. Her first passion is writing, having a flexible skill-set to write for a variety of audiences. Her second passion is promoting Canadian people, events, products and services.
Maria runs her company, Media Scribe, and is currently a member of the International Association of Business Communicators in Toronto and is the Director of Communications for the Alliance of Independent Practitioners.
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