Buddy Integrates Social Marketing Management, Ad BuysBuddy Integrates Social Marketing Management, Ad Buys

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Buddy Media is adding a social advertising management platform to its suite of tools for managing marketing pages and profiles on Facebook and other social media sites.

The new BuyBuddy product is based on Buddy Media's acquisition of Brighter Option in February. BuyBuddy handles the purchase and placement of ads on Facebook, automating the process for advertisers and agencies.

"From what we can tell, it's the first time anyone has had a social media management system fully integrated with an ad system," Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow said in an interview. "Long term, you have to have it integrated," he added because Facebook is moving toward a vision of marketing in which "the ad is the content and the content is the ad--you post to the Facebook page, and then you amplify that post with an ad." Lazerow discussed the significance of the news in a blog post earlier this week

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"It was kind of becoming apparent that having publishing tools and an ad platform in the same product was the model going to win," agreed Peter Goodman, founder and CEO of Brighter Option (now BuyBuddy). Facebook's direction of treating advertisements as stories and part of the social conversation only makes it more obvious, he said.

Beyond rebranding the Brighter Option technology as BuyBuddy, Buddy Media has integrated the software with its social media management platform so that data can flow between the two. That means advertisers can identify the content that is getting the best reaction from the social media audience and further accelerate that momentum with complementary advertising, Lazerow said.

BuyBuddy will be available independently of other elements of the Buddy Media suite, but its greatest potential will be as part of the suite, Lazerow said. Users who sign into the system to manage marketing content will be able to recognize when a piece of social content is getting attention and "click on a button that says 'promote the post' and with three clicks buy the ad, all through the same interface," he said. Advertisers who rely on an agency to make those buys will also be able to grant agency contacts accounts on the system, with permissions that limit them to only those parts of the system they need to access to do their jobs, he said.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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