Jan Rezab, SocialBakers, on Engage NYC: We’re Launching Something Special and Something Secret Today

Engage NYC 2013, an event organized by SocialBakers, starts today! It’s an event where you can learn how to change your social marketing forever – hear the innovators, discover the trends, and learn the tools that will really drive your social marketing. On this occasion we talked with Jan Rezab, SocialBakers CEO, about the conference, the new products that SocialBakers will present at this event and the current social media trends.

SocialBakers has always been an analytics first company, says Jan, and it wants to be the standard of the way the social media marketing is measured.

We were the first company to define engagement metrics, such as social media customer care metrics. This is where the response rate fits in, as well as response time. Nobody knew how to monitor this – everybody else followed us. We want to lead and be the standard. Lead by including a standard, but also create, innovate and penetrate into the market. That’s why with almost two thousand clients we are the strongest company in the analytics field.

We wanted to know what differentiates SocialBakers from similar tools, such as Hootsuite or Radian 6, and Jan explained that they offer only the listening side of things – looking at the keywords and putting them into the context – while SocialBakers looks at the official profiles, competitive monitoring, benchmarking…

And also, if I look at the Hootsuite, it’s a simple Twitter management tool with the 90% focus on that social network. Of the top 300 companies only on Facebook only five of them use Hoitsuite. Much more of them use some other enterprise tools. But there’s no clear publishing enterprise leader. Actually, the leader is still a native Facebook interface because the companies find it hard to fund a tool. That is why the Socialbakers has the products that are built on top of the native functionality and adding a lot more on top of that.

Facebook insights are free – why should one use SocialBakers?

But, why would small or medium business use SocialBakers instead of Facebook native app or insights? Jan explains that they are more of enterprise analytics today but also covering midsize companies. They offer additional tools that add the Facebook insights into the context of competitive monitoring, the context of looking at content and the context of looking at benchmarks. Facebook doesn’t offer that. But what if Facebook started to offer benchmarks?

They could do that, even though they don’t have the categorization system to do that. If they get there, for example, in a year, we will still have the multiplatform element.  A lot of the components are focused on other platforms, such as Twitter. We are launching components for Instagram, vk.com, YouTube. We’re launching LinkedIn analytics on November 21. We’re launching several new ways to access the tools on Engage. We’ll be announcing some cool changes to the platform.

Most common lie of the PR agencies: The crisis is going to go away

SocialBakers is committed to analytics – whatever it is from social care to monitoring companies’ crises. They’ve monitored all crises on social media – in telecom, in finance. They saw companies lose a lot of clients because they didn’t manage their social media. And companies struggle with it, says Jan.

When we come to some of these companies, they are still are not totally open to the idea. But you have to help them to be that. We are here to help them to the next level, companies that are scared, companies that are not evolved, companies that need a lot of help. They need to understand that it is worse not to be there. I wouldn’t make an equivalent to the most common lie of the PR agencies – the crisis is going to go away. Let’s wait, it’s going to go away. When it comes to social media – it’s not going to go away.

People are going to tweet about it for the next four days, Jan continues, and by then your reputation is already finished. You might get mainstream media attention, like British Gas and British Airways did. Those companies try, but don’t really get there. It needs more, it needs further commitment and if it companies don’t do that, people are going to think it has bad customer service. That aspect is a very important part of business and Jan believes that today’s businesses have to be more transparent and to communicate more with their customers because that’s the way you do it. You can’t do it the old way anymore.

Watch Engage through live stream!

Engage is happening today, on November 21, in New York. Jan says that the conference will be hosting great people from all around the world. In the same time, SocialBakers platform will be launching new things – “something special and secret”. Some of the best social media marketers in the world will be taking the stage – rather than to invite the biggest names in the business, the conference will host the best by engagement, social customer care or ecommerce. And they will tell you how they built it.

And if you didn’t make to New York, you have a chance to watch Engage through the live stream from 3PM CET.