Today Social Fresh, a social media conference company based out of New York City and founded by Jason Keath, launched the newest branch of its educational offerings in the form of an online social media company directory: Invest in Social. The site is a free, searchable business directory that aggregates agencies, consultants and vendors doing business in the social media space.
Invest in Social sets out to solve a very simple, but important problem: connecting social media companies to their potential customers. Keath and the Social Fresh crew launched the site into what he felt was a vacuum in the social media space after noticing that his personal blog was ranking for terms like ‘social media agency’ and ‘social media company.’
Out of the gate the site is impressive, with a cleanly designed, intuitive user interface. Similar to the Social Fresh site, Invest in Social features simple navigation and a low barrier to entry, allowing users to locate information quickly and easily.
In private beta the site grew to list 72 user-submitted companies (31 agencies, 17 vendors, 24 consultants); 18% of which are located outside the U.S. Today, Invest in Social touts some impressive growth stats, adding 45 new companies in a matter of a few hours and totaling 122 companies listed as of this post. [Some notables include: Edelman Digital, Porter Novelli, Radian6, Klout, and Argyle Social].
Some of the site’s coolest functionality is in its bookmarking feature – users can create a set of personalized bookmark folders to store company information for later retrieval.
Invest in Social also utilizes Facebook’s ‘Open Graph’ (a.k.a. ‘like’ functionality), which adds an interesting new layer. Currently, a company can boost its site rankings by completing its profile to the fullest. However, with Facebook functionality enabled, companies may soon begin ranking based on the number of ‘likes’ they have received. Invest in Social is in a unique position to harness this type of dynamic, decision-based ranking system to personalize each user’s experience based on his or her social graph, while adding an implicit recommendation layer to the B2B shopping process (i.e. I see which vendors my friends have ‘liked’ or recommended). While this functionality is not without its challenges – such as preventing users from ‘gaming the system’ – I am especially curious to see what the next few iterations of Invest in Social have to offer.
Other features that I anticipate seeing added are ‘click to call’ or ‘click to email’ functionality on a company’s ‘contact us’ page, and the ability to annotate saved bookmarks with notes about companies.
With its easy to spot search box and clean user interface, the site renders fairly well on a mobile device (or, on the iPhone at least), but I’d speculate that the braintrust behind Social Fresh already have a mobile app in the works. Either way, this is going to be one to watch, as I imagine that the features on Invest In Social will only become more ‘social’ over time.
What do you think of Invest in Social so far? Are there any other related needs a site like this could help to address? Any enhanced functionality you’d like to see?
