Five from Finland
Social media management
This quintet of Finns has all found ways to handle the numerous demands of social media with ease.
With all of the various social media channels available these days, companies must pick and choose the ones that are the most effective for them. These Finns help companies negotiate the minefield of challenges as they seek to win customers around the globe.
The Smarp platform enables employees to exchange information via social media, engage with industry and organisational content, as well as suggest other interesting topics. Now the company is 4.2 million euros richer, after closing a funding round led by London-based VC Nauta Capital.
“Our platform is very scalable and brings benefits to anyone from small startups to global giants, no matter where they are located,” CEO Roope Heinilä told us back in 2014.
Underhood
Using an innovative, automated system, this company helps companies and brands to get a handle on their social media efforts by assessing their presence across the pillars of similarity dialogue and visibility. This then provides a perfect way to assess a company’s reputation.
“There is a growing understanding that reputation is absolutely crucial for any company,” co-founderSami Kuusela said in 2016. “Some say that reputation is the single most important factor in the success of a firm.”
With companies increasingly finding clever ways to reach prospective customers via social media, these marketing channels are also rife with harmful content. Facebook advertising in particular represents something of a free-for-all.
Enter BrandBastion, offering constant “real-time protection of brand reputation and ad performance on social media,” according to CEO Jenny Wolfram.
“There are a lot of things that the brand or companies need to be aware of immediately,” she explained. “Social media is existing 24/7; it’s hard for many companies to have in-house monitoring.”
These days, there are countless examples of social media content being used online without proper compensation or even permission. And the problem is only growing.
BCaster believes its AI-powered mobile media platform can turn the situation around. Let’s say you capture a major accident on your phone. You upload the video to the BCaster app where it is automatically analysed, priced and embedded with copyright information. A journalist looking for footage of the accident can easily find your video based on its time and place and purchase the usage rights with a few clicks.
“Our AI makes the whole process fast,” said founder Janne Neuvonen. “When you take a photo or video [using our app] it can be found in our search engine within seconds. In that time, our AI has dug out what or who is in the picture, where it was taken and when.”
This company enables brands and publishers to create social magazines, applications and websites which combine editorial, curated and social content. A brand can engage its audience by allowing them to contribute content through any social media service by using a specific hashtag. The platform also enables content to be viewed on large advertising displays and TV broadcasts
“The key to this is enabling a kind of ‘360-degree publishing’ where the same content can be shown everywhere from big screens and ad breaks to a company’s own website,” CEO and co-founder Toni Hopponen explained to us.