SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Addvocate and Trapit, two leading providers of content discovery and curation, social selling, and advocacy services for marketers, today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to merge. The new San Francisco-based company will change the way organizations discover, publish, share, and amplify content across websites, blogs, social networks, newsletters, and other destinations.

Combined, Addvocate-Trapit offers its users a massive content library; artificial intelligence-based discovery capabilities; and the easy, one-click content distribution process of Trapit with the sophisticated employee advocacy capabilities of Addvocate. The merger immediately positions the new company as the only solution that combines all these capabilities.

“For the first time, marketers now have a single platform that provides a complete workflow for the discovery, curation, delivery, amplification, and analysis of unique content, eliminating the massive time and dollar investment required to create all original brand content,” said Gary Griffiths, CEO of the combined company and CEO and co-founder of Trapit. “No longer do marketers need to manage dozens of disparate marketing tools to initiate and analyze their engagement with their target audiences.”

The company is also announcing the first closing of an $10m Series B funding led by Rogers Venture Partners of Palo Alto, Calif., with participation from Trapit investors including Astro Digital Sdn Bhd, Southeast Asia’s largest satellite broadcast company.

An end to “bring your own content”

A cloud-based subscription service, Addvocate-Trapit addresses the challenges marketers face in trying to create enough original content to satiate the appetites of their information-seeking target audiences. While other tools enable organizations to collect or distribute content, they require marketers to spend countless hours hunting for or creating relevant content, following RSS feeds and monitoring Google alerts, a process known as “bring your own content” (BYOC). Trapit does away with BYOC by curating its proprietary library of more than 100,000 content sources—twice the size of the Google News index. With this library, Addvocate-Trapit enables marketers to cultivate a unique voice through useful and significant content to which the audience has not previously been exposed. These sources are drawn from blogs, professional journals, news services, magazines, podcasts, and more than 10,000 video channels. All of the sources have been vetted by human editors who ensure that the content is original, of high quality, and relevant to the marketer’s needs.

Trapit’s core technology is derived from the DARPA-funded research project in artificial intelligence and machine learning contracted to SRI International.

Solving the marketer’s dilemma

“Addvocate-Trapit introduces highly intelligent technology, going beyond just curation to meet all the requirements for content marketing, social selling, and advocacy,” Griffiths said. “Trapit is a platform, whereas competing products are simply software applications.”

Addvocate-Trapit thus solve the marketer’s dilemma by:

• Delivering a complete solution
• Reducing cost
• Increasing efficiency
• Triggering engagement
• Producing ROI/insight

“The integration of Addvocate and Trapit is a brilliant move,” said Ruth Papazian, chief marketing officer and head of business development for HD Vest Financial Services. “I believe it will provide significant value to our content marketing efforts. Trapit has become a core element of our social media outreach program and has delivered us a tremendous return on investment. I’m really looking forward to all the new possibilities that we can draw from the combined capabilities of Addvocate and Trapit.”

How it works

Addvocate-Trapit offers marketers the ability to set up “traps”—collections of content on any topic. Trapit technology delivers a constant feed of real-time, and relevant content on these topics, which can be further filtered and refined by the user. The system learns from each marketer’s activity and from the user’s interactions with the content. The content is then easily distributed to any channel including corporate social networks, blogs, websites, microsites, or other destinations.

Additionally, technology from Addvocate enables organizations to provide this content to their employees for distribution through their own social channels. The most recent Nielsen study on the subject identified word-of- mouth recommendations as the most trustworthy source of information for 84 percent of consumers, while only 42 percent trusted banner ads. Addvocate-Trapit capitalizes on this trust in personal recommendations by enabling employees to become a team of advocates for the brand. They can share unique content with thousands of their own friends and followers to amplify the brand’s information flow.

Addvocate-Trapit provides a workflow optimized to each social network, automatically formatting shared content for posts to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ or other social networks. In this way, Addvocate-Trapit minimizes the need to “buy your own engagement” (BYOE), reducing dependency on promoted tweets, Google AdWords, and other means of increasing engagement with target audiences. Automated analytics indicate which content is working best for various consumer audiences.

Addvocate-Trapit addresses the skepticism that some of today’s buyers show toward content distributed by faceless brands on social media. Content shared from individual personal accounts, however, often gain more trust and engagement

“The discovery of content is the most difficult part of the content equation,” Griffiths noted, “and nearly all our competitors have found discovery too big a task to absorb. Addvocate-Trapit uses advanced artificial intelligence to dig deep on the Web, surfacing the most relevant content for each user based on content needs. Our pedigree and our sophisticated technology place us in a category of our own in our relationships with major brands and their marketers.”

About Addvocate-Trapit

Addvocate-Trapit is dedicated to helping customers engage their audiences through quality, curated content and employee advocacy. Its technology helps to raise the signal and lower the noise, making content discovery, sharing, and publishing easier than ever.

Trapit started as a free app with over 10 million users discovering news and content of all kinds. Trapit’s commercial application was developed to combine the elegance of an award-winning consumer app with the feature set businesses need to engage their audiences and measure ROI.

Addvocate is a cloud-based employee advocacy platform that helps marketers build brands and increase engagement by giving employees an easy and fun way to post and share content to their social networks.

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/addvocate-and-trapit-combine-forces-disrupting-the-content-marketing-landscape-300006410.html

SOURCE Addvocate-Trapit