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When Laurie and I set out 2.5 years ago to quantify the effectiveness of sharing integrations and other social marketing efforts, we honestly didn’t know who would find our technology most useful and in what ways. We just believed there was a broad-based need to move the conversation about the effectiveness of social media beyond proxy metrics like fans and followers, and towards true measures of business value like visits, pageviews, signups, and revenues.

As the space evolved and we worked with more partners and customers, it became clear that our primary focus should be on application developers. We want awe.sm to enable a thriving developer ecosystem that innovates and creates value from real social performance data.

With that goal in mind, we set out to add many of the features our developer customers were asking for, expose everything awe.sm can do as a service, and package those APIs in a way that made our customers’ jobs easier.

awe.sm: the platform

Today we’re very proud to announce the latest release of the awe.sm platform, which includes:

• new and expanded APIs for tracking sharing, measuring results, retrieving data, and managing your account;
• a brand-new documentation site featuring more examples and quick start guides for Javascript, PHP, and Ruby;
• and an open-source example application (initially built during the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon) that demonstrates many key features of the awe.sm platform in a working app with documented source code.

Our platform is already being used by hundreds of developers to track how sharing from their application drives value to their business and to put that data to work in interesting ways. We’re particularly excited about some of these integrations that showcase how awe.sm helps our customers “concentrate on the core problem they’re solving and…create better products in less time“:

• Topspin Media is the most complete technology platform for artists to create their own retail channels, effectively promote their music, and connect directly with their fans. Topspin uses awe.sm to quantify the impact of fans who share artists’ music on Twitter and Facebook. “It’s impossible to overstate the importance of direct connections between artists and fans and the power of fans spreading the word about artists they love,” said Ian Rogers, Topspin’s CEO. “Using awe.sm, Topspin has been able to build unique data-driven tools to encourage and measure the use of social channels to help artists grow their audience and make money.”
• StockTwits provides investors, public companies, and market professionals with a platform to create, share, and gather information across a distribution network that includes StockTwits.com, top social networks, and major financial media outlets, with a combined audience in the tens of millions. StockTwits uses awe.sm to measure how word spreads when publicly-traded companies report their earnings or other financial news and information. “With awe.sm we are able to measure the reach and engagement with those messages across our network,” said Chris Corriveau, CTO of StockTwits. “The whole integration with awe.sm was done in just a couple days and we now have a full range of analytics APIs at our disposal to deliver these and future features for our clients.”
• LocalResponse is the world’s first cross-platform “check-in” based ad network, helping marketers reach individuals in the most contextual, local medium. LocalResponse uses awe.sm to track the effectiveness of the messages their clients send to potential customers. “awe.sm filled a major hole in our infrastructure — we had it integrated in a matter of hours and it instantly made our platform way sexier,” said Michael Muse, LocalResponse’s co-founder and VP of Product & Operations. “awe.sm made it possible for our engineers to get back to building our core product.”

We believe that focus on the hard value driven by sharing holds the key to unlocking social media’s full potential for businesses large and small. We also believe this potential will be realized by a robust marketplace of solutions like those above, serving the specialized needs of many different kinds of businesses. Our goal is to enable these tools.

Mo’ money, mo’ solutions

Today’s platform launch is just the first step toward our vision of enabling developers to harness the value of social media in their applications. That’s why we’re happy to also announce a new round of funding led by Foundry Group and GRP Partners, to grow our team and help us bring the awe.sm platform to more developers.

We’ve been very fortunate to have worked with great investors up to this point. GRP’s firm-wide focus on tangible value-creation and Mark Suster‘s understanding of the social media landscape have been invaluable. So have the counsel and efforts on our behalf of Jerry Neumann of Neu Venture Capital and Jennifer Lum and Peter Wernau of Apricot Capital. We can’t recommend these folks enough as investors and colleagues.

We’re equally excited to be working with our new investors, Foundry and kbs+p Ventures, who are joined by GRP and Neu Venture Capital in this round. Foundry’s reputation and portfolio, including investments in SendGrid, Gnip, and UrbanAirship, are unparalleled in the platform space, and we’re very happy that Foundry Managing Partner Ryan McIntyre will be joining our Board. kbs+p Ventures is the investment arm of leading full-service advertising agency Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners. They’re led by Darren Herman, who is a great ambassador of technology to the media world (and vice versa) and an excellent golfer ;-) .

You can read more about our funding over on TechCrunch and in our press release. After a brief discussion of whether or not to blow it all on hats, we’ve decided to use the money to grow the team. So please head on over to our jobs page and tell your friends.

Don’t forget to check out the new http://developers.awe.sm, and you can click here to chat with someone from our team.

Email

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who has expressed interest in joining the awe.sm private beta, especially those of you who have taken the time to complete our survey. We’ve frankly been overwhelmed by the response and sincerely apologize to anyone we haven’t been able to contact yet.

Unfortunately, we’re going to have to continue to limit access to the beta for the foreseeable future. We’re a small team with a new product and our primary focus continues to be on delivering the best possible experience to our existing users. We currently communicate very closely with all of our customers to understand their needs and how we can improve the product to best serve them. Obviously this is quite a labor-intensive process, but we firmly believe it is the quickest route to delivering a great product to everyone else.

We truly appreciate your patience and are seriously bummed not to be able to give more folks access yet. If you’ve already filled out the survey, there’s no need to do so again. And if you want to discuss anything with us, drop a line to support[at]awe.sm (though please allow a couple days for a response). Please note if you’re a developer interested in exploring our APIs, we’re being a bit more liberal about granting access to http://developers.awe.sm so go ahead and apply.