Five Questions with….Social Mention

A week or so ago, I wrote a post about Social Mention, a start-up out of Ottawa that does social media search – blogs, micro-blogs, comments, news, video, etc. To learn more about the company, I fired off some questions to founder Jon Cianciullo.

Q: Can you tell me about Social Mention’s roots? Who’s behind it and what was the inspiration to create it?

A: The idea for Social Mention isn’t wholly original. The web has a lot of search engines, but the problem is most of them search the “Web”. Conversations today are expanding beyond the Web and, ultimately, beyond the reach of conventional search engines, and into the world of instantaneous status updates, micro-blogs, comments, bookmarks, video feeds, and photo streams.

For years, whenever I wanted to track what people were saying about me or some Web app I launched, I would have to conduct multiple searches every time on Google, Technorati, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious etc. All those services are great, but ultimately it was far too time
consuming. That experience is what inspired me to create Social Mention. Social Mention is currently a solo project but with the great response it’s gotten so far, plans are to build it up.

Q: Tracking social media conversations seems to emerging as a vibrant market. Do you see SM as being on the vanguard?

As I mentioned above, conversation are increasingly moving away from content which is easily-indexed by traditional search engines and towards instant real-time updates and posts. There are lots of great services for tracking social media such as comments and lifestreams
but none that offer a simple Google-like experience. Social Mention offers that Google-like experience for searching the social media landscape.

Q: How does SM work? How are you able to search for such a wide variety of areas from blogs to comments to images?

A: Social Mention works in much the same way a Web search engine works; but instead of searching the entire Web it searches only the most popular social media sources for any given topic. Social Mention has the ability to differentiate various types of content allowing media
to be indexed properly.

Q: What are you doing to get the word out?

A: Like many start-ups, our chief source of growth is word of mouth marketing (much of which we’ve been tracking on socialmention.com). We are currently growing organically while the technology is perfected.

Q: When are you going to update your “About Us” section with some more information?

Soon.

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