Facebook ads management platform GraphEffect today announced the beta launch of a new social network for marketers aimed at helping cross-organizational teams collaborate.
GraphEffect followed the model of Facebook and other networks, giving users a profile, stream, messages and groups. It added task management and communication features called “follow-ups” and “sidebars.” Then, it turned its existing “ad manager” and “story manager” products into apps on the platform. GraphEffect will release APIs for developers to build their own marketing collaboration apps. Since GraphEffect is focused on Facebook marketing and advertising, developers might want to create tools for search and display campaigns, project management, working together on presentations or other functions.
It’s important to distinguish that the goal of this social network isn’t to connect with marketers everywhere and build up a large list of friends. It’s really about bringing people from different departments of an agency together with vendors, clients and platform reps.
“We want to make people work more efficiently with lessons we learned from social networking,” GraphEffect CEO James Borow says.
When marketers log into GraphEffect, they’ll see a feed of recent activity from people in their groups and updates about their ad campaigns. Groups can be created for different teams and projects, and those also include a feed of recent activity, as well as file sharing. Users can leave a comment that’s visible to the whole group or create a “sidebar” with specific people. Sidebars are private messages that display within context rather than sending users to a separate section of the platform. Users can also flag any item for follow-up.
GraphEffect is yet another platform working to promote collaboration while reducing email. For example, there’s Yammer, the “enterprise social network,” which Borow says is limited because it focuses on connecting people from the same company rather than cross-organizational teams. The idea with GraphEffect is to get account services, clients, community managers, art directors, analytics, PR, Facebook reps and others using the same platform, which was built for getting marketing work done.
Borow believes that the trend over the next few years will be to learn how people interact on Facebook and then apply it to different verticals to create the best tools for each space. He cites Lore as an example of what’s being done for education. These vertical-specific platforms help build more complex graphs that aren’t currently represented by Facebook’s friends and subscribers model. GraphEffect hopes its latest effort helps pioneer the marketers graph.
Get a test drive of the platform and request an invite here.
