Ribbit and Sprout Partner to Seed Online Engagement Campaigns with Voice
Communications-Enabled Widgets and Content Provide New Level of Interactivity for Online Marketing CampaignsTelephony Enables Creative Agencies, Brands to Create More Dynamic, Engaging Rich Media Campaigns
NEW YORK, NY - (Creativity and Technology Conference) - June 2, 2009 - Ribbit, a BT company, today announced a strategic partnership with Sprout, the premier platform for developing and managing creative engagement marketing campaigns, to offer easily integrated telephony features for any online social engagement campaign built on the Sprout platform. The combination of Ribbit and Sprout offers a new realm of interaction opportunities through integrated voice, SMS, click-to-call, call transcriptions, and other Ribbit-enabled telephony functions. The innate richness of voice and telephony enables brands and agencies to easily build higher levels of engagement and social awareness with their target communities, resulting in enhanced value, brand "stickiness" and desired community action.
Online communities today have a growing expectation for a closer level of interaction with the brands and personalities they follow, which presents continued opportunities for creative agencies and innovative brands to develop exciting campaigns with the latest technologies. The Ribbit communications platform - a carrier-grade telephony-plus-software infrastructure - is enabling people and brands to completely rethink the way they communicate and interact. With Ribbit, voice or communications-enabled media provides closer, more personal engagement for online communities. Available directly through the Sprout platform, agencies and brands now can dramatically increase the reach and effectiveness of their campaigns with easily integrated and feature-rich voice and telephony capabilities.
"Ribbit and Sprout provide a powerful combination for creative agencies and brands," said Ray Lee, Director of Platform Strategy and Business Development at Ribbit. "Integrated voice and telephony fundamentally change the way organizations can now interact with their target online communities, and enhances the relationship for better value on both sides. The new telephony features in the Sprout platform give agencies and brands the cutting edge tools to quickly and easily develop highly engaging, rich media campaigns - a big advantage in the highly competitive online marketing world."
TELEPHONY IN THE ONLINE CAMPAIGN
The creative possibilities of telephony integration with Sprout are limited only by the creator's imagination, and can easily turn interested customers into live leads or transactions. For example, an innovative auto brand could develop a dream car-building application on their main website or other social media property, allowing user customization with all of the bells and whistles available. To continue the potential customer interaction, a stylish Ribbit-enabled "click-to-call" button could instantly connect the customer to a live operator to answer questions, schedule a test drive, or initiate a sale.
The movie industry is another example where voice and telephony integrated with online marketing campaigns can create better community engagement. Leveraging the interest of movie fans for frequent updates on cast news and movie progress, studios can integrate movie-themed widgets into any online campaign to distribute information and dynamic voice content. For example, a cast member or director could privately call a Ribbit number to send real-time, voice updates to all widget users. With Sprout functionality, fans could then forward the voice updates or transcriptions to their social network profile, and even leave their own comment for all of their friends to hear. News from the set, reaction to personal developments, updates from the red carpet - these are all personal, engaging updates that will keep fans coming back to the widget and brand for more information. The integration of voice and interactive communication dramatically increases the widget value to the user, and can significantly increase brand visibility, reach and stickiness.
"Agencies and brands are always looking for ways to make their campaigns stickier and more engaging," said Carnet Williams, CEO of Sprout. "Our technology platform allows them to launch the most creative online campaigns and by adding voice with Ribbit, brands will experience an unprecedented level of value, awareness, and engagement. We are excited to see how this will be used in the next generation of online social engagement campaigns."
TELEPHONY AT CREATIVITY AND TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE (CaT)
Catch Ribbit on June 3 in the Metropolitan Pavilion Gallery at the Creativity and Technology conference, in New York. Featured demonstrations will include Sprout, Ribbit Labs, communications-enabled ad banners, and Ribbit augmented-reality calling. For more information on demonstration times and event updates, please visit www.ribbit.com/blog.
ABOUT SPROUT
Sprout helps brands develop and deploy engagement campaigns across diverse social networks. The Sprout platform solves a problem that has been plaguing new media marketers for years - How to quickly create brand experiences that are easily transportable across Facebook, MySpace and other social networks without having to find and hire expensive development resources. With Sprout, agencies and brands can create rich experiences that marry brand assets with UGC to capture social gestures and allow advocates to share their experiences with friends. Funded by Polaris Venture Partners, Sprout is based in Honolulu, HI and San Francisco, CA. To learn more, please visit http://sproutinc.com.
ABOUT RIBBIT
Ribbit is an open platform for communication innovation, bringing together the Internet, voice and data to form a new world of intelligent, integrated communication solutions. We see a future where rich voice and data travels seamlessly across devices, networks, carriers and protocols to create a better informed and more connected world. Ribbit was created to accelerate that future.
Ribbit is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. Ribbit is a wholly owned subsidiary of BT. For more information about Ribbit, please visit
www.ribbit.com.
Ribbit Media Contact
Denise Vardakas
The Conversation Group
Email Denise
(650) 483-5083
Sprout Media Contact
Cara Cassidy
Email Cara
(408) 460-0241