startupmania

It seems that everybody is marketing something nowadays. Whether you’re trying to carve a name for yourself in the harsh, competitive world of cricket-blogging, or trying to sell your latest CD, people are turning by the droves to social networking sites and what was once viewed as marketing or advertising, is now viewed simply as “user-generated content”.

But, like in all things, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about something. So how does one send out the right message and, more importantly, to the right people. After all, sending out mass-messages to users who may not care for your all-night ukulele jam session will land you in the category of the very annoying (albeit delicious) meat product – spam.

Israeli startup MyDrifts is here to help. Founded by Victor Rosenman, Shlomo Swidler (both former senior developers at Sun Microsystems), Oded Caspi – a former VP of business development at Vbox, Lior Shamir – founder of We Are Listening and Ram Hardi, the company promises to provide would-be social network campaigners the right list of people who will actually care about their campaign.

“Before our solution existed, MySpace or Twitter users would add any user within their lie of sight to their contact list. There was no way, for instance, to sort your contact list for users who would most like to hear about an upcoming show by a specific musician,” Shamir explains in a StartUpMania interview. “Through our program there is no need to send out invitations to ten thousand users, you can send out 200-300 concert invitations to those users who are most fit to receive the virtual flyer.”

Shamir illustrates that through MyDrifts language analysis technology, the system can recognize potential addressees who live near the schedule venue, those who like similar artists and make sure they fall within the correct age bracket. “Our technology can analyze the profile of any user in a social network and rate their relevancy to a specific campaign,” Shamir explains.

MyDrifts, which already managed to procure a government-sponsored venture capital fund, is aiming to go public with its social network semantic analysis service towards the tail end of 2009. According to company spokespeople the company is analyzing accounts on MySpace, Facebook and Twitter even today. Furthermore, if you happen to me an active musician with a MySpace Music Account, you are invited to register at the MyDrifts’s website and ask to participate in the trial version allowing you to try out the service for one campaign. After your initial advertising campaign you can continue to enjoy MyDrifts’ services for a small monthly fee.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum