Startup DeusM Aiming Online Communities At Business-Social Market

UBM on Thursday launched DeusM, a marketing services organization which will take its homegrown Community in a Box (CiaB) platform to the B2B market. The intent is to deliver business social media solutions, which DeusM identifies as the fastest growing segment of the online publishing arena.

"We're trying to drag B2B marketing kicking and screaming into the 21st century," said Stephen Saunders, managing director of DeusM and Min's Marketer of the Year 2010. "The marketing priorities of major customers have changed. Instead of using branding to make a short-term impact on a customer's perceptions, they now want to engage them in an educational dialog over the long term, because that's the length of their buying cycle."

"The communities we are building at DeusM allow them to do exactly that, using content to pull people into the site and keep them pinned there," added Saunders.

Those CiaB-centric communities include Internet Evolution, an IBM-sponsored site where online thought leaders opine about the future of the Web, and the Dell-sponsored Enterprise Efficiency. Its latest application is on EBN, a site for supply chain professionals. Three more CiaB-based sites are due by year's end.

DeusM describes CiaB as an integrated multimedia platform, which enables publishers to create specialized communities for their audiences. DeusM also taps the capabilities of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, to enhance each CiaB's Internet visibility by pushing its content outward and in turn attracting readers interested in engaging in discussions on the subject matter.

Marketing as a Service (MaaS) solutions such as DeusM are attracting increased attention, as advertisers hope to garner sustained engagement with audiences and integrate social media into their marketing initiatives, DeusM said in its coming-out press release.

Alongside managing director Saunders, Tony Uphoff, CEO of UBM TechWeb, will serve as DeusM chairman. Members of DeusM's advisory board include EDventure founder Esther Dyson, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and DNS inventor Paul Mockapetris.