Shoutlet Adds Twitter, YouTube To Social CRM

Businesses Take Action With Twitter

Social CRM company Shoutlet is expanding its platform beyond Facebook to encompass YouTube and Twitter, while also adding HTML 5 alternatives to its Flash-based social media widgets for websites.

Shoutlet has been best known for its website widgets and Facebook integration, including a shop and share component for social shopping. The Shoutlet 4.0 release announced Tuesday aims to make it easier for marketers to engage with customers across multiple networks, watching for people who "like" or "retweet" their content as likely prospects. The product expansion covers YouTube, Twitter, and more than 100 other social sites.

"We had elements of Twitter support in there all along, but we've really made it more robust in 4.0," CEO Jason Weaver said in an interview. Shoutlet has been hearing customer demand for broader social media support beyond Facebook all along, but the customers have been shouting louder lately. The volume has particularly gone up on YouTube as marketing managers learn how to use tutorial and product videos more effectively, he said.

Shoutlet published its own YouTube video outlining the product features.

Notable customers include AAA, Perry Ellis, Rayovac, and Bert's Bees. While Shoutlet has some similarities to products like HootSuite that allow publishing to and monitoring of multiple social channels, Shoutlet doesn't offer free accounts or even a Web-based signup form. Instead, visitors to its website are encouraged to sign up for a demonstration, which Weaver said is part of the company's enterprise sales model. "We want to tailor a demo specifically for the clients, as they tend to have very specific needs," he said.

Shoutlet also claims to go deeper into customer relationship and brand management functionality than some of its competitors and to support multiple brands, as well as franchise and agent relationships, a niche also being pursued by companies like Hearsay.

Shoutlet 4.0 features a revamped user interface, including a calendar view that makes it easier to see a lineup of scheduled posts at a glance and modify it as needed. Shoutlet is also introducing a contest application for Facebook to support contests, sweepstakes and giveaways that can be promoted within Facebook pages and easily shared between contestants and their friends.

The HTML 5 support in Shoutlet 4.0 is mostly relevant to the widgets the company has created to display social media feeds on customer websites. Because the widgets were previously based on Adobe Flash, they weren't displayed properly on devices like the iPhone and iPad that don't support Flash. Shoutlet now offers a browser detection capability to serve an HTML 5 equivalent to those devices.

Shoutlet also introduced a native iPhone app that can be used to capture video or audio -- for example, from an announcement at a trade show -- and post it to YouTube, Facebook, or the client's own website, directly from the phone.