You might think that someone with 75,000 Twitter followers would be just plain annoying. But Laura Fitton (@pistachio) has some very useful things to share—on Twitter and elsewhere.
What she’s saying today is that oneforty, the Cambridge, MA-based tech startup she founded in 2009, has expanded beyond its original focus on building a Twitter app store, and into the broader realm of “social business.” In other words, the company has evolved its model from a consumer-facing app store to a buyer’s guide for businesses looking for social tools.
“Social business” software refers to social media tools being used by companies to reach customers, manage sales relationships, build online communities, and also help their employees communicate internally. The market appears to be growing fast but is hard to quantify; the social advertising component alone is several billion dollars a year, Fitton says. Some well-known companies and services in the sector include Jive Software, Lithium Technologies, Offerpop, and Nimble; tech giants like IBM, Microsoft, Dell, and Cisco are also investing in social business products.
“We’re more than tools now, and we’re more than Twitter,” Fitton says.
I’m not here to write advertising copy, so I’ll leave it to oneforty (and other media outlets) to spell out all of its revamped offerings—which include more than 700 how-to guides and case studies for social business, a directory of social business professionals, and personalized “benchmark reports” that tell customers how well their social tools are working for them and how they stack up against competitors.
Suffice to say, the company is now focused on its core business users in a strong effort to make money. Oneforty is still pretty small—seven full-time employees and four part-timers. But its blog traffic has doubled in each of the last two months, Fitton says, and its new business user signups have grown by a factor of five since October. She declined to comment on the company’s revenues.
Fitton draws a parallel between what’s happening now in social media and the
