Curalate
Curalate is the leading marketing suite for the visual web, enabling brands and agencies to measure, monitor, and grow brand engagement on image-centric sites such as Pinterest and Instagram. Curalate is in use by hundreds of brands and agencies including Urban Outfitters, Michael Kors, Kraft Foods, Real Simple, Better Homes and Gardens, Edelman Digital, and GroupM Next.-
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One Social Media Start-Up Rises From the Ashes of Another
One of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to do is to admit defeat. But in the case of Apu Gupta and Nick Shiftan, failure was likely the best thing that could have happened to them.
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CRACKING THE CODE ON THE WEB'S MOST SHAREABLE IMAGES
With the right tools, brands can easily monitor words, such as their names, across social platforms. But increasingly consumers aren't sharing words. They're sharing photos. “Consumers are having millions a conversation a day, saying, 'I love this J.Crew sweater,' without saying the words 'J.Crew' or putting in a SKU number or doing anything that says, 'This is a J.Crew sweater,'” says Apu Gupta about images shared on networks such as Pinterest.
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Curalate Pairs Pinterest, Instagram Analytics; also adds promotions tool for photo-sharing service
Over the past year or so, images have become social marketing's breakout currency. Pinterest played a heavy role in that shift, as did Instagram’s surging popularity and its acquisition by Facebook. The ascendance of images has increased the need for marketers to be able to measure their impact, leading to the rise of companies like Curalate, Pinfluencer, Simply Measured and Nitrogram, all of which either specialize in Pinterest or Instagram analytics.
Now Pinterest analytics firm Curalate is adding Instagram to its tools, claiming to be the first analytics firm to combine Pinterest and Instagram in one dashboard. "What [Salesforce-owned social analytics firm] Radian6 did for text-based conversations, we're going to be doing for visual," said Curalate CEO and co-founder Apu Gupta.
Curalate clients like HGTV, Nine West and Michael Kors can now use its platform to check out which of their photos are most popular on the Facebook-owned photo-sharing site and how they compare with their content on Pinterest, all within the same analytics dashboard (brands can also separate the channels). Curalate pulls Instagram photos based on the hashtags users append, and if a user shared their Instagram photo to Pinterest, Curalate's image-recognition technology can match the images for clearer comparisons, Gupta said.
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Fashion retailer H&M is pretty popular on Pinterest—in spite of itself. Over the last month, the social scrapbooking platform's users have pinned, repinned, commented on or liked the brand’s products 145,000 times, according to Pinterest analytics firm Curalate (H&M is not a client). The problem is, a good number of H&M’s popular pins feature dead links—an increasing problem for retailers, said Curalate.
For example, one H&M dress has been shared on Pinterest nearly 1,200 times in the past 30 days. But clicking on that product's pin returns the message,"Sorry, this item is no longer available." Same goes for a pair of H&M shoes shared more than 2,700 times on Pinterest in the last month.
"Pinterest is driving a ton of people to [H&M's] website, but they can’t buy anything when they get there," said Curalate CEO Apu Gupta. H&M did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but the retailer is only one example of more pervasive missed opportunities. Curalate found that 48 percent of top retailers’ most popular products on Pinterest link back to expired pages. "We look and go, 'My God, how much money are they leaving on the table?’" Gupta said.
So what gives? As far as Gupta sees it, the issue is the way brands are siloed. Big marketers typically separate their social and digital marketing teams from e-commerce. "A classic problem of commerce and marketing not working together," said SapientNitro's global head of social media Nathaniel Perez.
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Pinterest Image Data Proves Valuable to Brands
Startups Curalate and Pinfluencer Provide Data In Absence of APIs
Brands want to know how consumers are using Pinterest. And the fact that the image-based social platform doesn't offer a public API hasn't stopped scrappy firms from helping them find out. Curalate, which grabbed $3 million in Series A funding last month, works with more than 300 brand clients including Gap, Nieman Marcus, Benjamin Moore Paints and Campbell's.
While Curalate has had early success in the Pinterest measurement game, the fact is the company can't collect information on which products people add to their Pinterest pages or measure for trends on the picture-posting site directly from Pinterest. Instead, because the popular social platform has not unveiled a public API, Curalate and other Pinterest analytics companies such as Pinfluencer must crawl the site to gather data.
"It's hard, hard work," said Apu Gupta, Curalate CEO. Despite Pinterest's lack of a public API, he continued, "We still went ahead and built this.... The lack of an API in some ways creates an opportunity for companies to help solve a problem."
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First Round Capital Founder Story: Curalate
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Pinterest Analytics Service Curalate Raises $3M
Curalate has already done one thing right: Unlike competitors like Pinfluencer, PinReach and Pinerly (now Reachli), it doesn’t have “pin” in its name. In the big, bad world of building services on top of other social media platforms, having that measure of independence from the beginning seems like a good idea.
The Philadelphia-based company, which applies image recognition to track pictures posted on Pinterest on behalf of brands, has now raised $3 million in Series A funding led by NEA with First Round Capital and MentorTech Ventures (the three also provided seed funding for the company, back in 2011, when it was doing something completely different, an “Airbnb for parking and storage” called Storably).
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Study: Almost 50% of top Pinterest pins link to webpages that don’t exist
48 percent of the most popular pins on Pinterest lead to expired pages on top retailers’ websites, according to a new study by Curalate, the social curation company. Since Pinterest is the fourth largest referral traffic driver to e-commerce websites, that’s a big problem.
And it’s one that many retailers haven’t yet woken up to.
“E-commerce retailers are used to a world in which they have products for sale, put them on the site, sell out, and take them down,” Curalate founder Apu Gupta told me yesterday. “But now all the stuff that people are pinning continues to live on Pinterest long after the products are gone. And we’ve discovered that once a product gets popular, it continues to get more popular.”
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Pinterest Launches Business Pages to Get Cozy With Brands
Pinterest is sending a signal to the multitude of brands and retailers already active on its platform that it's getting ready to open for business itself by unveiling accounts designated for marketers today.
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With 600 Clients Curalate Launches Pinterest Contest and Promotions Tool
Brands have increasingly been looking to take advantage of the trend towards visual social networks like Pinterest. Philadelphia-based Curalate provides a marketing platform to do just that, and the company launched out of private beta in May 2012 to provide an analytics tool companies use to track engagement on Pinterest. Today Curalate announced the release of a new promotions platform to help companies run, track, and engage their Pinterest followers through contests. The company currently works with over 600 brands and agencies, including Urban Outfitters, Michael Kors, Real Simple, and Better Homes.
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FIRST FRIDAYS: APU GUPTA, CO-FOUNDER/CEO OF CURALATE
In this month’s edition of First Fridays, we introduce you to Apu Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Curalate, a marketing suite for the visual web that enables brands to connect with consumers through the power of imagery. Curalate gives brands the ability to measure, monitor, and grow their presence on visual sites, such as Pinterest, and also employs sophisticated image-recognition technologies to relate images and visual conversations to brands, discover brand advocates, and increase earned media for brands. Read on for Apu’s thoughts on the companies which most inspire him, as well as his expert opinion on the future of social curation.
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Curalate’s Promote tool takes the pain out of Pinterest contests for marketers and users
Curalate launches its Promote promotion module today to solve the pain points of running contests on a visual social network like Pinterest. Pinterest is every social media marketer’s dream come true. Still, it’s something of a misunderstood tool, not to mention that there are few resources available to brands to help with their campaigns. Today Curalate, a social media monitoring and analytics service for image-based marketing, is solving that pain point with the launch of “Promote.” Brands can now take the guess work out of hosting contests and promotions on Pinterest, while tracking how well the campaigns are doing.
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Curalate’s ‘Promote’ Quadruples Followers In Pinterest Sweepstakes
Curalate, the first marketing platform for the visual web, is announcing the success of the company’s Promote tool, which recently helped Carnival Cruise Lines quadruple followers during an 11-day promotion on Pinterest. Curalate is proving that analytics and engagement tools for the visual web are becoming more important than keyword-based marketing tools thanks the company’s promising work with global brand and agency leaders. Curalate offers four tools for brands: Measure, Engage, Publish, and Promote.
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With 600 Clients, Curalate Launches Pinterest Contest and Promotions Tool
Brands have increasingly been looking to take advantage of the trend towards visual social networks like Pinterest. Philadelphia-based Curalate provides a marketing platform to do just that, and the company launched out of private beta in May 2012 to provide an analytics tool companies use to track engagement on Pinterest. Today Curalate announced the release of a new promotions platform to help companies run, track, and engage their Pinterest followers through contests. The company currently works with over 600 brands and agencies, including Urban Outfitters, Michael Kors, Real Simple, and Better Homes.
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Who’s Winning the Pinterest Election?
Of all the major social networks having an impact on this year’s presidential election, Pinterest is the newest. And while some of the once-red-hot buzz around the image-sharing network has died down, both the Barack Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns maintain an active presence there. But which candidate is more popular and, dare we say, more pinteresting?
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Mashable Features Curalate as the #1 Pinterest analytics tool to “supercharge your influence"
Use Curalate's service for enterprise-level Pinterest analytics. Your brand will learn about its most engaged followers and be able to join the conversation by accessing Curalate's consolidated communication tab. You'll be able to strategize existing Pinterest campaigns and future content by identifying trends of a viral nature.
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VCs and Start-Ups Pin Their Hopes on Pinterest
When Twitter last month announced a ticker symbol feature to enable searches for stocks and companies using the dollar sign, StockTwits Chief Executive Howard Lindzon quickly blogged a frustrated response, calling the adoption of so-called cashtags a "hijacking" of his company's idea and time.
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Group M Next Taps Pinterest Analytics Company Curalate
The nascent Pinterest ecosystem is showing some signs of maturing. Group M Next has inked a licensing deal with Curalate, an analytics platform that uses image-recognition technology to mine "pins" for actionable data for brands.
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Curalate: Pinterest analytics shop doubles client base to 400, including Kraft Foods, Warby Parker
After a few pivots in less than a year, homegrown Philly startup and Pinterest analytics provider Curalate might just be here to stay. Curalate started as Storably, a marketplace for storage space, but co-founder Apu Gupta says the team couldn't get both sides of the market to match and shut down last fall.
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Pinterest Prompts a Start-Up's Pivot: Meet Curalate, an Analytics Engine for Images
Pinterest's rocket rise may be slowing, but there are still lots of companies struggling to keep up with the image-sharing site. Apu Gupta wants to help: His Curalate promises to help brands and e-commerce companies track the use of their products on Pinterest, and eventually on other image-focused sites, too.
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Look Out: Pinterest Marketing Platform Curalate Lands $750k Seed From NEA, First Round, MentorTech
A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate, which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA, First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers.
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Curalate: Making Social Curation Work for Brands
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investment
Received $750k Seed Funding
Participation New Enterprise Associates, First Round Capital, MentorTech Ventures
