Wayin Brings Clarity To Every Aspect Of Social Business

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Wayin is a social media startup that makes tools to analyze and integrate social content into sales, service, and marketing efforts. With $33.5 Million in funding and offices in Denver, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Japan, Brazil, Hong Kong and Argentina, Wayin brings clarity to every aspect of social business. Our interview below is with Elaine Feeney, CEO of Wayin:

Q: Wayin was founded by Scott McNealy, the former Sun Microsystems Co-founder. Could you tell us something more about the company?

A: Wayin is a social search and engagement platform that provides brands with real-time social media content discovery and contextual analysis to power amazing display.

Wayin is not a traditional technology start-up, which are most often based in Silicon Valley and led by young men fresh from college. Wayin is based in Denver and led by an impressive team of seasoned leaders including a significant amount of women including the CEO, CFO and General Counsel.

Scott McNealy deliberately based Wayin in Denver because he had such a positive experience with Sun’s large Colorado campus and educated workforce. Wayin has clearly benefitted and attracted very experienced leaders including key Sun Microsystems alumni, as well as top digital and media industry veterans. Most recently, Wayin scored a significant hire of Oracle veteran and Social Network product leader, Andy Kershaw, who joined Wayin as the VP of Strategy and Partnerships.

Q: Wayin helps brands accomplish their goals, what is your core competence?

A: Not only does Wayin allow marketers, digital leaders and broadcast journalists to search social media content in real time, but it also gives users the power to analyze results and use display capabilities across all channels including TV to encourage engagement – all in one platform.

By helping customers find relevant social content and allowing them to extend it’s reach beyond the original social platform, such as Twitter or Facebook, to owned properties, microsites or branded communities we are able to help brands increase engagement among key audiences. The ability to aggregate, curate, integrate and drive action on social content and then to measure the value of the data in real-time on both social and owned platforms delivers greater value and control for companies, deriving greater value from their social marketing and communication efforts.

Q: How does Wayin differ from other social media intelligence companies?

A: Wayin gives users the power to truly understand the context around social media stories. Who are the key influencers? What are people looking for and what do they care about? Within that, who are my customers and how do they relate to me? Being able to answer these questions makes it possible to effectively market to your customers and find potential customers. This context changes the way the brand interacts with the brands loyal customers and helps them to activate new customers.

A significant differentiator is our omni-channel display capabilities. Once marketers are able to search social content and understand it’s importance, they can display conversations and engagements on essentially any type of screen to help drive action. There are many examples of how innovative digital teams have applied this to address their business problem which goes beyond simply showing tweets on a jumbotron, it is used to encourage key audiences to interact with brands in a creative way. For example, we’ve helped retail brands show trending products during peak shopping moments to help inform their customers on what to purchase by displaying the top products on in-store displays or on the e-commerce site itself.

Q: What are your plans for the future? Do you have any new features in the pipeline?

A: The future of social marketing is based on flexible search, understanding the conversations and then being able to engage immediately and in the long term with the brands target audiences. Creating a long term, trusted relationship with a sense of community. We’re excited to be launching a new search and engagement engine next week that will offer digital leaders, marketers and broadcast journalists a suite of extended search, analysis and display features. The new Wayin platform will greatly enhance Wayin’s offering from exclusively display to an all-encompassing platform for discovering, understanding and driving action through the display of social media stories.

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