Orbius Launches Pragmatic Brand-Focused Social Marketing Platform for Businesses

Company’s assault on high-cost white label providers set to do to social media what Salesforce.com did to CRM

DENVER, November 3, 2008 – At the Defrag 2008 conference today, Orbius announced a social marketing platform designed to alter the shape of the social media landscape in the same manner Salesforce.com reshaped the CRM market.   Where white label platforms can cost upwards to hundreds of thousands of dollars and take months to implement, Orbius has created a platform that allows businesses and organizations to build communities in a matter of days, with prices starting under $10,000. The platform’s low cost, structured content management and ease-of-use will help social marketing move from the realm of early adopters to main street small- and mid-sized businesses. In today’s economic environment, marketers are looking for pragmatic solutions that enable them to reduce their participation risk, while gaining all the business benefits that used to cost thousands and thousands of dollars. 

A study by Orbius in October 2008 revealed that 88 percent of respondents plan to incorporate social media tools into their marketing mix over the next 6-18 months. According to Gartner, by 2010, more than 60 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies with a Web site will connect to or host some form of online community that can be utilized for customer relationship purposes. 

“Orbius solves the social marketing accessibility problem for marketers and businesses by providing a structured set of configurable community-building tools that enable fast and easy online customer and supply chain partner engagement in a brand safe environment,” said C.H. Low, founder and CEO, Orbius.  “We provide pragmatic marketers a complete fully-configurable solution that won’t put their funding budget at risk, doesn’t require the involvement of IT and doesn’t take weeks or months to operationalize.”

Until today, only larger corporate brands and very innovative early adopter marketers could afford to build their own online communities.  Orbius’ low-entry cost gives smaller marketers the same community-building capabilities larger brands spend significant dollars to build and maintain. In the survey conducted by Orbius, more than half of the respondents believed a community should cost between $10,000 and $20,000 to implement.  Additionally, 43% of those that had taken the step to create their own online community said it took more than three-months to get a community up and running. The solution is designed to allow marketers to control the context and structure of content, so the voice of their brands isn’t lost in the discussion.

The Orbius platform is based on a scalable, flexible and easy-to-use software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. The Orbius platform not only supports the creation of blogs and discussion forums, traditional social media “point solutions”, but also provides seamlessly integrated capabilities such as: Website Maker, Ask the Expert, Two-way Online Newsletters, Interactive Surveys, Content Space, and Knowledge Center and secure Online Focus Groups.  The Orbius solution has received glowing third-party reviews around its strong brand controls and its configurability to be operational in less than 72-hours.

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