After weeks of voting, the results are in. This is the final ranking of CIO.com's 10 Hot Social Media Startups. Note that voting counts for only about 30-40 percent of the final selection criteria and companies are ranked based on such factors as the pedigree of the management team, VC funding, viability of the niche and the uniqueness of the product.
[Related: 10 Hot Cloud Startups to Watch]
[Related: 7 Hot Mobile Startups to Watch in 2013]
This roundup of hot social media startups was culled from a close to 100 recommendations and pared down to 40 nominees that were originally listed on Startup50.
Because narrowing a list of so many compelling startups down to 10 is a tricky and subjective process, we've recently started to crowdsource part of the decision-making process.
After nearly 2,000 people voted, the top 10 vote getters were scrutinized for any weaknesses. If, for example, the company has a management team that is too inexperienced or a concept we just couldn't quite buy, I moved down to the next startup on the list (and on and on) until I found a more compelling one.
(For more on the initial selection criteria and weighting, go here.)
Even though voting is only part of the decision process, the wisdom of crowds has become more clear. Eight out of the top 10 vote getters made the list of 10 finalists. The startups voters favored were favored for good reasons.
Here are CIO.com's Top 10 Social Media startups:
1. SocialFlow
What they do: SocialFlow's products give businesses and brands ways to increase audience engagement. It also ties performance goals to the company's social media strategy.
Why they're No. 1: SocialFlow finished at the top of CIO voting, they have an impressive stack of VC funding at their disposal and have an impressive list of customers.
Headquarters: New York, N.Y.
CEO: Missy Godfrey, who was previously a Managing Director of North Sea Partners.
Founded: 2009
Funding: $19.4 million from Fairhaven Capital, SoftBank, RRE, AOL Ventures, Betaworks, Highline Capital and a number of prominent angel investors, including Ron Conway and Mike Lazerow.
Why they're on this list in the first place:As companies develop social media engagement strategies, two distinct challenges emerge. During the initial phase of use, businesses must figure out how to publish effective content. Later, after companies have invested real resources into their social media efforts, they need tools to optimize and manage content, and to encourage real engagement with followers.
SocialFlow relies on Wall Street-like analytics to rigorously optimize social publishing and advertising. Cadence, SocialFlow's social media publishing platform provides the data-based intelligence companies need in order to publish the most relevant information at the right time. As engagement varies throughout the day, Cadence listens to real-time conversations and helps determine which of a company's messages is most relevant to the audience in the moment. The predictive analytics used by the platform also help customers control the frequency and reach of the messages.
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Crescendo, SocialFlow's "attention buying platform," attempts to find out exactly where audience attention is going to be most convertible and most cost-effective in order to execute ad buys in real time. Crescendo utilizes the real-time conversations of a target audience to identify key words to target outside audiences.
With this approach, Crescendo can target underutilized keywords and win impressions at lower costs. To provide the highest quality targeting, Crescendo partitions the ads based on a variety of interest-based segments, rather than one-dimensional demographic filters. SocialFlow claims that by taking advantage of emerging opportunities to capture attention as interests and behaviors shift, their platform delivers high conversions at low cost with heightened brand awareness and retention.
Market Potential and Competitive Landscape:Competitors include TayKey, GraphEffect and Bottlenose. SocialFlow has an impressive customer list (Wal-Mart, Pepsi, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Gawker, Volkswagen, and Al Jazeera), a good amount of VC funding and are in a high-growth sector.
2. Nexgate (formerly Social IQ Networks)
What they do: Provide a suite of cloud-based services that help companies discover and audit social media accounts. Then, once visibility is established, Social IQ helps companies protect their brand-run accounts and applications on the social Web.
Why they're No. 2: Nexgate actually finished in the middle of the pack in voting. However, we believe their name change right before voting started hurt them as much as anything. They have a credible amount of early funding and a solid customer list, despite being just over a year old.
Headquarters: Burlingame, Calif.
CEO: Devin Redmond. Before Social IQ, he served as the global Vice President for Product Management, Corporate Development, Business Development and Marketing at Websense.
Founded: April 2012
Funding: On April 9, 2013, Nexgate closed a $3.5 million Series A round from Sierra Ventures. This builds on the $1 million in seed funding they previously secured from Windforce Ventures, Deepak Kamra of Canaan Partners and other angel investors.
Why they're on this list in the first place:The biggest problem with social media in the enterprise it that it's become a central communication channel for businesses, yet there is a complete lack of governance surrounding it.
Many brands own and run hundreds of accounts on social networks. Unlike other communication channels and infrastructure, enterprises don't have visibility into most of these accounts, nor can they enforce unified security, compliance, and acceptable use policies on them.
We've seen plenty of instances of social media missteps blowing up in a brand's face, such as the Gap's Hurricane Sandy fiasco. Fixing that problem is a big deal.
Once Nexgate's suite of cloud-based services discovers social media accounts, it helps companies audit them and wrap policies around them. This helps companies protect their brand-run accounts and applications on the social Web. The suite integrates directly into social networks to help enterprises deal with social account sprawl, account auditing, account access protection, application control and content control across security, compliance and acceptable use.
Nexgate comes with pre-configured policies that regulate data and applications and enforce archiving. Two newly added policies automatically detect anything that may run afoul of new FDA regulations for pharmaceutical companies and FINRA regulations for financial firms.
Market Potential and Competitive Landscape: The social media security market is starting to heat up. Nexgate will compete with other startups, such as Actiance and SocialWare, and don't be surprised when incumbent security vendors move into this space.
Customers include Backroads Travel, Imperva, City of Memphis, Conrad Caine, Dome9, Porticor, Rosetta Stone, and WatchDox.
3. Bloomfire
What they do: They provide an "intranet solution that is reminiscent of Pinterest, to address the knowledge sharing, collaboration and content management issues that are plaguing modern businesses."
Why they're No. 3: Like Nexgate, they finished in the middle of the pack with voting. However, CEO Craig Malloy has a solid track record; they're better funded than many others on this list and have a solid customer list.
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
CEO: Craig Malloy. Malloy sold his previous companies, ViaVideo and LifeSize Communications, to Polycom and Logitech, respectively.
Founded: 2010
Funding: In March 2013, the company secured an $8 million second tranche of its Series A round, bringing the company's total funding raised to $18 million. Austin Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and CEO Malloy are the investors.
Why they're on this list in the first place:Bloomfire's software unites information silos across cloud, social and mobile platforms with a centralized user interface that enables workers to instantly connect with subject matter experts and relevant content across their organization, promoting anytime, anywhere collaboration.
The goal is to make collaboration and information sharing easy, while also promoting collaboration among workers and departments that wouldn't communicate otherwise. Bloomfire argues that it creates a "Pintrest-like experience," which is highly visual and intuitive.
Too many enterprise collaboration/content management tools are cumbersome pigs. If Bloomfire can truly deliver a simple Pinterest-like experience, it's a step in the right direction.
Moreover, Bloomfire has attracted some serious VC money for a social media startup.
Market Potential and Competitive Landscape:Gartner predicts that by 2016, 50 percent of large enterprise organizations will have internal social networks. Bloomfire believes that the content management, messaging and social enterprise markets will soon exceed more than $40 billion in combined annual revenues.
[ 11 Promising Enterprise Social Networks ]
Bloomfire competes with both startups and incumbent collaboration and content management providers. These include Microsoft (Yammer and Sharepoint), Jive, Huddle, Basecamp and others.
Bloomfire has more than 220 paying customers (including Etsy, Kellogg's, Comcast, Bechtel and the Make-a-Wish Foundation) and claims more than 65,000 corporate users worldwide.
4. prollie
What they do: Provide a tool that measures social media influence, one that tries to measure the quality of a person's contributions to social media networks rather than just how frequently that person posts and how many followers he or she has attracted.
Why they're No. 4: Prollie actually finished second in voting, but they need to reel in more funding and get customers on record to finish any higher than this.
Headquarters: New York, N.Y.
CEO: Mike Fabbri, who formerly worked as a social media strategist for several luxury brands at advertising agencies Carat and Vizeum.
Founded: March 2011
Funding: $500,000 in seed and angel funding. Investors include Frank V. Sica and Allen Cutler.
Why they're on this list in the first place:Being skeptical of Klout, we've found that a high Klout score is almost invariably associated with the most annoying people in your networks, those who compulsively overshare. An alternative tool, one that focuses instead on quality, is a good idea.
According to CEO Fabbri, "Influence scoring is an inept way of measuring how qualified a person is on social media. It's easy to game and usually gives undue attention to celebrities, rather than people with true talent."
Prollie's goal is to uncover qualified people to friend or follow on social networks based on your specific interests. prollie's algorithm evaluates users based on skill, efficiency, and usage of each social network and assigns a letter grade to represent quality and talent on social media, not influence or reach.
Prollie also provides a user-focused search platform that lets people search by interest, network, grade level, and location.
Market Potential and Competitive Landscape: The most direct competitors are Klout and Kred. One main reservation about this space is the fact that no one has figured out a surefire way to monetize businesses like this.
5. Shiftgig
What they do: Shiftgig enables better connections between employers and job candidates in the restaurant, hotel, nightlife, and retail verticals.
Why they're No. 5: Even though they finished fourth in initial voting on Startup50, we almost left them out of the final 10. Why? Well, this isn't the best fit for an IT audience, obviously. However, they finished strong in voting again, coming in third in this CIO round, and when we researched reviews about them and sorted through numerous endorsements for Shiftgig that were sent to Startup50, we couldn't justify leaving them out. Quite simply, users love them.
Headquarters: Chicago, Ill.
CEO: Eddie Lou, who was previously a general partner with OCA Ventures.
Founded: August 2011
Funding: Shiftgig raised $3 million in its Series A funding in October 2012 from I2A Fund, FireStarter Fund, and Red Barn Investments, as well as prominent angels such as Sam Yagan, CEO of Match.com; Brian Spaly, CEO of Trunk Club; and Ken Pelletier, CTO of Groupon.
Why they're on this list in the first place:The verticals Shiftgig targets tend to have very high turnover. A social media tool like this could certainly reduce turnover and, perhaps, also reduce the costs associated with a high-turnover labor force.
Shiftgig has a good model and target market. After all, most bartenders don't tend to find work on Monster.com. What seems to be missing, though -- at least on first glance -- is the kind of review/recommendation engine that benefits consumers of services like Yelp and even Amazon. Part of why there is high turnover in these sectors is that employees are often poorly paid and even exploited (and employers have plenty of legitimate gripes about unreliable employees too). If Shiftgig can shine a light on those problems, and then deliver that info back to employers and employees alike so they can improve, it could really have an impact.
We were a little skeptical about including Shiftgig in a roundup intended for a CIO and IT audience. However, it does serve as an example of just how disruptive social media promises to be in coming years.