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In talking to marketers, he explained, “The biggest problem they have is that they’re going from a production model where they create things like television commercials and billboard ads and they’re moving to a content model where instead of creating something every 3 to 6 months like a TV commercial is, they need to create something every 3 to 6 minutes. They don’t know what to put into that blank box.” The biggest publisher on Facebook, he pointed out, is Coca Cola with 52 million fans. “If you think about it, these brands are massive publishers in these channels and of course what we know is that the bigger the audience, the more content you need.

—With Its $9 M. Series A, Percolate Might Become the Next Buddy Media By Turning Brands Into Microbloggers | Betabeat

I don’t mind hiring people from there. We have a nice handful of ex-agency folks now and they’re very talented… One thing we noticed in our first six months to a year is that people’s appetite for risk is not that high. When we were an unfunded startup, there were a lot of people who were saying, “Oh yeah, I want to go work for a startup, but I want to get the same salary I was getting before.” We were an unfunded startup and we were profitable, but we can’t give you the salary you were making before.

—Percolate, ‘Son’ of Buddy Media, Helps Brands Build Interest Graphs

Percolate is a New York-based startup that helps CMOs manage all of their social media content and it suggests content for them to blast to their followings.

In the past six months, the team of 22 people have signed up 25 Fortune 500 companies. Now there are more than 30 corporations paying for yearly licenses to use Percolate. Brands including Reuters, GE, American Express and MasterCard, and they are each coughing up $10,000 per month.

When you add it up, that’s more than $3.5 million per year, which isn’t bad for a startup that’s only raised $1.5 million and isn’t even two years old.

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Percolate, New York’s Gift To CMOs, Has More Than 30 Fortune 500 Clients - Business Insider

I love these guys, I love this company. This investment is really paying off. They are killing it. 

But here’s the thing: Increasingly, brands are bringing social marketing in-house. The era of the social media Agency of Record is ending. So brands don’t really care if their social media management tools cut out the agency. They just want to be told what to say. It’s become a bit of a conundrum for brands that have spent the last few years amassing an audience in the form of followers and “likes.” Now what do they say?

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Percolate is Solving the One Problem its Social SaaS Competitors Won’t Touch | PandoDaily

Awesome story on Percolate. Those guys are killing it. 

Brands struggle to see themselves as both content creators and content consumers. They’re like someone with perpetual writer’s block, faced with a blank screen and mounting anxiety. That’s because brands are used to almost exclusively talking about themselves, and almost always in a very planned way. Brier is a fan of the “stock-and-flow” theory of content. There is stock content, highly produced and with high value. And there is flow, the small bursts of information done on the fly. Brands are used to dealing in the stock content of TV ads, less so in anything that’s on the fly.

According to Brier, in order to be a content creator, you need to be a content consumer, and brands, historically, have outsourced the consumption of culture through its agency partners and, most importantly, haven’t done this in real time. But as the social Web shifts the campaign-as-linchpin mindset — one that lives in a specific time period — to an always-on philosophy, brands find a vacuum is created where its audience is ready to discover and then share content.

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The Curation Wunderkind | Digiday

Good article about Noah and Percolate today