Buddy Media, the Facebook managing platform for businesses, announced this morning it had acquired the five-person New York start-up Spinback, which makes a social media plug-in and analytics dashboard that customers can enable by embedding a few lines of code on their web sites. “I’ve never seen a product that does what it does. It does what four or five technologies do in one,” said Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow when Betabeat reached him by phone this morning at Disney World, where he was attending the Mashable Connect conference with Spinback CEO Andrew Ferenci.
The New York connection was essential to the deal, the two CEOs said. “New York start-ups understand marketers better than West Coast start-ups,” Mr. Lazerow said. “Social media at the end of the day is word of mouth marketing on steroids.”
Spinback raised a small angel round of funding and had term sheets in place for a Series A when Buddy Media made a “really compelling offer” that the companies chose not to disclose. The companies had been talking about a partnership since February and it quickly became clear that the services were highly complementary–and both companies were strongly tied to New York. “We really like working in New York,” Mr. Ferenci said. There were some VCs that wanted them to move out to California, he said, but he felt the New York start-up scene was too vibrant to leave.
Spinback will move immediately into Buddy Media’s Flatiron office, where the parent company has around 170 employees, and the products will become “tightly integrated” over the next year as the companies merge, Mr. Lazerow said.
