Matt Booth hasn’t let any grass under his feet since taking the helm at Solfo/Yellowbot last year. The company has closed a $6.35 million Series A funding round, build up its team to include more focus on marketing and business development, expanded the product portfolio and, finally, changed its name to Connectivity.

As Solfo/Yellowbot, the company was known for its reputation and presence management solutions, and was known as a strong engineering-centric company. One of Booth’s objectives has been to expand the marketing and business development focus. He has grown the team to 27 (from around 20 when he joined) and plans to expand to 65 by the end of the year, adding both engineering and marketing/business development talent.

On the product side, Booth said Connectivity plans to focus on three core products — reputation management, listings management and a new piece, which is building automated customer lists. The latter works from the premise, supported by BIA/Kelsey data, that most small-businesses don’t have a very clear idea who their customers are. Building lists from unique identifiers (most commonly through a phone contact), puts a powerful tool in the SMB’s hand that they can in turn use to do more on the retention/remarketing side of the equation.

“Most small businesses don’t spend any money on retention because they don’t know who their customers are,” Booth said. His premise is that having a better way to capture and engage with customers will spur more investment in retaining and growing existing customers.

“Products have to be great in order to be part of what a business does every day,” Booth said. The standard he cited was OpenTable. Once a restaurant installs OpenTable it is very rarely uninstalled.

Connectivity currently has 92,000 paying SaaS customers, acquired largely through self-service and resellers. Most of these are smaller merchants, but recent growth has come from from the franchise and multilocation side of the equation. Going forward, Connectivity’s efforts will focus on working with agencies and directly with brands to bring in more multilocation businesses. Booth see what everyone else sees — there is no way to scale an effort at acquiring very small businesses other than self-service or working with large resellers. Direct efforts have to focus upstream.

The recently closed Series A round will fund the company’s expansion and product development efforts. The financing was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation by Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners, TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.

The post Solfo Raises Money, Becomes ‘Connectivity’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Matt Booth hasn’t let any grass under his feet since taking the helm at Solfo/Yellowbot last year. The company has closed a $6.35 million Series A funding round, build up its team to include more focus on marketing and business development, expanded the product portfolio and, finally, changed its name to Connectivity.

As Solfo/Yellowbot, the company was known for its reputation and presence management solutions, and was known as a strong engineering-centric company. One of Booth’s objectives has been to expand the marketing and business development focus. He has grown the team to 27 (from around 20 when he joined) and plans to expand to 65 by the end of the year, adding both engineering and marketing/business development talent.

On the product side, Booth said Connectivity plans to focus on three core products — reputation management, listings management and a new piece, which is building automated customer lists. The latter works from the premise, supported by BIA/Kelsey data, that most small-businesses don’t have a very clear idea who their customers are. Building lists from unique identifiers (most commonly through a phone contact), puts a powerful tool in the SMB’s hand that they can in turn use to do more on the retention/remarketing side of the equation.

“Most small businesses don’t spend any money on retention because they don’t know who their customers are,” Booth said. His premise is that having a better way to capture and engage with customers will spur more investment in retaining and growing existing customers.

“Products have to be great in order to be part of what a business does every day,” Booth said. The standard he cited was OpenTable. Once a restaurant installs OpenTable it is very rarely uninstalled.

Connectivity currently has 92,000 paying SaaS customers, acquired largely through self-service and resellers. Most of these are smaller merchants, but recent growth has come from from the franchise and multilocation side of the equation. Going forward, Connectivity’s efforts will focus on working with agencies and directly with brands to bring in more multilocation businesses. Booth see what everyone else sees — there is no way to scale an effort at acquiring very small businesses other than self-service or working with large resellers. Direct efforts have to focus upstream.

The recently closed Series A round will fund the company’s expansion and product development efforts. The financing was led by Greycroft Partners, with participation by Rincon Venture Partners, Daher Capital, Double M Partners, TenOneTen Ventures, Eytan Elbaz and SLP Ventures.

The post Solfo Raises Money, Becomes 'Connectivity' appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The conference will kick off on Tuesday, Sept. 14, with a keynote address from Yext CEO Howard Lerman. Yext launched Yext Rep in May and announced a co-branded deal to offer its solution toSuperMedia advertisers in June. Lerman will likely discuss Yext Rep as well as his overall vision for how leads are driven to SMBs in the near future.

Mid-afternoon Tuesday, we’ll have a panel dedicated to the topic of reputation management with representatives from three leading reputation management players on hand: Moon Valley Software, Solfo/YellowBot.com and VendAsta. They’ll enter a discussion with BIA/Kelsey moderator Matt Booth, who will pepper them with questions about how they convince media players (i.e., directory publishers) that they need to provide their SMB advertisers with a tool to monitor, respond to and/or update their presence, reviews and performance online.

Brendan King of VendAsta will talk about its StepRep product, which has been around since 2008 and features some cool social graph tools. Emad Fanous will talk about YellowBot’s success with its Weblocal.ca rollout that occurred in March. One of the newer kids on the block is Moon Valley Software’s MyRepMan product that officially debuted in May. Pete Ryan will be on stage to talk about how MyRepMan, which MoonValley co-markets with partner Acxiom, adds functionality such as a scoring tool and syndication model (on top of basic monitoring of reviews, blogs, listings data and the like) to help track SMBs’ progress online.

These very short presentations will lead to a discussion where the tough questions about reputation management will be put to the panelists. If you’re looking for a better understanding of what rep management is, and whether it’s a genuine opportunity for companies selling marketing services to SMBs, make sure you make this 3:45 p.m. panel on Tuesday, Sept. 14.

The post DMS ’10 Hot Topic Preview: Reputation Management appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.