ORLANDO, FL—(Marketwired – October 23, 2015) – The next generation of IZEA® is here. Today at IZEAFest, the company unveiled Version 1.0 of IZEAx, their pioneering platform. Now out of beta, the exchange features a comprehensive list of product innovations, technology refinements and entirely new ways for marketers and Creators to interact.
Among the new tools and features announced include: SocialLinksâ„¢ for eBay; IZEA for iOS Beta; ShareMonitorâ„¢ and SocialSearchâ„¢; Campaign Dashboard with Total Social Valueâ„¢; IZEA Score Suiteâ„¢ Beta; and Creator Portfolio & Search. To celebrate the occasion, IZEA also introduced a new brand identity to the crowd of over nine hundred IZEAFest attendees at Walt Disney World Resort.
“Today's announcements continue IZEA's steadfast commitment to platform innovation and industry leadership. We are proud to introduce this substantial array of new features. Equally important, we have invested resources to create new service layers 'under the hood' of IZEAx to support future growth initiatives,” said Ted Murphy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IZEA. “All of these advancements directly benefit the Creators and marketers we serve, making it faster and easier to work on successful influencer and content marketing campaigns.”
SocialLinksâ„¢ for eBay
A new opportunity offering in the IZEA Exchange, launched in partnership with leading online marketplace eBay, provides Creators with unlimited ability to monetize their blogs and social channels. SocialLinksâ„¢ for eBay bridges the gap between fixed–fee sponsorships and performance–based incentives by allowing qualified Creators to search through select eBay listings to generate affiliate links quickly and easily directly inside of the IZEAx experience.
The eBay integration is part of IZEA's new InterOppâ„¢ service layer, which enables IZEA to connect with online retailers, service providers, and other partner networks for similar opportunities in the future.
“With this integration, we are able to connect with IZEA Creators and their social following in a whole new way,” said John Toskey, Director, Global eBay Partner Network. “We have been working with IZEA in both sponsored social and content, and now IZEA Creators can be compensated for the transactions they influence on eBay, providing them with the ability to monetize the promotion of all sorts of products, from televisions and videogames, to dresses and lipstick.”
IZEA for iOS Beta
The IZEA for iOS app allows Creators to interact with IZEAx through an elegant, mobile experience facilitating Twitter, Instagram and Vine sponsorship opportunities end–to–end — making this the first natively mobile Sponsored Social workflow in the industry. Creators can bid and negotiate on marketer opportunities, receive direct offer notifications, and produce and publish short–form content all within the app. IZEA for iOS is available to select Creators via private beta today and will be released to all IZEA Creators prior to the end of the year.
IZEA Tools
IZEA has introduced a new area of the exchange dedicated to surfacing data insights and informing decisions outside of specific creator and marketer transactions. The first two of these tools, ShareMonitorâ„¢ and SocialSearchâ„¢, were unveiled today.
ShareMonitorâ„¢ enables users to create groups of URLs to track paid, owned and earned media. The monitor tool tracks the sharing of content through social networks over time, captures images, and generates beautiful reports with full analysis.
SocialSearchâ„¢ provides an elegant, yet powerful, tool to search and aggregate data from the Twitter firehose. The search tool aggregates vast amounts of search results and compiles it into charts with analysis on volume, engagement, destination links, influencers and content.
Campaign Dashboard with Total Social Valueâ„¢
IZEAx now includes a multi–platform Campaign Dashboard, allowing marketers to aggregate analytics from multiple opportunities into an integrated dashboard view. The new dashboard includes Total Social Valueâ„¢, the first and only calculation of earned media value based on marketplace data and influencer identity. Total Social Value (TSV) calculates the ROI of each social engagement based on IZEA's proprietary data from millions of marketplace transactions.
IZEA Score Suiteâ„¢ Beta
Also introduced today: a trio of new social–scoring algorithms called IZEA Score Suiteâ„¢ helps marketers make more informed sponsored content decisions. Score Suiteâ„¢ is currently analyzing over eleven million pieces of content per day and uses machine learning to increase accuracy and intelligence over time. Each ranking score is based on a one to one hundred scale, providing a weighted comparative index of Creators in the IZEAx ecosystem:
Influence Rankâ„¢ (abbreviated as InRankâ„¢) is a score for a publisher or individual and takes into account all the social platforms they have attached to IZEAx.
Platform Rankâ„¢ narrows the lens, helping marketers look at performance on each social media platform individually.
Community Rankâ„¢ further refines that lens by categorizing and scoring each piece of content published to that platform and assigning it a topical community.
Creator Portfolio & Search
Creators can now augment their profiles with a content portfolio, enabling them to showcase their best writing, photography, videos and illustrations to prospective clients. A new Creator–centric search feature provides a way for marketers to find Creators based on their subject matter expertise and professional backgrounds. These enhancements have been made in advance of the launch of content opportunities in IZEAx, which will be available in December for marketers.
IZEAFest continues through Saturday evening, featuring keynotes, panels, celebrities, Creators, and top brands — including Kellogg, Lenovo and PayPal amongst others. A live stream of the event can be viewed at http://live.izea.com.
About IZEA
IZEA operates the premier online marketplace that connects brands with influential content creators. IZEA creators range from leading bloggers and social media personalities to A–List celebrities and professional journalists. Creators are compensated for developing and distributing unique content on behalf of brands including long form text, videos, photos and status updates. Brands receive influential consumer content and engaging, shareable stories that drive awareness. For more information about IZEA, visit http://corp.izea.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
This press release contains forward–looking statements. These forward–looking statements are based largely on IZEA's expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond IZEA's control. Actual results could differ materially from these forward–looking statements as a result of, among other factors, competitive conditions in the social sponsorship segment in which IZEA operates, failure to popularize one or more of the marketplace platforms of IZEA, inability to obtain additional capital, and changing economic conditions that are less favorable than expected. In light of these risks and uncertainties, there can be no assurance that the forward–looking information contained in this press release will in fact occur. Please read the full statement and disclosures here: http://corp.izea.com/safe–harbor–statement.
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