SceneChat , a social video advertising startup addressing the needs of brand marketers, researchers and educators, with an innovative interactive video and social sharing solution, today announced the immediate availability of a free trial of its social video marketing platform.
The company also announced the raise of $350,000 from angel investors led by Baseball Hall of Famer and former Del Monte board member, Joe Morgan and Ernest Hodge, of the March/Hodge Group. The company will use proceeds to further develop and launch its platform.
SceneChat is a self-serve solution for marketers looking to increase video engagement and conversions. The platform provides the easiest, most flexible solution for creating, publishing and analyzing interactive social video marketing campaigns - without the need for video editors or Flash developers.
SceneChat enables the creation of interactive experiences that can be synced to specific scenes within a video, engaging audiences as they consume content. Interactions can be timed messages or questions, graphics, URL links, polls, or multiple choice questions that can navigate a video. With SceneChat, marketers are able to design sophisticated interactions that engage audiences at the best time during video consumption - providing scene-relevant interaction that gathers data while driving conversions.
SceneChat experiences can be broadly distributed via Facebook or Twitter, or directly embedded on a publisher's site or blog. In addition, the company offers both a WordPress plugin and on-site code that enables experiences to be directly published onto a site.
The SceneChat free trial enables anyone to create an account and instantly create and deploy interactive videos for 30 days without restriction. After 30 days customers can continue using the service for as little as $10 per month. A "Forever-Free" option is available for users with less than 200 views per month.
"As a full service agency helping brands explain their products, SceneChat's time-based interactive capabilities give us a powerful and flexible tool that enables us to convey information that complements our visuals, said Martyn Hale, Managing Director at MAK Media Solutions UK, "We can now craft non-linear interactions that engage and educate audiences in ways we could never before."
To monitor social interactions, all SceneChat users gain access to their own dashboard displaying real-time responses and a wealth of insight into how a site's audience interacts with its content, including graphed analyses of how videos are performing, and who the brand ambassadors in an audience really are.
"Social video is a must-have strategy for every brand large or small," said Shawn Hopwood, CEO of SceneChat. "Unfortunately, with the plethora of content coming online every day marketers need ways to attract and keep audiences engaged. Interactive social video marketing, and specially SceneChat drives contextual engagement while moving potential customers through the funnel."
"SceneChat's ability to craft and deliver conversion oriented interactions in sync with a video provides a powerful native advertising solution for our brand clients," said Jon Lamb, President of Moore & Scarry Advertising. In addition, our ability to tie in context specific SEO dramatically increases campaign discovery within our target audience."
Founded in November of 2009, SceneChat is a pioneer in Social Video Marketing technologies. The company has developed patent-pending technologies that assists brand marketers, publishers and agencies to increase socialization and conversion around their online video content. SceneChat has an exceptionally strong founding team (including executives with marketing and product development expertise from Apple, SGI and Dolby as well as a CTO with a Ph.D. in Computational Physics from Cal Berkeley). The company's Angel list includes sports hall of famer Joe Morgan, and SceneChat's Board of Advisors includes the co-founder of The North Face, the former CTO of Palm and a senior executive from Dolby Labs.