Scate Technologies Inc. of Orion, Mich., develops and markets its own social media software products for marketing companies. Its applications compete directly with the pay-for-click companies – such as the ads on Google, Yahoo!, Bing – those ads on the side are pay-for-click. Scate also provides clients custom programming services for desktop, mobile, Web and client/server applications; search engine optimization, and graphic design.
Company founder Stephen Sadler has many years of automotive experience, including working at a tool and die shop before going to a Chrysler plant in Ontario where he started programming its first welding robot. He later became director of engineering at Talon Automotive, a supplier of stamped structural modules and interior trim. He and his wife started Scate Technologies in April 2003.
“Our products’ biggest contribution is saving companies money,” Sadler said. “You’ll be able to market without paying astronomical amounts of money to get your message out.
“Instead of pay-per-click, we provide our clients a pay-per-tweet model. By sending out messages through social media, people are cutting down on their marketing costs by 90 percent and still driving the same if not more traffic to their website.”
Every two weeks Scate Technologies hosts a luncheon called “Social Media Monday” for its customers and potential customers to discuss specific subjects, such as how to create a Facebook fan page and how often should information be posted on the fan page and what’s the appropriate messaging for businesses.
Sadler even recently published a book about social media called “Exposure to Closure.”
“Social media is about focusing your time and assets on what is important, which is the conversation,” he said. “A lot of people will go and spend their life tweeting when they go to a conference with a bunch of people who want to spout off on what they are doing, but they’re not listening. In today’s world you better spend your time listening to your customers. They’ll tell you what they want.”
One of the major changes that may impact social media marketing is a new site called Buztweet.com, he noted, and his firm is looking at how it can help its clients use it more effectively, he noted. Buztweet.com allows even small businesses to run social media campaigns.
“Essentially (www.buztweet.com) is a software-as-service operation so you log in and you attach all of your social media accounts so everything is synced,” he said. “If you have a Facebook page, a Twitter page, a Google Buzz account or a LinkedIn account, it will take all of those accounts in one spot and you can create campaigns at a certain frequency or certain time frame and date and you push play and off it goes. You can create messages and tweets from content within your website. It makes tweets out of those so you can get it out into the social media stream so you don’t have to spend your time figuring out what you want to say.
“Then you can spend your time monitoring what people are saying about you and talking to people, which is what social media is all about. There’s automation where automation is needed and you can spend your time communicating to your customers.”
Although he was born in England and grew up in Ontario, Canada, Sadler said he started Scate Technologies in Michigan because there are many smart people in the state and they need to take their skills and apply them to different markets and different things. That will lead to diversifying the state’s economic base, allowing things to grow and bring more stability to the area.
Website: www.scate.com