Eluma wants to build great communities but with a difference. Eluma’s focus group is the brand marketers. These brand marketers will get their loyal users to build communities around their products using Eluma. What Eluma will provide is its branded Desktop Community product to aid the brand marketers. This branded community can help generate discussions among users around something they have in common – The Brand! Eluma can reinforce brands, and allow users to benefit from the wisdom of crowds. Eluma, headed by Richard Buck, is located in Boston. Eluma had received an undisclosed amount of funding from Sebastian Holdings.
In my talk with Richard, he briefed me about how he and his friend Paul Christen (CTO, Eluma) came up with the idea about Eluma. First they recognized the fact that lot of consumers who have affinity for a particular brand are not able to keep track of the brand activities. On the other hand there are brand managers, who want to connect their loyal customers, but are not able to do that using the regular means like newsletter that end up in the spam folder. Also it is a time consuming and costly for them to develop and maintain their own community solutions.
So they came up with an advanced desktop communication tool that allows brand manager to push their message directly to the desktop, providing them with a targeted, one-to-many broadcast channel. This is also great for customers who get the latest information right on their desktop and also receive/give recommendations in their community. Interesting point about Eluma is that it does not have any web-version. All the content can be subscribed and read only from the desktop client. Eluma’s aim is to complement brand sites and not compete with them. It can instead increase web-site hits for the involved brands.
Brand marketers can get in touch with Eluma to build a branded community. Eluma takes just half a day to prepare the branded community which consists of Eluma Control Center for brand manager and a desktop client for the brand consumers. Eluma Control Center enables the brand marketers to easily upload and manage desktop alerts, feeds, and content for the users. Whenever the brand marketers wants to inform its consumers about a new product or a new release, he can push that content through the Control Center which will be delivered onto the desktop client through RSS. This desktop client is like an advanced form of RSS reader. Users are be able to view, comment and rate content items. Users can also rate and comment from toolbar or desktop client itself. Eluma has also developed client sync feature, like Feeddemon, so that consumers can install the client on multiple machines but don’t end up reading the same content again. Once they have the client installed on their desktop, they can search and subscribe to other branded communities as well using the same client. Eluma will also be providing a mobile based client by the year end. Currently Eluma is focused on US based brands, but will be soon offering multi-lingual desktop clients to enable a global push.
Eluma is going at great lengths to provide complete privacy to the users and also prevent community hijacking by top 20 users (read digg). Like, you can’t drill-down a user profile and get all the comments he has ever written or items he has ever rated in all the Eluma branded communities. Whatever happens in a community, stays in the community. Aside from the privacy, Eluma is not just for brand managers. If users want they can also setup their communities using Eluma.
As for monetizing their product, Eluma will be sharing advertising revenue generated through the branded desktop clients. Besides this brands also have to pay a monthly license fee to Eluma. Traffic.om will soon be the first company to launch a branded community using Eluma. Right now Eluma is aggressively focusing on signing up more brands.
I think Eluma is great idea. But the whole idea depends on the fact that users have to download and install the Eluma Desktop Community client. Brand managers and Eluma will have to work together to convince users that Eluma is in fact is a good option. Brand managers need to keep in mind that if they try to push out too much or false content, they might end up loosing their most loyal customers.
Links:
Eluma
Tags: StartupSquad, DEMOfall, Eluma, Marketing, Branding, Advertising
ThinkPassenger
Around this transaction system FEED Tribes is building number of services that will target both retailers as well as consumers. FEED users will be able to signup to receive offers from local stores they are most interested in. On the other end participating FEED retailers will have access to a backend system that allows them to create promotions on the fly that can delivered onto consumers subscribed to a particular store location. Retailers will also be able to create targeted coupon and cash back offers for their customers where the funds can get debited back to the users FEED account automatically. FEED will also be offering location based services. Take a case when FEED user is located away from his original FEED account location and makes a FEED transaction which will indicate the true location of the user. FEED system will than quickly look into the users subscribed list to automatically deliver offers according to the new location. 
StartupSquad at Wordpress 