Actiance Announces Socialite Engage to help Financial Advisors Strengthen Client Relationships and Drive New Business through Social Media

The platform enables financial institutions to protect their brand, ensures compliance while allowing employees to share relevant content, measure impact and increase engagement End Quote

(1888PressRelease) February 01, 2012 - BELMONT, Calif. - Actiance (www.actiance.com), helping organizations benefit from new forms of communications and collaboration, today announced the general availability of Socialite Engage. Socialite Engage helps financial advisors share pre-approved content, ensure authenticity of voice, measure impact and increase engagement to grow their business.

For the financial services industry, the Socialite platform ensures compliance with all the applicable regulatory and government guidelines, such as recent SEC alerts and Financial Industry Regulatory Advisory (FINRA) notices 10-06 and 11-39. The platform includes a robust analytics engine that allows managers to analyze the impact of the distributed content and measure the results on sales and network growth.

"Within three weeks of enabling our advisors, more than 1,200 of them were using social media. Actiance helps us understand what content is the most relevant and allows our advisors to further build their social media presence," said Mike White, marketing director at Raymond James. "Actiance met the dynamic requirements of our business to provide our advisors with industry-leading and compliant social media communications support."

Socialite Engage provides organizations with the ability to empower users in their usage of social media, from the provisioning of appropriate content to the measurement of resulting effects from that content. Through the tracking of key connections, users can focus on those friends or followers who are of particular importance to them. Users can utilize a pre-populated content library to share with their network, or distribute their own content knowing that this is run through a compliance workflow to protect the individual and the organization.

According to a May 2011 Social Business survey conducted by IDC, 51 percent of companies were using consumer social media tools for communicating with customers, 43 percent were creating awareness about a company product or service, and 42 percent were acquiring knowledge/asking questions.

"Today, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have become household names; not only to communicate with friends and relatives, but also as viable marketing and communication channels for conducting business," said Michael Fauscette, group vice president, Software Business Solutions, IDC. "While the use of consumer social tools can provide good business benefits to companies, there are concerns over security, IP protection and compliance, particularly in highly regulated industries like energy and financial services. One company that is helping firms in the financial and energy sectors overcome the hurdle of using consumer social media compliantly for lead generation and customer interaction is Actiance. The Actiance Socialite Engage solution is designed to help financial advisors along with their marketing and compliance teams distribute approved content over LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to drive new business opportunities, customer loyalty and brand awareness while minimizing risk."

"We made a commitment to our customers to provide a solution that met their requirements to enable faster and more effective adoption of social within their business, leveraging content management, distribution and analytics tools for their social engagement," said Kailash Ambwani, CEO at Actiance. "Today's launch of Engage is the result of that commitment. Early adopters to the platform have found success through authenticity of voice and by integrating it with their existing infrastructure. This success includes more effective social interactions, leading to a higher potential to increase business and a reduction in customer churn. These adopters are not just leveraging Socialite Engage, but also our underlying compliance platform and enablement materials to further empower effective and compliant social media use."

In order to facilitate adoption of social, Engage users also have access to targeted, educational material, such as tips, best practices and how-to guides, ensuring users not only have the technology, but also the knowledge to effectively communicate via social media sites, which include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Other features and functionality of Socialite Engage include:
• An aggregated news feed from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
• Find and establish key connections and tailor your activities to match theirs
• Share pre-approved library and/or tailored content to provide authenticity of voice
• Leverage crowdsourced content across teams to improve interaction
• Full integration with compliance controls for content, feature access and record keeping
• Advanced analytics show engagement, trends and social graph growth
• Central content creators can use gamification tools to drive adoption and aggregate results from distributed team usage

Actiance's Socialite platform was the first to provide granular controls for social networking sites, which include the specific ability to manage features accessed and content shared across 200 features on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Socialite Engage empowers individuals in regulated industries with the ability to share approved content, engage with centers of influence and provide actionable aggregated results across social media sites.

For more information or to see a demo of the product prior to its general availability, please contact Actiance at 650 631 6452. For more information, please visit: http://www.actiance.com.

About Actiance
Actiance helps organizations manage, secure and ensure compliance across unified communications, collaboration and Web 2.0 applications such as blogs, wikis and social networks. Actiance's award-winning platforms are used by 9 of the top 10 US banks and 284 FINRA regulated firms globally.

The Actiance platform allows organizations to gain visibility of applications in use, apply usage and content policies, ensure compliance and gain valuable insights across the communications and collaboration channels. Actiance supports all leading social networks, unified communications and collaboration providers and IM platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Skype, Cisco, Microsoft, Jive, and IBM.
Actiance is headquartered in Belmont, California. For more information, visit http://www.actiance.com or call 1-888-349-3223.

Press Contacts:
Sarah Carter
Actiance, Inc
650-631-6452 / (cell) 415-806-9504
scarter ( @ ) actiance dot com

Marrissa Meyer or Amy Robinson
LEWIS PR
619-677-2700
actiance ( @ ) lewispr dot com

EMEA & APAC Press Contact:
Sara Claridge
Marylebone Media Relations
+44 (0) 7968 626838 (mobile)
sara ( @ ) marylebone dot co.uk

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