Everyday, people are posting social media messages, photos and videos, loading the Internet with their own personal “social breadcrumbs”. With all this data out there floating around, there's a lot of interest in how it can be utilized. Products like PeopleBrowsr, Rapleaf and qwerly help brands, companies and marketers sift through the data. Radian6, also in that category, even sold last week to Salesforce for over $300 million, further validating the necessity to filter and understand the social media data (and the people behind it) that is flowing like a river without a damn.
Champaign, Illinois startup, Mirror.me, is helping to organize social media data by creating a snapshot of information, visualizations and analytics. The company was founded by Hieu Le, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, and has developed a real-time social-marketing platform for both personal and business use. While there are many companies that do social media analytics, Mirror.me looks to make its analysis relevant, interesting, and fun for the individual by focusing on an easy to use, visual interface. To put it more simply, Mirror.me shows you what people are interested in, based on their social data.
We got our first look at what is now Mirror.me last fall when they participated in our Champaign mixer event, then known as Caterva. They gave me a sneak peak at what they were up to and created a simple tag cloud of relevant terms associated with my Twitter stream. This looked something similar to the cloud below.
Mirror.me screen-shot category cloud
They have since changed their name and created a self-service product where anyone can sign-in via Twitter or Facebook and create profiles. Profiles enable you to slice and dice your data so that you can find the most meaningful connections and read updates based on theme or tag. For example, it self categorized some of my followers by the term “entrepreneur” (as shown below).
Mirror.me screen-shot entrepreneur community list
Mirror.me also does some analysis on the friends and followers of a user. It categorizes followers by interests and gives a snapshot. Check out the example of an Audience profile (below).
Mirror.me Audience Demographics Screen-shots
Mirror.me not only connects to Twitter – it can also use Facebook and LinkedIn. But for the most part, the current set of tools and views are focused on Twitter data.
After participating in Illinois Ventures' iVentures10 program for student entrepreneurs and receiving early financial support, the company raised a seed round of funding from a combination of IllinoisVentures, Serra Ventures, RPM Ventures as well as some angel investors. The details on the round have not been disclosed.
Mirror.me will be part of the startup innovation showcase as well as a sponsor of tonight's Tech Cocktail mixer in Champaign, Illinois. If you are in the area, you can come by and meet the team and get your Mirror.me profile setup in person.
