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Ok, four times last week I was asked this by investors and other industry experts.   So time to blog on it.

Yeah, were “like” Hootsuite because:

1) We aggregate social networks

2) We offer our service through a Cloud/SaaS model

3) We make communication so much easier to stay on top of

4) We have awesome company names 

As I told the investors I’ve pitched, I don’t see us as competitors. Here is a recent LinkedIn message I just sent to a Social Media expert who also asked this question:

“Hootsuite rocks. Great for social search, and account management.
They are vertical. Click one of your twitter accounts and see the columns. Find new topics, grow followings and search trends.

SMAK is built for a different purpose.

I use hootsuite to find new relationships. I use SMAK to manage the hats I wear on a daily basis.

For instance:
I have relationships on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, MSN, and Yahoomail, along with my other email accounts where I own the domain names.

Hootsuite does not let me check Friends. I can check @heyhoop on twitter, click a tab and see @vigilantguy click a tab and see Facebook. But it doesn’t let me see:

Friends
Investors
Colleagues
Coupons

By setting up LifeModes you get to circle all your digital communication

However, we put messages (action oriented and relevant to you) on the left. We put the stream (connections talking to and anyone) on the right. We also are analyzing network effects of notifications. (who has updated their skills, made connections to people you know, following people following you, etc..) soon we will allow to select alerts like

Whose looking for a job? Whose moved recently? Who is spending more time on social networks? Extremely valuable if you are a recruiter, a real estate agent, or in your case a marketer.

Here is a quick video I whipped up
http://www.vimeo.com/onsmak/overview “

Posted via http://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbhooper

So as you can see, I truly believe we are different.

Can’t HootSuite just add this?

Sure they could.  Ryan Holmes is awesome and doing a great job as their CEO.  He could probably get them to do anything.  However, early in forming SMAK I spoke to Ryan personally about this concept and it wasn’t on their radar.  In fact our plan was to integrate into their API.  However, it couldn’t support email which is a fundamental aspect of SMAK’s value.

So as I’ve said to anyone whose asked this question, Hootsuite will continue to be my “go out and find new relationships and ideas tool”.  SMAK is my “manage who I have and why in my life tool”.  We hope we get some great traction during our launch, and the team at Hootsuite will buy into our vision and modify their API so they can pull SMAK data in.  We are also looking into seeing what it would take to build a HootSuite App, like Summify did.  At this time however, we like Hootsuite are focused on our core offering.

So who are the competitors keeping me up?

Social CRM tool Nimble and very well designed aggregator MultiMi are the competitors I have my sights on.  If you want to talk about them, I’m happy to have that conversation, better yet compare us for yourself.  Registration is now open to the public.  http://www.mysmak.com/register.php

Happy SMAK’n

-Matt FB Li

@heyhoop

@vigilantguy