Meltwater Acquires Blogsearch Firm IceRocket
The Meltwater Group, an online media intelligence company, has acquired IceRocket, a social search engine, for an undisclosed amount. Together, the companies will provide public relations, marketing, communications, and advertising professionals with the tools for monitoring, analyzing and engaging in relevant conversations across social channels.
Meltwater has grown to a $100 million company by delivering online news and social media monitoring and search engine marketing solutions. The company has 57 offices around the world serving more than 20,000 customers.
IceRocket is an advanced real-time search engine that crawls more than 200 million blogs, and an array of tweets, news, and videos that are each profiled, categorized, and ranked for accurate results. The company offers blog search options for identifying trends, influencers, shared links, and popular topics. IceRocket will continue to operate as a standalone search engine while its technology will be integrated with the Meltwater Buzz product.
"The acquisition of IceRocket gives us access to one of the richest sources of social media in the market," said Jorn Lyseggen, CEO and founder of Meltwater Group. "We arm our customers with sophisticated tools for mining social media for business insights, and this requires high quality sources. IceRocket helps Meltwater secure an enviable leadership position in the social media intelligence space. This acquisition represents an important step toward achieving our goal of generating $100 million in social media business within three years."
"Since its launch in 2004, IceRocket has been at the forefront of social search, starting with blog searches and later expanding to social networking and microblogs," says Blake Rhodes, IceRocket's founder. "That's why we're thrilled about this acquisition and the potential to take social search to the next level. IceRocket's integration with Meltwater Buzz will provide access to more sophisticated capabilities, such as measuring and analyzing social engagement and influence. We're excited for this next chapter."
In addition to IceRocket, Meltwater acquired social CRM company JitterJam in March and BuzzGain last year. The company intends to acquire more businesses and technologies to help further expand its product suite.