Blab grabs $8.8M to predict where and when your brand will profit most from a marketing push

Think of Blab as a magic crystal ball for your brand’s social media and advertising needs.

Using mountains and mountains of social media data and patterns, Blab claims it can predict almost the exact time and channel in the next 72 hours where a brand should focus its resources. And today, the company is announcing it has raised $8.8 million of the $11.6 million it’s seeking in a second round of funding.

Along with tracking obvious keywords such as the name of your brand and products, Blab also looks for broader topics and not-so-obvious social media conversations that can be important to your brand.

For example, Blab helped a clothing detergent company pick up on an unexpected opportunity to promote its brand around Halloween. Using its pattern analysis, Blab noticed that social media users were discussing concerns over costumes from thrift stores smelling bad, cofounder and chief executive Randy Browning told VentureBeat.

For each prediction, Blab can pinpoint a specific channel (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and so on) and a specific time down to the half-hour, and up to 72 hours in the future. Currently, Blab is overall about 76 percent accurate in its predictions, Browning said.

In a way, you can think of Blab as helping its client businesses skate where the puck is going to be instead of where it is, to very loosely quote the words of hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. And in the crowded space of social media monitoring, that can give Blab a real advantage, as most other companies are doing real-time monitoring and analysis, which has a very limited window of action.

Blab is also now focusing more and more on programmatic media buying (when algorithms are set up to trigger online ad buys based on various parameters). According to Browning, Blab’s ability to target social media conversations based on topics and interests will enable brands to better target their programmatic ad buying, which is usually based on demographics and behaviors. The company will continue to work with its partner media agencies as it delves deeper into this, Browning said.

The new funding, co-led by Blue Focus Communications Group and Shoreline Venture Management, with additional participation from Operative Capital, will help the company expand its sales and marketing efforts, among others.

Blab was founded in 2012 by John Kottcamp, Joseph Mouhanna, Malcolm MacGregor, and Randy Browning and is based in Seattle.