UPDATED 12:32 EDT / MARCH 09 2011

Social Media Revival Gains Some New Executive Leadership

A couple of notable social media companies appointed new execs this week, marking some important developments as several industry companies fine tune their product and leadership lineup – women’s social shopping site ThisNext and Ashton Kutcher’s social marketing firm Katalyst.  ThisNext announced MySpace CEO Mike Jones joined its board of directors.

“Over the past year, ThisNext has more than doubled in size, a feat we expect to achieve again in the next 12 months. We have upcoming initiatives online and for mobile platforms that will benefit tremendously from Mike’s insights and expertise. We are thrilled to have him,” said Matt Edelman, CEO of ThisNext.”

ThisNext did experience a tremendous amount of growth, but the exact opposite can be said about MySpace. MySpace’s userbase and growth have been a steady decline for the last couple of years, which means a role at the social shopping site may just prove to be a good career path for Jones.

Moving on to Katalyst, the “custom creative social programming” firm founded in 2000 by Jason Goldberg and Ashton Kutcher announced it has appointed digital entertainment publisher BUZZMedia’s CEO, Anthony Batt, as its new President. BUZZMedia gets around 50 million unique visitors per month, and it seems Katalyst’s approach hasn’t failed either – a charitable social media campaign by company reached 265 million viewers and raised over $200 million for the cause.

International Business Times reports social media marketing software vendor HubSpot, which also focuses on other areas such as e-mail marketing and SEO, raised $32 million in Series D financing. To top this off, Google Ventures and Salesforce participated in the round, in addition to Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, Matrix Partners, and Scale Venture Partners. This brings HubSpot’s total funding to an impressive $65 million, and reflects a very obvious interest by these companies (most notably Google) in online marketing – including search engine optimization, a major point of contention in recent weeks.


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