Beta customers and partners include leading brand marketers, digital agencies and measurement and analytics data providers

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., October 15, 2008 - Federated Media Publishing (FM), a next-generation media and publishing company, today unveiled the beta version of its much-anticipated Conversational Marketing (CM) Toolbox. The CM toolbox is the industry's first open converstional marketing measurement platform for tracking and analyzing conversational marketing campaigns. The beta version is available exclusively for select FM customers including American Express, Asus, Best Buy, Dell, Intel and Symantec with wider availability beginning in the first quarter of 2009. Industry leading partners participating in the beta program include AideRSS, BuzzLogic, comScore, DoubleClick, Google Analytics, Meebo, Nuconomy, Pheedo, PointRoll, Twitter and Yahoo!

The toolbox offers marketers a real-time view of campaign delivery and performance based on a customized set of data points. The beta program and ongoing development of the toolbox is a collaborative effort among leading brand marketers, agencies and data providers who will offer feedback based on real-world campaign testing. These insights will facilitate the continuing refinement of the platform for industry-wide use.

"If it wasn't clear before, it is certainly clear now that brands need to be involved in the conversational media space," said Tia Shaw, associate media director at GREY Group. "The question now is how do we measure the effectiveness of our marketing efforts when so much of the data is scattered across multiple platforms with limited accessibility and almost no insight. I applaud Federated Media for making the effort to rein in and make useful the scattered field of social media metrics and data."

FM has developed a detailed methodology for measuring campaign success by organizing campaign data into Engagement, Amplification and Equity categories. Organized in this way, the CM Toolbox helps brands and agencies understand the effectiveness of their conversational marketing activities with a customized, dynamic portal through which marketers can view all potential marketing metrics and data points.

"Consumers do more than view Web pages and click on ads," said Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google. "They engage with Web sites and marketing messages in ways that require a dramatic evolution in how companies measure success. I am happy to see others in the industry recognizing the need for a collaborative push to understand the valuable nuances of online visitor behavior."

In addition to standard campaign delivery data such as impressions, click-through-rates and traffic sources, the CM Toolbox enables brand marketers to track and analyze data points uniqe to social media such as commenting, blog posts, sentiment, widget adoption, Twitter activity, social bookmarking and organic search ranking. The toolbox helps marketers gain visibility into campaign success, optimize campaign performance and gain valuable insight into future marketing strategies.

"We've listened to the needs of our customers and partners, and the CM Toolbox is the result," said John Battelle, founder, chairman and CEO of Federated Media. "Key to our business is the ability to ensure the success of our partners including brands, agencies, data providers and, of course, our publishing partners. I view the toolbox as central to this effort and I hope that with continued development, it will go a long way to moving the ecosystem forward."

About Federated Media
At FM, we believe great voices attract great audiences. We're in the business of supporting those voices by connecting them to great marketers, as well as providing a suite of services that let authors focus on what they do best: make compelling media. In so doing, we are creating federations of respected voices that prosper on their own terms. Current federations include Sports, Technology, Automotive, Business & Marketing, Media & Entertainment, Video Gaming, Graphics Arts, News 2.0, Lifestyle, Parenting and Green. For more information, please go to http://www.federatedmedia.net.

Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners.

Contact
Matthew DiPietro
Federated Media Publishing
415-230-4866
mdipietro@federatedmedia.net