As enterprise customers add social media to their marketing mix, we too have been keeping a close eye on the technology vendors in this space. In connection with social media marketing vendors, one name that pops up frequently is Awareness Inc.

Awareness is a US-Canadian vendor that has gone through many twists and turns over the past decade.  Most recently, Awareness focused on “Social Marketing Hub” software to help enterprises manage their presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

The beginning of the end?

However, of late, we’ve noticed a few strange things that should set off warning bells for potential customers.

Firstly, there is total silence on their social media pages.

• Last few weeks, their Twitter account @awarenessinc has been inactive
• Ditto with their Pinterest board
• Same goes for their Facebook page.

For a company that previously used to actively engage on social media and that too a social media marketing vendor, this is rather odd.

Fig 1. Awareness Facebook Page, ironically, shows a ship sailing into the sunset.

Most ominously, their website is also no longer accessible.

Who will turn off the lights?

Digging a bit deeper, we find a mass employee exodus in recent months. Many senior executives and tenured managers now sport the “ex-employee” tag on LinkedIn. This includes the former heads of finance, marketing and sales, and engineering, as well directors for sales, operations, and quality. Even their CTO, who’s been with them for more than a decade, is gone.

Social's Fiscal Cliff?

We don’t know what exactly transpired but can only surmise that Awareness ran out of money and was unable to raise additional financing or find a buyer. (Their last tweet ironically is how Linkedin is ideally poised to make a big acquisition.) If so, we can commiserate with the impacted employees and wish them well. We hope that the social marketing efforts of existing customers have not been adversely impacted, and that they have a Plan B ready.

For prospective customers, this should give you some pause -- even in "hot" market segments, not all vendors will succeed.

High on smarts, low on software?

At RSG, we’ve tracked the many incarnations of Awareness - from the start of their journey in 1998 as SurfMap to their transition into a SaaS CMS vendor iUpload, and then in recent years, when they rebranded as Awareness. Our evaluations archive noted “Awareness certainly maintains a high profile in the marketplace through regular webinars and presentations” but “software development is stagnant” and “their real value is in their conceptually thinking through… how to add value to social tools through versioning and workflows… based on their CMS heritage,” but “technology is rough around the edges.”

You probably see a pattern here.

Isolated incident or a larger systemic issue?

Another question this raises is about the overall health of the social media marketing segment. Have the premium valuations garnered by Buddy Media ($689 M) and Vitrue ($300 M) when they got acquired last year by Salesforce.com and Oracle respectively lulled customers into believing that it is a thriving marketplace? Are we seeing the other side of the coin now in the Awareness saga? Is it just a single vendor failing to keep pace, or is it a signal for the sector at large? I suspect it's a little bit of both.

Our Digital Marketing vendor evaluations pay attention to both technology and vendor intangibles.  You should too.