Marketwire rebrands and brings in Yahoo! vice president

Marketwire is continuing its drive into the world of social media, rebranding as Marketwired and bringing in former Yahoo! vice president Stu Ogawa to lead the tech push.

Jim Delaney, Marketwired’s COO, explains that the company is responding to clients’ changing needs. ‘We were a traditional wire business focused on broadcast communication – broadcast from a company to a customer – which was a one-way conversation,’ he says. ‘What’s happened, particularly with the advent of social media technologies, is that communication has now given way to a conversation that is real time and two-way.’

While Marketwired will continue to push information through its traditional newswire and press release channels, users want to be ‘wired into the marketplace,’ adds Delaney.

Talking about last week’s announcement from the SEC that companies can now use social media to communicate with investors, Delaney says this is ‘exactly where we see the marketplace going.’ Indeed, long before the SEC’s clarification on the use of Twitter, Facebook and the like, or the company’s reincarnation as Marketwired, the firm knew social media were growing in importance.

Back in 2010, Marketwire bought social media analytics and monitoring platform Sysomos, allowing it to add services such as the media analysis platform and Heartbeat, a monitoring tool, to its more traditional offerings. Since then, the company has joined the Twitter certified partner program and launched a feature ‘allowing clients to search influencers’ Twitter bios.’

Delaney says there’s more to come, too. ‘This notion of being plugged or wired into the marketplace is something we’ve built into a new product, which we are scheduled to release in the fall,’ he explains. He adds that users ‘can take advantage of this new tool in the building of a traditional message, whether it be a press release or a message they want to broadcast directly to a Facebook page or LinkedIn or Twitter.’

And this is where Ogawa, the company’s new global executive vice president of product and technology, comes in. A technology and software veteran with 25 years’ experience ‘leading large development, product and engineering teams at start-ups and multi-billion-dollar enterprises,’ according to a Marketwired press statement, Ogawa will ensure the company’s technical offerings are ‘state of the art’.

‘Leveraging social, mobile and open technologies, within and around our social communications platform, is the key mandate for Stu joining our team,’ adds Delaney. Between them, he says, they hope to continue the changes at Marketwired that will ‘help [users] get plugged into the marketplace, help them get connected, help them better collaborate, and help them join that two-way conversation now.’