• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, November 5, 2013

Starcom MediaVest Group has struck an alliance with market research outfit PulsePoint Group, which has developed a database designed to help marketers develop and execute their social strategies. 

Under the terms of the deal, SMG is the only global agency that can offer PulsePoint’s so-called Social Media Accelerator marketing tool to its clients. In return PulsePoint, which is launching the Accelerator service today, gets a fee and input from SMG on how clients are evolving social strategies. The research company is not related to the ad exchange of the same name. 

The PulsePoint research is based on responses from more than a thousand interviews with senior executives and social media experts on their best practices. That data is augmented with over 100 case studies from Fortune 2,000 companies to help marketers implement best practices and establish a corporate baseline. 

Going forward PulsePoint Group will continue to update the Accelerator tool with new research and case studies including input from SMG. PulsePoint partner Michael Gale said the basic idea is to help organizations understand their current position in the social landscape and more quickly develop strategies and plans to achieve specific social media objectives from reputation management to demand marketing or employee engagement. 

“Social is a process,” Gale said. “There is no perfect start or finish. It’s about choices.” That said, he adds that the poorest choice a marketer could make would be to avoid having a social strategy given that the most socially engaged enterprises have far better economic returns, according to his research. 

PulsePoint assesses close to two dozen ways that social media can be ultilized within a company such as social brand reputation, crisis management and thought leadership. “We provide a formula that allows you to pick and choose where you want to go,” Gale said. 

Kate Sirkin, SMG’s EVP, global research, said that “all of the content we create needs to be socially enabled,” and that PulsePoint’s new offering will help its clients do that in optimal ways. “It will help them set up a business framework,” for social, Sirkin added, and implement best practices based on the data and case studies provided by PulsePoint. 

The research firm, Sirkin said, will “continue to evolve the tool as social evolves and we will help them understand how marketers use it.”