BuzzTale pivots messaging to Corporate Communications tool

    You’ve probably seen us referencing and embedding BuzzTale, especially at startup events like Slush and more recently TechChill Baltics. There’s good reason, the Riga-based startup has close ties to both events; BuzzTale was part of the Helsinki-based accelerator, Startup Sauna (whose parent foundation also funnels money to run Slush) and had their demo day at last year’s Slush event. And with CEO Andris Berzins as one of the founders of TechHUB Riga, their event TechChill Baltics is close to home.

    BuzzTale could be described as a mobile-first liveblogging tool, designed to make experiences more consumable. When you open up the app, you’re prompted to create or find a story to add to. For the TechChill Baltics event – you could just search for TechChill and then help add to the feed by taking a photo, video, or writing a note. While the app and paired web service is useful for events, the BuzzTale team has pivoted the app slightly with a stronger focus on corporate communication.

    “When I started with BuzzTale last November, we focused on real-time content marketing for public events, but over time found a greater interest from enterprises. Think of this as the visual web for enterprise – like and internal Pinterest/YouTube. As I have been talking with corporations, I understood that there is a big trend to tap into – companies are struggling to catch up with the visual, viral and engaging communications people have in their home lives and have a sort of need to compete with that in the workplace to keep employees engaged, especially the younger generation,” explains Berzins in an email.

    Their first major customer here is with Tele2, the European telecoms operator. They used BuzzTale to generate and share content from their CEO and extended leadership team summit in January, and Tele2 says were surprised to find that it actually generated content, didn’t distract from presentations, and was not shared outside the company.

    With a million free and paid tools out there for “capturing event buzz” it makes sense that Buzztale is looking for customers who can actually pay for capturing content. It’s a nice package, so hopefully they can convince more enterprises that they can create stronger corporate culutre by challenging their employees to capture all-hands meetings, team-building meetings, and other events worth sharing.

    For more info, watch the video below or read Berzin’s guest post on the Seedcamp blog.