Location, location, location: how Geofeedia created its own industry

by Maura Gaughan
February 3, 2014

On April 17, 2013, Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s coffin was drawn through the streets of London by the King’s Troop Royal Army. It was one of the largest funeral processions in modern English time and it’s coverage was being powered by a small startup here in Chicago: Geofeedia.

As the Iron Lady was carried by gun carriage through the miles-long route, the BBC aggregated all of the photos and posts shared across social media platforms into an online interactive map, in real-time. This innovative coverage provided not only the BBC but the world with a first-person perspective of the event.

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Back across the pond at 101 N. Wacker Street, the company just closed it’s second round of Series A funding at $1.25 million this month and plans to grow its staff of eight to more than 20 in the next 60 days. And thus far, Geofeedia has spent $0 on marketing.

It did take some time, however, for Geofeedia to power the London’s most grand funeral procession and venture capital money in the bank.

The concept started in 2011 when CTO and co-founder Scott Mitchell was playing around with APIs from social media feeds. He began to create algorithms that geospatially aggregated publicly posted content by location and found he could do it within about 15 feet of an establishment.

Mitchell showed this technology to now COO Mike Mulroy. Mulroy said he felt Mitchell was on to something so he reached out to friend and former Priceline Executive Phil Harris to get an opinion. Harris was interested and told Mitchell build the product during his free time.

“Usually entrepreneurs don’t have the drive to go do that. But he did,” said Harris, now CEO of GeoFeedia. Three months later, the team had a prototype. Three weeks after that Harris and Mulroy wrote checks to capitalize the company, Mitchell left his job as CTO of another social media company and an industry was born.

Around that time in fall 2011, fellow social media monitoring companies were going through large acquisitions (Radian6, for instance, was acquired by Salesforce for $326 million.) These companies, however, focused strictly on keyword and hashtag data. Geofeedia found that these discovery tools missed 70 percent of data that could be captured.

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“The data that we pull is different than the traditional social media vendors,” Harris said. “There’s a wide range of people in businesses and government agencies that don’t see value in those traditional keyword and hashtag tools, those are geared toward marketing departments.”

The team spent the following fall and spring iterating on the product and talking to their peers about the technology. Mulroy said what they found was that, “nobody was able to aggregate multiple sources and then put it in a view that as as simple to use as ours and as compelling as our collage view. We started getting really, really positive feedback on that.”

Geofeedia really began to pick up momentum in May 2012 when a story was published on the front page of journalism thinktank Poynter by Steve Myers. Within 24 hours, Geofeedia fielded 1,700 inquiries from journalists eager to see their service.

“After having batted around a number of verticals this response made Mike step back and say, ‘Wow, we’ve got something in journalism,’” Melroy said.

While some of the industry’s professionals will decry the rise of “citizen journalism,” there is no denying it’s necessity in the modern newsroom. More and more news organizations like Chicago Sun Times are making drastic cuts in their photography departments. This leaves writers, who are already hard-pressed for time, short on visuals and opportunities to find eyewitness accounts to stories. This is where Geofeedia really comes into play.

Journalists are able to setup live, location-based social media streams and monitor Twitter, Picassa, Instagram and Flickr posts. If a story breaks at Millenium Park, a journalist can instantly go to their GeoFeed and access all of the publicly shared social media content from that day and track down eyewitnesses.

Of Geofeedia’s over 95 clients are journalism titans like the Associated Press, Gannett, the BBC, Digital First Media and Dateline NBC.

Another area Geofeedia is finding traction in is the public safety industry. The Detroit Gang/Crime Commission has utilized Geofeedia technology to distill real-time intelligence via social media activity in 24 public schools. They’ve cracked down on firearm possession and illegal drug activity and have been able to intervene with students with a propensity for posting violent content.

“It’s a perfect platform for public safety officials to understand what’s happening at a place especially in a time of need, during a natural disaster…. anything happening that’s impacting a community.” said Harris.

During crises, people go straight to their phones and Geofeedia picks up on those spikes in dats, Harris said: “So not only can we take a public official or first responder to a place when something happens, we can deliver a rich set of data because people record what’s happening.”

Geofeedia is subscription-based and data is cloud-stored. Users can download saved GeoFeeds in CSV format or access them via RSS feeds - and if Instagram takes down a post, Geofeedia is able extract that post from it’s archival data.

According to Harris, their clients have come from in-bound interest. They’ve spent “nothing” on marketing, but plan to start this year as they grow their internal team. Within the next two months Geofeedia plans to go on a hiring spree, targeting a data architect, developers and marketers who demonstrate a want to “win.”

“Now we have a new industry and it’s location-based, social media monitoring,” Harris said. “And it’s a fledgeling industry that we think will experience phenomenal growth.”

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Jobs at Geofeedia

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