A ZingPR client had a happy ending this week: Viralheat announced it has been acquired by Cision, and will now be the core technology to power Cision's social media publishing, management and analytics product line.

Vishal Sankhla and Raj Kadam started Viralheat in 2011 with the prescient belief that social media would ultimately be a massive opportunity to apply big data science. The meteoric rise of social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more has proven their hypothesis right. Today, more than 2 billion people around the world are active users on social platforms, and the vast torrent of tweets, posts, and images they generate represents both a huge data challenge and opportunity for brands.

Viralheat rose to prominence as a next-generation technology that promised to help brands monitor, analyze and engage customers and prospects on social media platforms. I was one of their earliest beta users and can attest to the amazing power that's under the hood. It's evolved considerably since those early days to a fully-fledged enterprise platform.

Working to promote Viralheat has been fun. Over the the months of our collaboration, We've employed a variety of approaches: media interviews, classic news releases, pitching bylined articles, and of course surveys and infographics that we developed to illustrate the potency of the technology. Our primary objective was to show how Viralheat is on the forefront of predictive social media analytics : i.e. using social media to detect when a consumer is at the point of making a purchase. Now and then , we were successful: for example Forbes: Viralheat Is Using Social Media Sentiment To Predict Buying Behavior.

You can read more about the acquisition on Adweek, PR Week and MediaPost.

The media coverage of the acquisition has been very positive, and I wish the team well in their new home. Jeff Revoy and Tobias Kemper: it's been great working with you, and thanks for all the fish!