Blog @ Percolate

Last week The Next Web announced our recent partnership with American Express and their small business platform, OPEN Forum. With the help of Percolate, OPEN Forum is expanding their footprint to Tumblr by using it as a channel to curate high-quality small business content from around the web.

We’re very excited about this for lots of reasons. First off, we believe the OPEN Forum brand and strategy is a best-in-class example of a brand buying into the value of being a content creator. In just a few years they’ve built a platform that the rest of the industry looks to with admiration and we’re excited to say we’re a part of. Second, with their foray into Tumblr, OPEN Forum is doing something that many brands and media companies struggle with: Accepting that the platform dictates the content. Their tone, content and style on Tumblr is catering to the visual and networked nature of the platform.

Scott Roen, Vice President at American Express, spoke a bit to The Next Web about how Percolate is powering the Tumblr experience for them:

“It’s early stage, but a really interesting player as far as a brand is concerned. We were lucky to get an early start in building out a community and content site for small business owners. Percolate has given us some pretty good insights and helps manage some of the assets we are building out. While we started with Tumblr, we want to pull Percolate into the other channels like Facebook and Twitter as well.”

Additionally, here’s OPEN Forum editor, Tara Fuller, explaining how Percolate helps her in creating content day-in-and-day-out:

“Percolate provide us with a workflow that aggregates the most relevant content from the sources we tell it to follow, puts it in one place, and makes it easy for us to comment and share—getting rid of the various steps this would require otherwise. Since using the tool, we’ve gone from a Tumblr mostly posting OPEN Forum content, to a hub of small business resources from around the web with much more reader engagement.”

We’re stoked to share this partnership with you and look forward to announcing more partners in the coming months. If you are interested in working with us, you can see more about our business offerings here or get in touch with us here .