Alterian Fills Social Media Gap With Intrepid Acquisition

Alterian, a digital consultancy that provides a suite of monitoring tools, has acquired Intrepid, a social media analytics firm.

Intrepid is a 40-person firm with offices in Seattle and London, as well as a small analytics team in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Alterian, which is based in London, is known primarily for its flagship offering, a listening platform called SM2. The acquisition will help fill gaps in that offering, specifically a weakness in social media outreach.

Zach Hofer-Shall, an analyst with Forrester, gave SM2 a positive write-up in a 2010 report, but had noted an area that needed improvement: "the level of services offerings and overall consulting," he wrote.

"Combining Intrepid's existing consulting team with the SM2 product will address this gap well, improving Alterian's product line," Hofer-Shall wrote on the Forrester blog yesterday regarding the merger.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Follow Douglas Quenqua on Twitter at @DQuenqua.