NFL, Pepsi Look to Make Web More Social

The NFL, Pepsi, Hearst, and Carnival Cruise Lines have signed on to use ReachBuddy, an app extension tool unveiled this morning by social software company Buddy Media. The offering builds on Buddy Media’s ProfileBuddy, which helps marketers create Facebook apps. ReachBuddy will allow the NFL, for example, to deploy its apps on NFL.com or other properties.

It “puts out embed codes, so it can work anywhere that supports embed codes/HTML like Tumblr, Wordpress, any website, etc.,” Joe Ciarallo, Buddy Media spokesperson, told ClickZ News via email.

Pepsi, a beta partner, has already put ReachBuddy into action. It recently created an app to distribute video on Pepsi.com around the Fox reality TV show “The X Factor,” which the beverages and snacks company has been sponsoring.

In a prepared statement, Shiv Singh, global head of digital for Pepsi, said ReachBuddy could make his company’s overall web presence more social in nature. He said that Pepsi can “now bring the social experiences we love from Facebook to our websites as well...It’s an incredible efficiency gain, and allows us to track how content deployed on the web is performing compared to content within social networks. We’ve wanted to be able to do this for quite some time, and thanks to Buddy Media, it’s now possible.”

Earlier in Singh’s statement he also said “Facebook and Twitter are extremely important to our business.”

But social is not without its downside for Pepsi, as Singh indicated in the following Tweet posted earlier this week: