#SFSNYC: How SOCi Ties Local Reputation and Social Media at Scale
Streams of commentary flooding social sites can carry loud, powerful messages, but at the same time it might seem like an overflow of information for local marketers.
A high volume of reviews and feedback give voice to customer sentiment, especially at a national or global level. The trouble is sorting out how those comments relate to individual store locations, if at all, or if these are responses to specific marketing campaigns.
Jacob Chappell, vice president of enterprise sales with SOCi, will speak at next week’s Street Fight Summit, discussing how his company’s social media marketing management platform can help businesses make sense of the ever-escalating scale of social feedback and how it can relate back to the local level.
How is social media at scale relevant to local marketing?
We have a big focus in our technology on helping any type of service provider or agency — a lot of agencies that deliver local advertising, local online presence, social media, marketing, and Web services. We help those agencies deliver a very affordable and scaleable product.
Social media is one of the fastest growing parts of marketing. We’re seeing everyone, from small and medium-sized businesses to the biggest brands have some grasp on social media marketing or want to get involved. It opens the door for local providers, who are already working with the SMBs to now be able to deliver a full service or full stack of solutions from Web, SEO, and social. Where we come into play is to help them deliver that at scale. They can manage hundreds to thousands of individual SMB clients and using our technology, help them be extremely efficient as they go out and source content, automate content, and deliver content on a custom schedule.
What does SOCi do for its clients?
Everything we do is to help companies be efficient in managing social media in one central place. This extends from social to online reputation management. We built our own proprietary technology, expanding upon social capabilities to reputation.
I look at this in a few different buckets. I look at what is the landscape of 2017, where is social heading, and what kind of impact does it have on your businesses. From there we look at what are some of the mistakes that other brands are missing out on. Then we look at what are the specific steps through social that can help drive more audience, drive more customers to clients from a local strategy. Brands, franchise groups, and multi-location businesses are struggling to manage their image, a constant flow of content that goes out to all their locations. Being able to centralize your assets in one place is where we fit.
How does SOCi bring together asset management, content, and user reputation?
Think about social media in its simplest form, and you think about a brand, or a dentist, or a lawyer, or a plumber who decides they need to get into social media. The implication is they create a social page that is static like a webpage only to realize that social media is not static, it’s fluid. You have to continuously feed your social media accounts to have any kind of impact.
For a certain provider who is delivering a managed service, they need a single platform that’s going to take them from A to Z. What differentiates SOCi from the masses is we built our own proprietary content discovery search engine.
Essentially what Google did, creating a search engine to find information, we did the exact same thing but with a social media focus. We search the social web and posts, analyze that, and tell you what is working. We help you find content, organize it, store, and archive it. From there, when you’re programming and planning out your content, you have to have a very smart scheduler. We help optimize when you should be scheduling out, the frequency, and what time you should be posting. From there we talk about being able to diversify the content, making it more unique, and use dynamic text.
Now that you are pushing out all this content, maybe you want to strategize and build out campaigns — promotions, offers, and giveaways. We want to have that fully integrated and we built into our technology a way to deploy coupons, offers, and sweepstakes so it sits within all of your data analytics. As they look at all of the leads that are coming in, marketers want to know what type of content is performing well and what type of content is not performing well. We have an analytical component that sorts out all of that data.
What kinds of changes have you seen in the way social is regarded by businesses?
The old way of thinking of social media was to handle reviews in one place using Reputation.com, and then use Hootsuite as the social media management tool. We felt those needed to be speaking to each other. There’s a crossover of what a review is, so we built a customer care system so you can manage and aggregate all the conversations into one single place. If someone sends you a mention, someone tweets at you, someone sends a Facebook message or a Yelp review we can help you aggregate that across thousands of locations and source it depending on who should receive it and then built in workflows. If you’re a service provider, and you’re delivering this to your SMBs, you want to have a turnkey reporting solution. This is all built within our platform.
Joao-Pierre Ruth is a Street Fight contributor.
Join SOCi’s Jacob Chappell and hundreds of other top local companies and brands at The Best Street Fight Summit Ever — a three-day extravaganza in Brooklyn on June 12-14. Click here to register now!
