Dachis Group’s Advocate Insight Finds A Brand’s Most Valuable Fans

There may be millions of people or more following and commenting on a brand, but how can it find the ones worth reaching out to? That’s the question that Dachis Group is trying to answer with a new product called Advocate Insight.

Founder and CEO Jeffrey Dachis (previously the co-founder of interactive agency Razorfish) says the new product will help brands “engage at scale.” He contrasts that to tools that just help companies push their content to social networks. It’s not enough to broadcast your message to fans, he says — you also have to spread your message by reaching out to the most engaged and influential of those “brand advocates.” (Other companies, such as Zuberance, are also trying to help businesses target brand advocates specifically.)

CTO Erik Huddleston says this goes beyond something like Klout: “When I look at something like a Klout what they’re identifying is topical influence. … We’re looking specifically at the influence an individual has on the members of a brand’s audience.” He says Advocate Insight could find not just the most influential people in a given subject area, but also (for example) the 50 people who have the biggest positive impact on the reputation and mindshare of Coca Cola specifically.

So Advocate Insight gives customers a list of their advocates who are the most effective at “amplifying” a brand’s message. It creates a profile of each advocate and segments them based on things like region and platform. There’s also an algorithm that excludes employees and “spamvocates.”

The new product, which customers will need to pay for with a separate subscription, is built on top of the same social analytics platform that powers Dachis Group’s other products. Last September, it launched a free Social Business Index, and the company says the index has added nearly 1,000 corporate users in the past six months. Dachis Group also says “dozens of large enterprise customers” have either purchased or contracted to purchase its first paid service, the Social Performance Monitor.