Dynamic Signal, the social marketing company led by Adify co-founder Russ Fradin, is launching a new product today called VoiceStorm, which encourages, manages and measures employees’ efforts to promote a company on social networks.
Fradin told me that VoiceStorm is functionally similar to Dynamic Signal’s existing platform, which helps companies run word-of-mouth marketing campaigns — it’s just built for employees rather than customers or fans. Basically, Fradin aims to replace all those team emails and in-person encounters where someone is nudging everyone else into tweeting something, posting it on Facebook, and so on.
“One of our first clients said to us, ‘Hey, can we get our employees to join this community as well?’” Fradin said. “Our employees are really our best advocates. We want to be able to send content to them and make it super easy for them to be able to get that content.”
VoiceStorm can automatically pull content from a company’s RSS feeds, and users can also upload content that they find elsewhere for approval. So when an employee logs into their dashboard, they might see the latest job listings, or a press release about a big product launch, or a TechCrunch article about their latest venture funding. Then they can select the content that seems worth sharing, write their own message, and push it to all of their connected social accounts.
Management, meanwhile, can see who’s doing the most sharing and getting the most clicks. The site even includes a leaderboard of the most successful employee advocates. Fradin argued that this allows companies to quantify the value of that promotion, and to reward employees accordingly. For example, if someone’s sharing eventually leads to the hiring of an important team member, that could save the company tens of thousands of dollars in recruiting fees.
There are other companies, including Addvocate, trying to help employees promote the company on social media. Fradin said that with VoiceStorm, the key ingredient is mobile messaging. Managers can not only add content to the system, but they can also send it as a push notification to specific groups within the company. So if TechCrunch had a big scoop that we wanted to promote immediately, VoiceStorm could actually send alerts asking all the writers to tweet it right away.
On the flip side, if employees just want to visit the VoiceStorm site once a day, they can also queue up a number of social media updates, then the service will automatically space them out so that they don’t all post at once. Fradin said there’s not much technical intelligence in the scheduling. It’s less about optimizing the timing and more about making it convenient for the employee.
Oh, and it isn’t just for employees. You can invite other company supporters, as well — for startups, that would probably include their investors and advisors. VoiceStorm is free for up to 40 users, with final pricing to be announced later.
Dynamic Signal provides a white-label platform for brands to run high-reach word of mouth marketing campaigns in collaboration with a trusted circle of brand advocates. Brand marketers already know that word of mouth marketing can be extremely effective. But they haven’t been able to justify big investments in word of mouth, because it lacks scalability, repeatability, measurability, and brand safety. The Dynamic Signal technology and services enable brands to: 1.) Identify and evaluate category influencers 2.) Bring influencers into a long-term alliance...
Russ Fradin is a digital media industry veteran with more than 15 years experience in the online marketing world. Russ co-founded and was CEO of Adify (acquired by Cox for $300M in May 2008) and co-founded SocialShield. He was also SVP of BD at Wine.com, EVP of Corporate Development at comScore (NASDAQ:SCOR) and was among the first employees at Flycast (acquired by CMGi for $2.3B in January 2000). Russ is also an active angel investor in...
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