Moxie Software has announced the ability for customers to tap into the Facebook social graph to determine the best time to engage with people on a brand’s Facebook page.
Moxie is a customer facing and internal collaboration service that provides a knowledge engine that defines profiles and business rules. It is a crowdsourcing platform that the company refers to as “social knowledge” that it markets to customers for better engagement on brand web sites and now Facebook.
Here’s how it works: Moxie uses the social chat Facebook API. Its Engage+ App gives companies the ability to access a consumer’s Facebook profile to deliver personalized offers. The customer, usually a mass consumer brand, provides its social data to Moxie, which it then adds to the customer’s knowledge base. The brand gets notified when a Facebook visitor comes to the page who may be interested in the company’s products.
Moxie Vice President of Products Nikhil Govindaraj said in an interview that the company has learned with experience in following the footprint of users on websites. A customer may have gone to a company web page and looked at an ad, subscribed to a newsletter or meet the demographics that the brand is trying to target. Predictiveness gets better over time as more data is collected. On Facebook, it’s a relatively new game compared to branded web sites. But as with traditional websites, the rules of engagement are defined by the customer’s online behavior with the brand.
Facebook provides the brand with another channel, but it only works after the social knowledge is acquired.
The ways in which to collect, analyze, maintain and act upon that data will become a key factor in how the collaboration market grows over the next five to 10 years. It’s data that sits at the heart of this kind of strategy that goes beyond chatting with customers on a Facebook page. It means a rethinking in infrastructure, the meaning of IT and how companies perceive customer experience. The data helps tell the story, but it’s meaningless if the people and processes are not in place. It all has to come together.
Moxie is in a good place. The company, founded in 2006, has $75 million in funding. It now has an integrated platform that combines its customer-facing technology with its internal collaboration tool.
General collaboration tools have settled into the market but their impact has been relatively light. In 2006, the market viewed general collaboration as the best way to gain traction. Six years later, adoption is still relatively low. Jive Software and Salesforce.com started their services by offering customers general collaboration tools and have only recently started offering tools that are more oriented to specific channels.
Moxie is the opposite. It started as a service for specific channels and only later offered a general collaboration tool.
The Moxie service is robust, but customers are getting more picky about what they decide to adopt. Moxie needs to find more ways to use data analytics to truly differentiate in the crowded collaboration market.